I work for an international company and cross cultural issues are always causing issues between staff – the way we do things are different, our humour is different and our HISTORY is conflicting…generally people get on very well, but there are times when the temptation to blame and point out racial differences become too tempting…
The fireworks have set off in our office, some member of the senior management team had the blind faced cheek during one of his supposed motivational improvement meetings a couple of weeks ago, to call the whole UK team ‘islanders’ with an islander closed-minded mentality. Apparently they are like the swiss mountain people…how racist is this? The person in question is from Germany…and boy you can image the jibes people were making behind his back afterwards, along the lines of whooping their ass about the war.
Now, there’s not a topic to get the Brits started on…or Americans, or French. Enough said.
The team wouldn’t have minded so much if he was a glowing example of openness – one rule for one and all that!
So a word of warning, if you want to motivate or make friends with people from other countries, do the simple thing and don’t take the piss out their heritage, culture, history, language, ways or working etc – it just ain’t worth it!
And NEVER mention the war!
