The Business Development across Cultures program explores the benefits of applying Cultural Intelligence concepts to customer satisfaction and team performance. A manager with high Cultural Intelligence (CQ) can enter into new cultural settings – national, professional, organizational, regional – and understand what is happening and why, confidently interact with people, and engage in the right actions.

The cross cultural program has changed a lot how we work together now. During the workshop we saw that it was more about the project culture that we needed to create, rather than about national cultures. I feel it is personally very inspiring to work across the different cultures. Sometimes it is about the little things: they showed me for instance how to type on a Chinese keyboard. I suggest such an initiative for any cultural change project. Background: The Business Development across Cultures program was introduced at Deutsche Telekom and Huawei during the joint development of Deutsche Telekom’s Entertain TV

We introduced the Business Development across Cultures program in Belgium in 2016 when working with one of our customers on a large infrastructure project. The program really helped all parties to become more aware of different ways of doing things in China and in Belgium. We practiced how to work together across the cultures. ‘It’s not wrong, it’s just different’ became one of our catch-phrases. The customer’s satisfaction on our collaboration went up by 75%, which I think is quite impressive.

Communication is often difficult. Communication in a project with complex software is always a challenge. Communication against the background of pronounced cultural differences in a project with complex software is a decisive success factor. Therefore, both our customer and we as a supplier were happy that we were able to implement this program together for the benefit of our project.