What and when?
I am going to take you back to a Fraternity House at the Stanford University. The date – 7th August, 2006. I was 18 years, 4 months and 19 days ago and I was the youngest student to have made it to RealAcad – an intense global venture management program. It was the 2nd day and while one part of me was skipping in delight at the thought of all the learning that was bound to take place, the other parts, were in shock..
Who?
I was surrounded by 18 top performers from all over the world. Our group consisted of 5 Indians, 3 Americans, 2 Belgians, 2 Brazilians and 1 each from Bolivia, China, Serbia, Mexico, Wales, Haiti and Kyrgystan. We had a tumultuous 1st day where one of our camp mates had fallen ill and had to be rushed into hospital. Added to this fact was the clashing of expectations of every individual in the camp and the 2nd day felt like a day out of the world war.
What happened?
I noticed two strong groups emerge. One group was a collection of all those from the west (Europe and the USA) who were fixated on the agenda while the rest (from Asia and South America) were those who weren’t as concerned about time and a fixed agenda. From my Indian lens, I just couldn’t understand the fixation behind following the agenda. After all, it was one of ‘them’ who had to be rushed to a hospital. Besides, I felt ‘their’ constant stress on the agenda was only throwing the camp further off the agenda.
More background
Every person in the room had tasted success in their professional lives, as top performers in companies like Microsoft, BCG, as entrepreneurs etc, and were leaders in every sense of the word. RealAcad promised to bring this entire team together and form a new entrepreneurial venture by the end of the sixth day. Every individual in the room, hence, was trying to pull the camp in the direction of their ideas.
What did I feel and do?
I strongly felt that being ‘efficient’ here would not do much to solve the inherent issues. In my understanding, the basic issue here was that the participants were unclear of how their expectations would be met given the open ended nature of the camp and only effective conversations that brought about alignment would help iron out our issues.
Luckily, the leadership team felt the same and we did iron these differences before we moved forward. This entire process took 2 whole days and caused further discontentment and angst. But, our leaders still persisted.
Results
Eventually, things came together by Thursday and in the remaining 48 hours, I was truly astounded by the impact of aligning a team with open and transparent communication. During this course, we also understood the point of view of our friends from the other side of the Suez Canal and planned our next steps effectively. By the time the camp closed on Saturday, we had created 4 new companies!
And hence, my 3 mantras for cross-cultural group success are –
Mantra 1: Be open(to new/weird ideas, behaviors, food habits etc)
Mantra 2: Seek to understand before trying to be understood
Mantra 3: Read Mantra 2 again.
And one last thing, I did learn never to forget an agenda!
A Learning a Day 