360 Degree Feedbacks Can Improve Multicultural Teams
By Peter Lee (Birkman 360)
Multicultural teams - teams that have members from several different cultures - are becoming very common in the global work setting. Many organisations recognise the great potential for such teams since diversity often engenders creativity and leads to innovations. But running diverse teams is not without pains. There are all kinds of communication, cultural value, and chemistry issues involved in multicultural teams. So what can you do to help such a team?
Jeffrey T. Polzer, a professor of Human Resource Management at Harvard Business School, believes that 360 degree feedback can help diverse teams more than other conventional team building methods , he wrote in his recent article in Harvard Business Review as follows:
"Diverse teams are prone to dysfunction.... Conventional team-building activities are unreliable for such groups, because their one-size-fits-all approach to building cohesion fails to recognize team members' idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses and how they can be combined to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts."
This is a key insight for any team that has members from more than two or three different cultures, languages, nationalities, and/or ethnic-racial groups. Typical team building activities are designed based on certain values and cultural assumptions - i. e. time-oriented or event-oriented, etc. - that they cannot be beneficial to those team members who do not subscribe to these assumptions, and thus to the team as a whole.
According to Professor Polzer, 360 degree feedbacks can help team members improve their "fit" or interpersonal congruence, which happens when team members' self-assessments are similar to those of other team members. In other words, when other team members see you as you see yourself and vice versa, then you have a good "fit" in the team, and 360 feedback is a great tool to improve this team fit.
However, Polzer also warns that 360 feedback can backfire and further complicate the existing situation if it is not executed well. He states that its effectiveness will depend on the team leader's openness to receiving candid feedbacks, team members having some level of mutual trust and respect and motivation to make things better in the team, using solid methods to collect the data, and ensuring to use the data for team development instead of evaluation.
Personally, I would strongly recommend a diverse, multicultural team to utilize 360 degree feedbacks provided that they additionally address the following issues:
1. Cultures represented on the team and the team language:
Oftentimes, the language of the team determines the underlying culture of the team or at least its largest cultural stream. The natives of that language tend to dominate the approach to team and what's the "right" way to function as a team. East Asians in general tend to emphasize group harmony and modesty and Westerners efficiency, honesty and individuality, and these values will be reflected in the way each team member appraises oneself and others. These need to be considered when giving and receiving feedbacks.
2. Sensitivity of assessing the team leader / manager:
Again, for East Asians, it is quite a sensitive thing to assess and give feedback to their leader/manager. They usually feel uncomfortable giving feedbacks to those who are in authority. This needs to be considered in a 360 feedback session involving team members from Asian cultures. They should be encouraged and assured of their standing in the team since assessing their boss is considered the job of the boss of their boss, not theirs, and they could be afraid of negative consequences. One way to mitigate this issue is using an indirect sharing - having the Asian team member's feedback of his or her leader be shared with a 3rd party facilitator who in turn shares it with the leader. It might sound awkward to a westerner, but it's often the norm in Asian business settings.
3. Need for deeper understanding of personalities:
360-degree assessment is really good stuff, but it would be incomplete without an understanding by the team of each team member's personality traits. The problem with human personality is that it is so complex, and any assessment is trying to measure something that is immeasurable. However, certain tools are better than the others at this. The problem with most personality assessment tools is that they measure normal, usual, or strong behavioral patterns of the person, and they usually fail to show the person's underlying needs and the behaviors that come out when those needs are not consistently being met.
By using a proven personality assessment tool and having a trained facilitator who can guide the team through the process, a 360-degree feedback can make a real difference in a team's chemistry and performance.