International cooperation
National champions are a thing of the past - Neelie Kroes, EU Competition Commissioner
We help the management of companies in production and IT, to eliminate deficiencies of performance and quality in projects that can be traced back to problems of international cooperation.
Challenges
Globalisation has shrunk the world, and technology allows us to communicate quickly. That does not mean there are fewer differences, just creates more opportunities to make mistakes and learn.
Employees in international organisations differ from each other structurally and culturally. Their attitudes, needs, values and work behaviour differ. Dealing with these factors appropriately and efficiently becomes a crucial success factor for companies. There can be very different patterns of perception and behaviour with regard to dealing with hierarchy and status, power distance and equality. Future and performance orientation, uncertainty avoidance and the perception of career options are also perceived very differently. The balance between cooperation and competition, gender-typical behaviour in everyday work, informal communication norms and work commitment can also make interaction and trust-building considerably more difficult beyond purely linguistic barriers.
Inefficient working relationships between teams from different nations can result in various operational problems, such as
- Lower productivity in projects
- Quality defects
- Delay of customer projects
- Lack of communication
Lack of trust between the teams can lead to
- Lack of drive/motivation to work with the international team.
- unresolved conflicts and other hygiene deficiencies in the company.
Solution Approach
The cause of these challenges is often intercultural differences between the people involved. This can be attributed to weak intercultural competence of the organisation and/or a company-specific organisational culture that is not aligned with the whole organisation.
As a first step, we work on improving the intercultural competence (dimensions of awareness and sensitivity) of an organisation's staff. In order to find sustainable solutions to the identified problems, we go in-depth to find the root causes.
In the next step, we moderate the elaborated solution finding with the help of numerous creative methods. These are evaluated in terms of their feasibility and their impact on the business result. The organisational culture of the company is also assessed to see whether it is balanced or not.
The defined business process improvements are then rolled out along the concepts of change management. This ultimately has a positive impact on the most visible intercultural competence dimension (behaviour). The intensity of the results is accentuated through team and individual coaching.
Various digital tools are used for these steps. The implementation is also largely digital and is optimised in such a way that the location of the people involved is irrelevant for the implementation. This ensures efficient and time-saving implementation.
Our Methodology
Get to know our offers in a target-specific way
What are your biggest challenges in relation to your International Business
or asked differently:
"If everything were possible, what would you like to achieve with the help of external support?"
Improving intercultural Negotiation Skills
Our offers to improve negotiation skills in an intercultural environment.
Improving the Intercultural Competences of an organisation
Our offers for improving the intercultural competence of organisations
Better understand the organisational culture of my company
Our offer specifically for the management of companies to understand your organisational culture and to classify it sector-specifically.
Improving Business Processes against the background of Intercultural Differences
Our offers for optimising internal business processes against the background of intercultural differences. Especially for engineering and IT companies active in mechanical engineering and the automotive supply chain.