1. Overemphasizing company culture

Every organization has a company culture that employees should embrace. If your employees understand and follow the established culture, the workplace can be easier to manage.

Unfortunately, insisting on a culture fit over a culture add may make employees feel stifled and disrespected. Moreover, while the company culture may seem reasonable to you, members of your multicultural group may feel like you’re imposing ways to think and act upon them. The perception of ethnocentrism in the workplace can result in underperformance, absenteeism and resignations.

Solution

When managing different cultures, create an environment where individuals’ cultures are welcomed and respected. A study evaluating methods for eliminating ethnocentrism in the workplace recommends adopting cultural mutuality to combat ethnocentrism. As a manager, you should be willing to learn from your employees’ different cultures, which inspires them to learn about yours.

If you shape the work environment to promote freedom of expression and avoid judgment or biases, you will create a healthy company culture that enhances job satisfaction and performance.

2. Perpetuating cultural stereotypes

It is possible to go too far with acknowledging cultural differences and inadvertently perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Even though cultural stereotypes don’t always have negative connotations, be mindful that good intentions can make you unaware that you’re perpetuating a stereotype.

For example, you might assign Asian team members complex tasks that require intense analytical skills based on the assumption that they are naturally good at them. While you might think giving such tasks shows that you’re confident in your employees’ abilities, the people in question may feel typecast.

Cultural stereotypes limit employees’ skills range. If you assume certain people are good at analytical tasks based on their ethnicity, you may never put them in a position where they can fine-tune their people skills.

Thus, stereotyped team members may lack the well-rounded experience that most jobs allow employees to develop, hurting their career progression. Stereotyping also leads to low job satisfaction and high employee turnover .

Solution

As a manager, you’re responsible for developing employees’ careers and drawing the best out of them. Try looking beyond the culture and ethnicity and see the people underneath. Examine what they are actually good at and set out to fill their skill gaps.

You can also combat stereotyping by creating diverse work groups and assigning them different tasks. Rotate members within the work groups to ensure they develop a well-rounded skill set.

3. Ignoring microaggressions and dog whistles

Microaggressions and dog whistles are often a by-product of cultural stereotypes. They can also hide in seemingly lighthearted jabs and jokes between employees. As such, they can be hard to miss and more likely to occur in a multicultural group.

Microaggressions refer to subtle spoken and unspoken messages that make people from other cultures feel objectively different. It’s easy to inadvertently perpetuate microaggressions since they can sometimes occur unintentionally. For example, the remark, “Your English is very good,” is a common microaggression in professional spaces.

Dog whistles are subtle but intentional jabs aimed at people from a different culture. As with microaggressions, dog whistles can be hard to miss if you’re not a member of the culture they’re targeting.

Unfortunately, many euphemisms used in professional settings are dog whistles. The common phrase “inner city” is a dog whistle that refers to low-income areas with a Black majority population.

Solution

Recognizing microaggressions and dog whistles can be difficult. Worse still, employees subjected to them may not have the proof to make an official complaint.

You can address this by encouraging employees to speak up when something makes them uncomfortable. Ensure they don’t suffer any consequences for reporting their discomfort to HR.

Be ready to show members of a multicultural group that you take their complaints seriously. If an employee frequently uses dog whistles against his multicultural coworkers, anticipate escalating things beyond a warning to suspension and dismissal.

Diversity training is also essential when managing different cultures. The training should be a recurring event incorporating the latest methods for perpetuating cultural tolerance.

4. Underestimating communication differences

Communication is the backbone of a successful business, and effective communication is essential when managing a multicultural team. However, you cannot assume that all the members of a multicultural group understand spoken or written communication the same way you do.

The effectiveness of cross-cultural communication depends on the context level each culture demands. Western cultures are low-context, so communication is straightforward and not cushioned in euphemisms and inferences.

Such cultures also tend to have a low power distance. An intern from a low-context culture may be very comfortable when speaking to a superior and might use casual language even in a professional setting.

In high-context cultures like those of the Middle East and Asia, understanding the context of a conversation is key to getting the true meaning of a piece of communication. People from such cultures consider directness discourteous and disrespectful, meaning you must know how to read between the lines. High-context cultures often have a high power distance, so communication between a subordinate and their manager will be highly contextualized to avoid offending.

Solution

Collaboration is one of the most effective tools for combating communication inefficiencies. When people work on various tasks together, they develop a deeper understanding of how each communicates.

It also helps to achieve inclusivity and may reduce the power distance between managers and other team members. A low power distance will likely make employees from high-context cultures more comfortable interacting with their superiors in official settings.

5. Overestimating the capacity for flexibility

Like communication, how people make decisions, solve problems and resolve conflict differs from culture to culture. The level of uncertainty avoidance will determine how these critical processes work in your company.

Cultures that are high on uncertainty avoidance prefer routine and structure. Team members from such backgrounds need all the information possible about a subject before making a final decision. Consequently, decision-making and problem-solving will be slower in such a multicultural team.

On the other hand, cultures with low uncertainty avoidance are likely to make faster decisions. They are more tolerant of ambiguity and trust that people will get things done, so they tend to ignore rules and proven methods.

Solution

Companies must be highly flexible and quickly adapt to survive in a dynamic market. However, you’re likely to compromise the unity of your diverse team if you expect everyone to jump on board with a split-second decision.

If you entrust a multicultural team with a big decision, allocate time for data collection and evaluation. Data-driven decisions have higher quality and protect the company from hasty, half-baked decisions.

If the situation calls for quick decisions, ensure every member of your multicultural group is aware of what’s happening in the company and how it might affect them. Keep the communication doors open until everyone understands the decision and why you made it. When managing multicultural teams, it is better to over-communicate than under-communicate.