Features

100s of practical Tips

Working Globally offers 100s of practical tips to help you avoid embarrassing mistakes, get to “yes” when negotiating, create productive and effective multi-cultural teams, and prepare for life in a foreign country.

Want to know when or if to make a concession when negotiating with Russians? Simply open the Russian country profile and check negotiating strategies.

Need to conduct a “brain-storming” session at the kickoff of a Japanese-Brazilian joint venture? Simply click the menu option “issues between nations” and select Japan and Brazil.

Are you German project manager, working for an American company, developing software for a French company, using Indian developers and Chinese tech writers? Do you need a strategy to motivate the Indians to develop the software asap? Working Globally’s “national profiles” and “issus between nations” will alert you to potential problems and supply you with field-tested solutions.

Working Globally provides you with the easiest and most intuitive way to enhance your multi-national business skills.

What is your "Cultural Intelligence"?

Working with other nationalities is unlike anything you've ever experienced.

Why???

Because every nationality has its own beliefs about business relations; for example:

• the right way to communicate,
• the right way to interact with one's boss, subordinates, and peers,
• how to manage time,
• duties owed others and responsibilities toward others.

Your personality, your leadership style, and your feelings concerning national business differences will affect your performance in multi-national assignments. Understanding these aspects of yourself will alert you to the ease or difficulty you will have working with other nationalities.

Our personality, leadership, and buisness beliefs questionnaires will help you understand and will help you identify critical differences between you and your multi-national colleagues.

Check out our quick demo video to see how this site can help: ** Demo coming soon.

Fast & Helpful Support

If you have a question, we’re here to help. Our extensive Support Center has easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorials containing screenshots and videos to make sure you’re able to quickly find answers to your questions.

We understand that sometimes you’ll need one-on-one, personal assistance too. This is where many companies would leave you hanging, but we’re proud to offer fast, email-based support to all of our customers. Our friendly, knowledgeable support team works around the clock to answer your questions, usually within a couple hours!

National Negotiating Styles

To succeed in multi-national negotiation, you need to know how to communicate with and influence people whose values, beliefs, and negotiating practices differ from your own.

Should you overwhelm with facts or appeal to emotions? Should you make concessions or stand firm? Are your bargaining partners expecting a long-term relationship or are they only interested in the immediate business at hand? Who is likely to have the authority to approve the deal? Is time often or seldom an Issue? What are the likely strengths and weaknesses of you bargaining partner?

Your best strategy and most appropriate goal will depend on the nationality of your bargaining partner

A growing body of research documents the range of different national negotiating styles.

Working Globally has incorporate this research into its country profiles and national comparisons.

Want to know how Indians negotiate? Simply open the Indian country profile and check negotiating strategies. Want a list of likely negotiating differences? Simply go to national comparisons, select India and your country, and check negotiating issues.

National Management Preferences

Successful managers are respected and trusted by their subordinates, peers, and managers, because they get the job done by using effective strategies to lead, plan, communicate, motivate, and make decisions.

But strategies that work in one country don't always work in another! How can you know which strategy will be most effective with your superiors, peers, and subordinates?

Our National Profiles use the values and beliefs of each nation to explain what managers expect of their subordinates, what subordinates expect from their managers, and what peers expect of peers. These expectations provide the clues for choosing the best strategies.

• Will your subordinates expect you to be involved in their private lives?
• Do your subordinates expect you to be an expert or a facilitator?
• Is it OK to seek out anyone in your organization who can help or will such behavior be considered subversive?
• Should you publicly reward individuals for their effort or will this embarrass them and act to demotivate?
• Should you promote individuals based on their achievments or will this demotivate because your staff expects to be promoted based on their family and university ties

Our National Profiles provide the answers to these and many more questions. Our National Comparisons use these answer to identify cross-national management strategies that will be effective with your multi-national colleagues.

National Profiles

Working Globally has more than 100 national profiles which we continuously update with on-going research and with the experiences of the Working Globally community.

Our national profiles use the values and beliefs of each nation to explain national behaviors and business practices. For example, in China contracts tend to be vague and are not considered to be very important, this is because the Chinese believe relationships not contracts are the best basis for trust. If you want a successful business partnership in China, you must allocate the time and energy needed to establish good personal relationships.

Below is a sample of the values and beliefs profile for France, and a description of the behaviors and business practices resulting from the French belief that work is done most efficiently when there is a clear chain of command. If you are attempting to reorganize a French business group be aware that the French view the American idea of “matrix management” as incomprehensible.

         

National Comparisons

The key to working effectively with multi-national partners is to identify the differences in values and beliefs.

If you are unaware that your business partner believes that harmony is essential in maintaining a respectful business relationship and that ambiguously answering questions, especially if the news is bad, fosters harmony. And you believe that complete, unambiguous honesty, even for bad news, is most important in maintaining an effective business relationship. You are likely to misunderstand what your partner says, have faulty expectations due to this misunderstanding, and judge that your partner cannot be trusted.

Working Globally makes it easy for you to identify the likely differences between your values and beliefs and those of your multi-national business partners. Our “national comparisons” allow you to select your country and your partner’s country and then present you with a table of likely differences rated from very likely and very important to not likely and/or not important.

Understanding that your business partner’s actions are shaped by beliefs and values that differ substantially from yours, will enable you to properly interpret and respect your business partner’s behavior. Which in turn will foster better understanding and a more effective business relationship.

In addition, Working Globally provides suggestions and strategies for recognizing and overcoming challenges that result from these national differences.

Cross-National Research

The study of how to succeed in the global workplace includes several areas of research:

• Psychology, which explores personality traits that inhibit or promote success in the global workplace, how perception biases our view of reality, and how our judgment is affected by our beliefs and experience.
• Anthropology, which explores how culture affects the global work place, and
• Management, which investigates techniques and strategies for working together most effectively.

The Working Globally community undertakes research in all these areas and here at Working Globally we continuously monitor the results of this research so that we can make you aware of the latest and most powerful models and up-to-date conclusions.

For example, our on-line course “working abroad” will walk you through:

• Bennet’s and Cross’ theories concerning how people view different cultures.
• Argyris’ theories on the enteractions between perception, experience, beliefs, and judgments, and
• The most current research on national differences, their causes and supporting examples.

Working Globally Made Easy

We don’t mean to brag, but our "country profile" and "national comparison" tables are features that really set Working Gloabally apart from the crowd. National Comparison table is our fabulous tool that makes it a breeze to identify all the issues you are likely to face working with your multi-national partners. With one click, you can see all the issues and get a list of detailed behaviors along with full explanations of why the behaviors differ from yours and how best to work effectively.

We built the country profile and national comparison tables into Working Globally because we believe you shouldn't have to spend days doing google searches attempting to get the information you need. Well, now you don’t have to!

We have created a new way of looking at national differences and how they affect business. A straight forward way to help you work more effectively with your multi-national colleagues.

When you interact with other nationalities sometimes you sense and interpret things correctly, some times you sense but misinterpret, and some times you don't even sense what is happening. Our site will increase your ability to properly interpret what you sense and sense more of what your multi-national colleagues are actually doing and saying. We do this by helping you recognize the things that can't be seen, heard, or tasted (the things that can be seen, heard, and tasted, are the easy national differences such as dress, food, music, or greetings - often called "the tip of the national iceberg").

We focus on the differences that lie below the surface, that are hidden from view unless you know what to look for and where to look. These are differences in national beliefs and values, and these are the important national differences that affect peoples business attitudes and behaviors.