Let’s get started

Welcome to Week 3.

We hope you enjoyed the first two weeks of learning.

Now we know more about culture and how it can influence a team, we can ask the question: how can we harness the potential benefits of multicultural teams?

As Lee discusses in the video, we’ll be introducing you to some practical frameworks and strategies to help you develop your approach.

First we’ll examine the MBI model. This framework developed Professor Martha Maznevski and colleagues is a useful approach for interacting effectively in multicultural teams. As you can see from the image below, it involves three stages: Mapping, Bridging and Integrating.

_{Adpated from Lane & Maznevski (2019). Click on the image to open a PDF version.}

We’ll then move on to the SPLIT framework developed by Professor Tsedal Neely, for working in and managing global virtual teams (GVTs).

Remember the challenges we explored in our case study from last week? Throughout this week, we’ll revisit these and apply the above frameworks to understand how they could work practically in multicultural teams.

Your task

Over the next two weeks you’re going to learn a lot of tips, tricks and strategies for working better in multicultural teams.

We recommend you start this week by putting together a notebook or document that you can use to keep track of the tips that resonate with you, or that you think would work well for your team.

By the end of the course, this will become a useful resource to take away and help you as you lead your culturally diverse team.

Reference

_{Lane, H., & Maznevski, M. (2019). International Management Behavior: Global and Sustainable Leadership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 112}