Meet the Expert
Jason Patent PhD
Director, Center for Intercultural Leadership, International House - University of California, Berkeley
- Expert cultural interpreter with more than two decades of experience with China, including more than 10 years living and working in China. Work has spanned the worlds of education, for-profit business, and non-profit organizations.
- Currently, director of the Center for Intercultural Leadership and chief of operations at International House, UC Berkeley. Formerly, American co-director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China, and inaugural director of Stanford’s Overseas Studies Program, based at Peking University.
- Deep connection to China from childhood, growing up hearing stories from his grandparents about “the Shanghai years” – the nearly two decades they called Shanghai home. Stateless Jews from the USSR (grandfather) and Iraq (grandmother), in the 1930s they settled in Shanghai, one of the few havens for Jews at the time. Jason’s father bore witness to both the Japanese occupation and the Communist revolution, before emigrating to San Francisco in 1950.
- Grounded in Chinese culture through education, language mastery, in-country experience, and scholarly research. Fluent in Mandarin, known for uncannily native-like pronunciation.
- At Gap International, a consulting firm based near Philadelphia, led a team of linguists charged with investigating and innovating methods of using language to improve business performance.
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Interpreting China - Helping East and West Make Sense of Each Other
Director, Center for Intercultural Leadership, International House - University of California, Berkeley
Key Trends
- Budgets for intercultural training are very slowly rebounding from the recession.
- Companies often don't want to see intercultural training and coaching as a core business area, nor do they comprehend how it directly affects their bottom line. So often, it's one of the first things that gets cut when budgets are tight. During the recession, it seemed like a luxury to develop your workforce, so budgets for intercultural training were hacked to pieces. They're slowly being rebuilt, but budgets are still smaller than they were in the years before the crash.
- Even established intercultural firms still rely on piecemeal training solutions.
- Many large companies that do a lot of work in China used to have expertise in-house that could train and advise staff on intercultural issues, but now it's often treated as an outsourced HR solution. Intercultural training and coaching are most effective when they are treated as fundamental to business success. If they are treated as "one-offs" or as boxes to check, they will fail.
In addition to initiatives for staff, intercultural training and coaching should be part of an ongoing development program for leaders. Particularly since the recession, companies have drastically cut budgets for holistic, ongoing intercultural training in favor of one-day trainings, coupled with maybe some relocation assistance on the ground. But that's not enough. You have to recognize the human need to learn on an ongoing basis, and to have opportunities to check in with somebody who is sitting on the outside with intercultural expertise. The strategy needs to be ongoing, integrated, and holistic. - Attention spans are shorter and people want results faster.
- Thanks to the "do more with less" impact of the recession, often companies want results from a one-hour training session, and the fact is that not much can be accomplished in that little time. An effective intercultural initiative should start with at least a two-day session that thoroughly covers the basics of intercultural competence. Pre-assessment using the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) should also be done (which requires a total of 1-2 hours of staff time per person, plus 0.5-1 hour of consulting time per employee).
Follow-up trainings (2-4 hours) should happen at least quarterly, preferably monthly. Employees should also gather "critical incidents" (case studies) from their daily work to bring to the monthly or quarterly trainings for discussion. Paper tools such as the Intercultural Conflict Style inventory, and online tools such as GlobeSmart and Cultural Detective, can be leveraged to accelerate learning.
Re-administration of the IDI should happen at set intervals — 6 to 12 months — to track increases in intercultural competence.
If the context is leadership development (of managers and executives), then coaching is critical to success. Bi-weekly or monthly coaching sessions (at least one hour per session) are needed. IDI assessment should be used for this as well. - There is an increased awareness of the need for staff that are interculturally skilled.
- According to "Competing Across Borders: The How Cultural and Communication Barriers Affect Business," a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, companies increasingly understand the costs of not preparing their employees to work interculturally, which is great news. But they still don't have much awareness about how exactly to fill the need, much less a willingness to devote resources to filling the need.
- More companies are declaring their organizational culture.
- More and more organizations are working to understand, and state, what their organizational values are. This represents a kind of self-awareness that is relatively new and is perhaps particularly important for companies that have intercultural workforces. It's obviously also incredibly important when you're talking about mergers and acquisitions, when two different corporate cultures come together. Companies have shared ways of thinking and behaving. Even companies that don't declare a corporate culture still have one – an anthropologist could go in and do an ethnography and outline it.
So, when an American company wants to expand into China, it's not just Americans coming into contact with Chinese. It's Americans in a particular corporate culture who presumably want to maintain some consistency around that corporate culture. They're going to have a particular set of challenges that are pretty predictable if anyone stops to identify and analyze it. It's a question of recognizing yet another variable – corporate culture – in an already complex equation of national cultures colliding. It makes for a very complex challenge.
Interpreting China - Helping East and West Make Sense of Each Other:
Key Trends
Expert Topic