RUSSIAN = ENGLISH

Cross-Cultural Communication

Across cultures, people differ in how they relate to time, to power, to customers, to the group; how they solve problems; how they view customs, contracts and protocols. These differing cultural assumptions affect workplace behavior. Often, participants in a bilingual bicultural project feel bewildered and helpless, not knowing how to confront and work with all these differences. Our approach is to provide order to cultural chaos and empower clients to proactively search for cultural differences in an organized way. Working with cultural difference is a challenge, and that's important to know for everybody who is involved in a bilingual (which means bicultural) project.

Sonia Melnikova-Raich helps project managers and team members working for bilingual projects, joint ventures, and companies doing business in Russia and FSU work effectively across cultures. She will help you to develop understanding about cultural differences and how they affect the way people manage projects and accomplish work tasks. She will assist you with:

• detecting the different ways of thinking in a different culture that will impact your project
• developing a clear understanding of the specific workplace challenge
• troubleshooting problems involving cultural differences
• mediating cross-cultural conflict resolution in a crisis situation
• developing a corresponding set of cross-cultural strategies that will address those challenges, and a process for incorporating these strategies into your team work
• learning strategies for using cultural difference creatively to enhance the project

and most important of all,

• keeping the lines of communication clear when you transmit information across the culture barrier in person, over the phone, or by e-mail.