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In this video, Dr Lee Martin explains what you'll be learning this week.
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LEE MARTIN: Welcome to Week 3. Congratulations, you’re over halfway through this course. We hope you’re enjoying the materials covered so far, and that you’re learning from the different perspectives and insights of your peers. Last week we learned more about why cultural diversity matters in teams and identified some of the opportunities and challenges of working in multicultural teams. Now we’re going to explore what we can do to actually address those challenges and grab hold of the opportunities. This week, we’ll explore two key frameworks and their associated strategies. First, we’ll explore the Map, Bridge, Integrate or MBI model developed by Dr. Martha Maznevski and colleagues for working in high performing culturally diverse teams.
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Then later in the week, we’ll introduce you to the SPLIT framework developed by Dr. Tsedal Neeley as a way to effectively manage global virtual teams. Throughout this week, you’re strongly encouraged to consider how these strategies can be applied to your own situation and how you can begin to work more effectively with your team. Think about the opportunities and challenges of multicultural teams that we explored last week. Were there any that you really wanted to unpack or get ideas about how to address? Share these in the comments. We’ve got some really useful suggestions coming up. So 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.

Flow diagram: Mapping: understanding cultural differences, Bridging: Communicating effectively across cultural differences, Integrating: Managing the cultural differencesAdpated 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

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Leading Culturally Diverse Teams in the Workplace

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