Insights Into Cultural Understanding

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I attended Edie Fraser’s Diversity Best Practices Summit & Business Womens Network http://www.bwni.com/ event in DC this year. The force of this powerful, engaging, and friendly yet about-the-business-of-business woman is phenomenal. Edie is the CEO (aka the CVO - chief visionary officer) behind both of the organizations. If you weren’t there, you missed out.

Most would be delighted to hear it live and in-person from one CEO. Well about 2,000 multi-cultural, multi-dimensional “friends of Edie” got to hear from Edward Liddy (Allstate), Reuben Mark (Colgate-Palmolive), James Turley (Ernst & Young), Dale Gifford (Hewitt Associates), Robert Nardelli (Home Depot), Patricia Russo (Lucent), Richard Parson (Time Warner), Steven Rogel (Weyerhaeuser), Barry Salzberg (Deloitte & Touche) and Antonio Perez (Eastman Kodak). That is CLOUT…Edie style.

Some of the things that keep them up at night are keeping every business owner/operator up at night. I include a few anonymous quotes here so that those of us in the “Fortune One Million” if there were one would know that we are not alone in the midnight hours: – Talent acquistion and retention. Where are we going to get the people from? Specific mentions: Diversity in the nuclear college fields, engineers , professionals in USA far flung places — Employee membership and engagement — Bench strength — Differences becoming divisive –Pipeline development is not the issue. The challenge is in advancing people through the pipeline — The American culture is fast-paced. Direct eye contact, baseball analogies (hit it out of the park, get to second base) don’t work everywhere.

Spotlight on two insights shared during the conference: 1) “Remember many Africans and Carribeans come to the US with a sense of entitlement. They come here as royalty. They know who they are. They didn’t grow up in oppressive cultures. Their presidents look like them, not like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln” (Philip Berry, VP Colgate Palmolive). 2) Doctors have a reimbursement issue if they have to have a new patient every 20 minutes. For some cultures, the first 20 minutes would be spent on telling you about their family. You won’t look like as good of a doctor if you don’t do this” (Panel guest).

Tips: Make sure some one on the interview team looks like your interviewee.– Never take anything for granted. You can’t always tell a book by its cover. — Listen — Encourage candidates to get excited about moving to rural Arkansas — Use resource groups as sounding boards. Oh yes and get to next year’s event.

 

 

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