Managing Across Cultures - Essay Example

Business news on managing across cultures In most cases, business organizations are likely to have a workforce which is composed of people from different cultural backgrounds, different religion, different race and many other backgrounds. The fact here is that the workforce of any business organization is diverse and the issue of multiple cultures (Chevrier, 2003). It is upon the management then to ensure that all the decisions made within the organization consider the diversity of the workforce and the entire business family.

All decisions and the general management process should not at any point be biased to other people and favor others. In this case then the managing across the different cultures should be professional without any discrimination drawn on the lines of culture. It is then common to find many news articles and other published materials addressing advocating for the effective management across cultures in all business organizations or companies. Therefore, the implications of business management and other aspects of culture in business decision making are mostly outlined in such articles.

I found such an article with the title “Build on Your Strengths Instead of Focusing on Flaws.” In this article, Harjit Gill who is the chief executive of an electronics company based in Singapore gives his experience on how to manage the company with a team of employees with different cultures in order to meet the company’s objectives. As explained in Kolesnikov-Jessop (2014), Gill explains that a good manager is a person that is very transparent to others and someone that other people are always free to talk to and seek help from in case of any challenges or problems at the workplace.

He explains that all these draw the line between a team leader and a team manager. This means that when it comes to managing and organization, one needs to ensure that that the team he is managing get to learn and step up from the level they are in. when it is about delegation of duties, an employee should be able to understand that decision made by the manger and identify how the decision is good for them and the whole organization. Gill also gives his experience while managing across cultures in the company.

He says that one should generalize issues without considering the composition of the workforce and instead get to know the people well and the different cultural aspects in them (Kolesnikov-Jessop, 2014). It is important them to pull the different people into one team that can learn from each other by leveraging the differences in cultural traits of the employees. Adding on to that, Gill says that as a manager he was very flexible in managing diversity in all aspects in order to be able to cope with differences among the employees of the business organization and respond to them effectively.

One of the implications on business management addressed in this article is that managers should always be aware of the diversity in a workforce just as Trompenaars and Hampden-Turne (2012) explains. This will then see that no generalizations are made in business decision making and other matters of the business does not amount to discrimination or biased against other employees of the organization. Another implication is that managing across different cultures requires that the manager be very flexible.

In that case, the manger will be able to handle different business matters under different aspects of culture without a problem. Therefore, the content or the message in this article is very useful in business careers o many people and mine as well. This is because the article explains how a manager is able to lead his team of employees and leverage the different cultural personalities in them for the benefit of them business and the employees themselves. Considering then one will be able to make decisions and address different business matters flexibly without any interference from the diversity within the business organization as explained by Oya (2006).

References listChevrier, S. 2003. “Cross-cultural management in multinational project groups.” Journal of World Business. Vol. 38, pp.141–149.Kolesnikov-Jessop, S. July 6, 2014. “Build on Your Strengths Instead of Focusing on Flaws.” International New York Times News paper. Accessed on November18, 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/07/business/international/philips-harjit-gill-global- manger-asia-pacific.html.Oya, A. Z. 2006. “The cultural diversity phenomenon in organizations and different approaches for effective cultural diversity management: A literary review.

” Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal. Vol. 13, no. 4, pp.296 – 315.Trompenaars, F. and Hampden-Turne, C. 2012. Riding The Waves Of Culture Understanding Diversity in Global Business.3rd edn, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, Boston, MA.