BRINGING THE BEST IDEAS AND TALENTS INTO PLAY
HOW TO BRING THE BEST IDEAS AND TALENTS INTO PLAY By Signe Walther Mørck, Journalist
A silo mentality, internal competition and personal barriers can stand in the way of knowledge sharing, without managers and employees even being aware of it. However, through culture-neutral work tools that create trust and enable cross-cultural communication, organisations and people can transcend substantial barriers and bring the best ideas and talents into play, according to a communications expert.
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ulti-cultural working groups can greatly contribute to innovation in an organisation. Nevertheless, many businesses and managers are unaware that, irrespective of the organisational set-up, employees sometimes tend to withhold information and ideas, and this can obviously harm the organisation’s internal learning and ability to bring good ideas and talents into play. An American research study conducted by the Academy of Management and published in 2017 reported on the reactions on feedback from almost 2,000 employees. The results showed that, unlike employees who only cared about improving their own performance, employees who were curious and motivated to receive feedback attracted more and higher-quality feedback from their surroundings. If you want motivated employees who are willing to share information internally in their department or with the entire organisation, it is crucial that the company culture is based on trust and cross-cultural communication. This should be the organisation’s DNA, according to Claus Adam Jarløv, CEO of the consultancy firm GlobalDenmark. “From a psychological point of view, feedback is a sensitive process, because we not only comment on a person’s performance; we also, implicitly, assess the person’s right to be part of the group. Professionals are often ambitious and competitive individuals, and many people live in fear
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of their incompetence being displayed. Moreover, employees also avoid engaging in colleague-to-colleague feedback, either because they are afraid to hurt other people’s feelings, or because they fear that their feedback will lead to frustration and a thirst for revenge”, said Claus Adam Jarløv, explaining that feedback is therefore often reduced to an unstructured and superficial response that does not create real value.
ments, but rather a factor that contributes to creativity and cooperation”, said Claus Adam Jarløv, adding that: “At GlobalDenmark, we work with a special feedback model that maps out opportunities, allowing a valuable exchange of ideas to take place by virtue of cultural differences, and not despite cultural differences”.
Culture-neutral work tools enhance constructive generation of ideas However, if conducted in the right way, feedback can serve as an important catalyst for stimulating the best ideas and talents in an organisation. Consequently, feedback is a crucial element in the organisation’s toolbox. GlobalDenmark offers courses on how to promote the use of culture-neutral tools that are quick and easy to implement, while at the same time reflecting a number of psychological and cognitive processes that break down the silo mentality and cultural barriers in an organisation. “By using tools that are culture-neutral, cultural differences are no longer disturbing ele-
G R E AT ER CO P EN H AG EN L I F E S CI EN C E | N OV E M B E R 2018