Conducting and Hosting International Meetings
Module 1 : Cross-cultural awareness, a key factor for international meetings
1. Acknowledging the cross-cultural impact in business relations
- Understanding how cultures and values are build, why and how they impact meetings
- Clichés and stereotypes: avoiding the prejudice trap
- The real meaning and implications of « English » as a common language
- Culture-free and culture-fair: the two main layers of any good business relations
- How and why different cultures have different perceptions on methods and processes
- When stress arises: assessing and understanding the main communication clashes
- Understanding the different steps in cross-cultural adaptation: from choc to synergy
- Assessing various levels of interaction between cultures: individual, functional, organisational and national
2. How international meetings are affected by cultural bias
- Identifying each participant’s business, professional, and personal expectations
- Establishing trust: relative importance of tasks and relationships (individual and group)
- Managing the agenda: how cultures value and manage time
- Decision making: how individuals view their relations with their team, hierarchy, and risks
- Identifying the bedrocks of a culture thinking and reasoning: adapting one’s communication, presentation and argumentation style (empirical, theoretical, importance of facts, explicit or implicit communication, simple vs complex, etc.)
- Analysing one’s cultural profiler: where one stands culture-wise
- Recognizing, respecting, reconciling, and making the best of cultural differences
Module 2 : Succeed in hosting international meetings
1. Preparing an international meeting
- Checking each participant’s cultural profile (tasks, processes, team work, relationships)
- Fostering a common objective: making sure steps, tools and objectives are culture-free and fair
- Establishing a strong agenda: realistic and culture-fair
2. Conducting and hosting: best practices for an efficient international meeting
- Cross-cultural communication: integrating the « 4 Pillars »: Preparation, Purpose, Process, People
- Starting the meeting : welcoming, connecting, agenda, objectives, processes
- Roles: chairman/woman, manager or host?
- Making the most of the verbal and non-verbal communication tools
- How to use both a common language and a specific cultural communication
- Putting across one’s message : how to avoid misunderstandings
- Best practices in speaking turns, discussions, debates, questioning, summarizing, interpretation, decision making and next steps
- The last and lasting impression: how to conclude and international meeting
- Walking the talk: best practices in writing and circulating minutes.
3. How to embrace remote meetings
- Understanding and managing the impact of remoteness upon international meetings
- Creating a strong meeting structure
- Fostering a clear and common working framework
- Telecommunication channels: considering their impact on quality of content and exchanges
- Optimizing remote meetings: how to use the « 4 Pillars »
4. Managing a difficult meeting & sensitive situations
- Cultural attitudes toward confrontations, tensions and clashes
- Managing international tensions: key causes of tensions and appropriate defusing techniques
- The 3 steps of tense situations management: anticipating, preventing, solving
- Managing inappropriate behaviors and confrontations in international meetings
- Communicating well in tense moments : best practices
- Closing well: acknowledging the proper value of any tensions/ confrontations
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