Unleash your intercultural potential

Being able to find out where you fit in the spectrum of several measures of intercultural dimensions is not new but tends to involve a very costly process. On Philipe Rosinski’s site you can complete just such a questionnaire and get the results for free.

I can imagine that this might be a wonderful exercise to try out with an international team of students who were preparing to work, say, on an Erasmus Intensive Programme. This might help them identify potential areas of conflict as well as areas of strength within the team. Of course it might be a good idea to get a bit of background knowledge first about the meaning of the different dimensions by reading one of Rosinski’s books on the topic. The 2003 ‘Coaching across Cultures’ explains the approach. It would be quite a task to collate and analyse the results from a whole group and this is where you can decide to pay Rosinski for an analysis, tailoring of the questionnaire and coaching. But my guess is that even completing the individual questionnaire on its own would be a valuable student exercise.

According to Rosinski , the role of the intercultural coach is helping you unleash your potential through an appreciation of your preferences and strengths in a range of orientations. These orientations tend to vary across cultures and are based on the classic findings of Hofstede and Edward T Hall. Rosinski has re-arranged some of these orientations somewhat but amongst them we find the classic ones about polychronic and monochronic, which today we might term multi-tasking. There is also our preference for formality or informality which Hofstede referred to as power distance. Using Rosinski’s approach you can fill in a questionnaire which highlights those areas where your preferred working style differs from your strengths. When I did the questionnaire for example I discovered that I may not be good at working in a strictly hierarchical situation and that I work better in informal environments.

Rosinski conducted an hour long webinar on the topic for SIETAR which you can access freely on the SIETAR website and I was given permission to include two extracts from the webinar in the latest show of our Absolutely Intercultural podcast if you want an even more compressed version.