The Faculty of Graduate Studies serves all graduate students and post docs (at least the ones we know about!) here at Dalhousie University. Most of the time we deal with them indirectly, through the routine administrative systems handling applications, admissions, scholarship applications, grade results, convocations preparation. For many of the students, the only time we actually see them face-to-face is at convocation. And that's usually a good thing, not because we don't enjoy contact with students, but because it means that everything has gone as planned.
Of course, not everything goes as planned. As the old proverb has it, "man plans; God laughs". When a graduate student's program goes off the rails, or there is confusion about requirements, that is when the staff on the team come to a renewed understanding of educational administration as a contact sport. More contact than sport, really.
Today all of the staff of FGS got together as a group for a professional development session. A trained facilitator collected data before the meeting on where we are regarding our understanding of the challenges of intercultural communication. Then she took us through some theory and practice. An interesting business, to be sure.
It's easy to dismiss these kind of sessions as nothing more than a mildly amusing morning out of the office away from the phone and email. After all, something in the order of 80% of our students are Canadians. And when you reflect on the contact we might have in a year with the other 20% of the students, the vast majority of the communication is respectful, straightforward, and apparently successful on both sides of the exchange. I have nothing in the way of empirical data apart from my own thoughts about overhead conversations between staff and students, and the regular exchange of information we have as a team. But if I had to guess, well over 90% of the exchanges are non-problematic, probably over 95%, if we include email. Problem intercultural exchanges are probably less than 1-2% of them.
So what's the big deal? Why invest any time improving the effectiveness of intercultural communication?
There are a couple of reasons that spring to mind. First, there is a trap in the phrase "apparently successful". This is not quite the same thing as "successful". Second, we have a special obligation to the international students - the ancient (and some would say sacred) obligation of hospitality. Third is the question of simple human compassion in the context of our mission to support students in the search for success. We have invited these students to study with us, notwithstanding the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges. Fourth is the question of risk management.
Risk management?
Yes. My good colleague Jack Duffy (professor emeritus from the biz school) and I have done research on the serious risks to Canadian faculty members. One of the patterns that emerged is the increased risk of threat where there are serious differences in power, high levels of frustration, cultural disconnects, and high stakes. Failing out of graduate school as an international student is, for some cultures, higher stakes than even for North Americans.So getting the communication right for the small number of students with serious problems (and those that aren't so serious) pays off.
Frankly, there are other reasons to give us pause to think about how to anticipate the possibility of a misunderstanding in intercultural communication. Improving our skills in this area by suspending judgment, thinking about alternative ways of understanding the situation especially from other points of view, looking for variety of solutions before coming to judgment - this has got to be good for communication with people we don't normally think of as coming from a different culture.
Say someone like me, from Alberta. Or someone from Cape Breton. Or Toronto. Or an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer, an economist, an actuary. All different cultures. Each culture presents opportunities for mistaken judgments enabled by communication disconnects.
I used to have long drawn out painful arguments with a business partner, Brian Harrington, who was not at all shy about telling me I was wrong. After 18 months of excruciating exchanges, he finally said to me: "you realize I'm an engineer, don't you?"
"Of course," I replied, "what has that got to do with anything?"
He patiently explained. "When an engineer says you're wrong, most of the time it means that he didn't understand what you said."
A major intercultural communication barrier evaporated.
So the big lesson for me today was one I already knew. The most common thinking mistake there is, and likely the most important one in terms of impact, is rushing to judgment before exploring. It's an easy thing to forget when your in-box overflows with requests for judgments, and as soon as possible. And that improving intercultural communication might just improve communication period.
That would be a good thing.
Sunny