In today's world, where we have more diverse global and remote connected teams than ever before, it is extremely difficult to establish common social norms in a diverse group. There are more opportunities for conflict to occur and for trust to be broken. Two decades ago, managers didn't worry about this. Workers were socialized to comply. In other words, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Do. The problem with this traditional theory of management was that conflicts can arise from deep level human needs, such as, worker's personal beliefs coming into conflict with professional expectations. Today, workers can simply submit to orders without consequence. With increasingly diverse workplaces and new laws, there was new attention brought to the need to embrace and work with issues of diversity when facing conflicts. Remember we said that your team culture determines the rules, whether written or unspoken, that guide how you're going to work together and solve problems? As we learned in course one, humans instinctively form groups and establish rules. But how does a group of people establish shared ground rules when basic assumptions about teamwork vary from person to person? While there are many potential sources of conflict when groups form and make decisions, in this module we'll focus on the most conflict source affecting diverse teams. And this is the difficulty of establishing trust. Conflicts in diverse teams frequently occur due to the challenge of forming trust, especially affective trust. Affective trust is the gut feeling or implicit notion that you can trust someone. Affective trust can be difficult to established in diverse teams because of basic differences and communication styles. For example, in your country or company culture, you might place a high value on saving face and group harmony and be completely adverse to confrontation. Instead you might communicate with your colleagues using non verbal cues. In another company our country though, there maybe a more direct way of communicating when expressing disagreement. Let me tell you about an instance where a difference in communication styles severed trust and ultimately ended the relationship. This was the case of the dissolution of beverage company joint venture between French owned company Danone and Chinese owned company Wahaha. After the results of an internal audit, the owner of Danone publicly accused the head of Wahaha, and his family, of funneling $100 million from the joint venture into sales of identical products in China. The public confrontation was followed by a dramatic and painful legal battle that ended the joint venture. This situation was likely fueled by a lack of trust on both sides of the disagreement. Had the parties trusted one another, they may have been able to come to a clear understanding about both parties intentions and priorities going in to the joint venture. While this example is dramatic in reference to cultural conflict, it is certainly not the only example. Other common reasons for cross cultural conflict are differences in communication styles. Direct versus indirect, for example, fluency and accent differences from the dominant language, different attitudes towards hierarchy and conflicting decision making norms. Research has shown that most cross cultural teams fall short of their goals, and at least one third of them rate themselves as unsuccessful. By understanding that the source of conflict across most diverse teams is establishing trust, you, on your team, can create strategies to build trust, and establish some rules in a more inclusive way. For example, at IDEO, the design thinking firm, employees are trained on emotional intelligence in order to help team establish trust. It is a norm at IDEO for individual member to listen and not judge ideas before they have a chance to fully explore the idea. If this norm is broken, on some IDEO teams, members will draw attention to this publicly, but delicately. When a colleague prematurely judges an idea, participants will throw soft toys to call kind attention to the norm of fully listening to an idea before asking questions and exploring it further. It is also a norm at IDEO to acknowledge others' perspectives and emotions before making key decisions. For example, if a project leader notices a designer's frustration over a marketing decision, she may ask to resolved the issue through negotiation. The bottom line is that the conflict sometimes arise from deep level human needs that are often just below the surface. By investing in developing trust, and accepting that their need to be a means to established it, your team will have the best chance to overcome conflict and achieve high performance.
