What do I do about foreign-born employees who present language and culture issues for group training?
Very interesting issue. Our recommendation is that interaction with foreign born participants is one of the best ways to talk about business behaviors and make the participants aware of what culture of a company or a nation are and how to read them. We had a French participant in one of our PRIDE programs, who made it a practice at every session to approach and individually shake hands with each one of his colleagues! That raised a few eyebrows, but when the subject of reading a client culture came up, his colleagues based on Feedback Giving skills they had learned in the course, they gave him that feedback and some considerable interesting discussion followed. The result was that he was now aware of how his behavior was perceived and the others had gotten a good lesson as to how relative business behaviors are; both very valuable lessons in todays global market place. To the other part of the question: No, PRIDE is not a substitute for English as Second Language! Q: I have a Training
