„Why culture always comes first and ultimately always remains?“
What defines commonality in pluralistic times, and what determines cultural footprint in the long term? As recruiters, we are primarily partners for companies and are there to bring problems and challenge-definitions closer to solutions. Now, one could say that it’s ultimately always about snapshots from a momentary perspective.
No, ultimately, it’s always about trying to grasp different cultural approaches and skillfully bridge cultural gaps with competence and empathy. The fact is, today’s world is highly globalized; everything is perceived as “disruptive” and fragmented into individual pieces, which consultants then strive to bring together.
No level of it and no element can be viewed in isolation, and yet, even in vastness and decentralization, the law of proximity, detail-orientedness, and individuality resides. So, what then ultimately describes cultures, and why is this definition so crucial for our service approach as HR-consulting firm?
“Culture” may have socio-political aspirations, but is not always socially relevant in a wider sense. Culture is often defined in a narrower entrepreneurial sense or in an even personal-individualistic sense. It is essentially always about the balance and well-being of systems and organizational constellations, and about the distinctiveness of a certain character or certain characteristics and parameters at the individual level.
I can use my own cultural perceptions and beliefs to influence the environment of the other person in a respectful way, and only when I am culturally at peace with myself—and by that I mean that I can understand my own cultural dimension—can I become aware of the other person’s or company’s culture and allow the “Consulting approach” to take place.
In this aspect, “cultural diversity” plays an important role and is neither contradictory nor even ambivalent to pluralism, self-realization, and hedonistic striving. Highlighting and marketing cultural identity is more socially viable than ever, especially in times of emerging individualistic, self-centered efforts to engage only oneself.
So, how can a consultant become an “intercultural advisor” and engage in an exchange with companies and organizational structures which primarily involve regaining balance between individual perspectives? As internationally active executive search consultants, we are, whether we like it or not, always caught in the tension between geographical, socio-economic, and cultural-politic perceptions and dimensions.
Only by attempting to understand the other party’s cultural position, individualistic contradictions and idealizations can be reduced and interorganizational and interpersonal bridges can be built for mutual understanding.
Especially in international exchanges, at the national-regional or organizational-system-maintaining level, “bridge building” and an empathetic understanding are more relevant and important than ever. Continental economic systems in the age of global value chains require a profound understanding from us as HR-consultants at the individual level.
Intercultural management coupled with change-, strategy-, and value management are requirements that are demanded of HR-consulting firms in order to be able to evaluate and harmoniously realize and bring to life even the most complex recruiting projects – nationally and locally.
Cultural “diversity” is hereby a factor that cannot be represented in a single-minded way of thinking. It has to be “entirely grasped”, so to speak. Rather, it is about a wider tolerance and the cosmic “dance around a cultural center” in which the client, with their needs and requirements, stands.
So let’s engage in the game of opposing poles, let’s begin to understand culture as a fundamental prerequisite for being able to survive in the interpersonal race for the best talent. The clock ticks, and ticks, and ticks. The “survival of the fittest” race has culturally only just begun.
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