The first time you work with a multinational and cross-cultural team can be thrilling but also overwhelming. You could find yourself in a room with multiple languages, multiple accents. Some people not able to understand you and you may not be able to understand them. Even if you do understand them, the topic of their conversation or even just the way they talk and the words they choose may feel foreign or not normal. They might be more outgoing than you are used to or more shy and quiet. They may be louder or quieter, formal or casual. They will just feel different. The logical thing for you to do in this moment may be to find the closest person who looks like you, sounds like you, and then stick to that person like glue. We get it. When everything else feels uncomfortable, we tend to look for what's comfortable and what's familiar to us. Hi. My name is Daniel Student and I am a management consultant and communication specialist. I have been a cultural, environmental, and social sector leader for over 15 years, and I bring a unique cross-section of creative and business strategy to my work. I have designed and led workshops on international teams, communication and implicit bias, storytelling and leadership, and adaptive leadership and change management. You will see much of that work reflected in this course and the remaining courses of this specialization. Hi. My name is Cleveland Justis, and I'm the Founder and Principal of Potrero Group, a research-based strategy and management consulting firm. As an organization leader in entrepreneurial communities in the environment for over 25 years, I've worked and consulted widely with many different startups, businesses, non-profits, foundations, and government organizations. I also am the director of the UC Davis Executive Leadership Program. This is a place where I received my MBA and my PhD. I also currently teach Social Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley with a focus on international students. So let's start this course the same way we start when we speak to multinational cross-cultural teams in our workshops. Here's our advice. Don't get comfortable. Instead, be brave. You have a rare opportunity if you work on a multinational cross-cultural team. You get to, in essence, travel the world without leaving the comfort of your regular life. The world, if you will, has come to you and interacting with people different from you, that's not only an amazing chance to learn about them, it's actually a singular chance to learn about yourself. The hardest thing about culture is while it shows up in every part of your life, you often can't see it. Also, it's one of those words that we regularly use but we rarely actually know what it means or we define it. Therefore, as a result of this course, we aim for you, our learners, to be able to truly explain what culture is and how it affects your work. You will learn how to recognize and respond to cultural differences in your teams. You will dive deeper into opportunities and challenges typically faced by multinational and cross-cultural teams. Finally, you'll practice and demonstrate behaviors that make for a successful multinational and cross-cultural teams. In essence, this course will serve as a broad overview to this topic. Further courses in this specialization will dive deeper into elements of communication, virtual teams, and leadership, respectfully. We consider this our introduction level course. So expect a strong focus on tools or frameworks that will help you understand and recognize culture and evaluate and respond to the challenges of working together in a team. We will also introduce you to our wonderful panel of experienced professionals in this course for the first time. This is a diverse global group of women and men who will share with you personal experiences and anecdotes that will support and highlight the ideas and tools you will learn throughout this course. In future courses in this specialization, we will rely even heavier on this panel to help us dive into specific topics more deeply. Then the other constant you will see through all of our courses, it's an encouragement from us to you to practice the approaches you will learn here with your own multinational cross-cultural teams. We recognize that for some of you, this will be easier than others. You may feel unwelcome or even unsafe to try to implement these lessons. That's why we also heavily feature discussion questions in our specialization. We ask that you set aside time as you work through this course to not only answer the questions but read and review your classmates' responses to discussion prompts. Remember what we said about the opportunities that multinational cross-cultural teams provide? The same goes for the multinational cross-cultural participants of this course. Be brave. Use this opportunity to interact with people from different companies of all sizes and industries and different countries and multinational cross-cultural teams from all over the world. Read what other people share. We expect you to learn as much if not more from them and their unique-lived experience as you will from us and the researchers and academics we will introduce you to. Take a moment and look around you. You may be in your office, or your home, on a bus, or walking down the street. Ask yourself, what am I seeing that is unique to me and my world? What is part of my experience that might not be part of someone else's? How might it affect how I behave and act? Now think about all the people on your own team and imagine each of them doing that very same thing. This is a challenge, and this is the exciting and unique inspiring opportunity of leading a multinational and cross-cultural team. Let's get started. Let's do it.
