Ten Commandments of Intercultural Communication

As a cross-cultural trainer for a foreign language translation company, I find application for the guidelines from the “Ten Commandments of Intercultural Communication” on a daily basis.  At work, I am constantly interacting with people from other cultures; whether based on ethnicity, age, gender or life experiences.

I find these guidelines are beneficial when attempting to interact with someone on their level.  I don’t mean that one level is higher or lower, but different.  When attempting to “walk in their shoes” or connect on a deeper level “seeing things from their perspective” it is vital to take into account cultural differences.



An example of this was with my past supervisor.  I am born and raised in the United States, however she was raised in a Latin American Country.  As such, our perspectives on time are different.  My cultural perspective placed priority on starting and ending meetings on time according to the schedule.  Her cultural perspective was more fluid with the start and end times, with many of our meetings starting late and going very long as her priority was the connection and building a working relationship.  Rather than getting frustrated by this, I simply modified my perspective to accommodate her value system, and would not schedule any meetings after ours in case we ran very late into the day.

I like that each of these commandments started with the phrase “be aware”.  This is the most important step in the “how to” process, simply acting in awareness of the potential differences.