Mentoring across national cultures

With the rise in global mentoring programmes, come the issues associated with the norms, beliefs and behaviours of different national cultures and how these can impact mentors and mentees working cross-culturally.

In same national culture relationships, there tends to be an expectation that there is a similarity in values and world-view. In mentor and mentee matches where cultures are quite different, there can be fears, biases, and stereotypes about other races and ethnicities. The mentor in particular, needs to find a way to empathise with and understand their mentee’s personal life situation.

In many global programmes, there is little thought given to national culture differences.  Apart from the time difference and the irritation that some countries have more and different national holidays, everyone is expected to be the same. However, ignoring these differences, just means you can end up with some unsatisfactory mentoring.

So what can happen?

Hofstede’s research (1), on the Power Distance Index (PDI) across different cultures is a way of viewing the extent to which lower ranking people accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. In the context of a global programme, this means that people from cultures with a high PDI tend to be passive and do what they’re told, whereas people from cultures with a low PDI tend to feel that their opinion is just as legitimate as their boss’s opinion and they will say so! Examples of countries with low PDI include the UK, USA, Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. Countries with high PDI cultures include India, much of SE Asia, and the Arab States.

This can be thought provoking when you are considering some of the challenges that may be faced putting two people together in a developmental mentoring relationship where the power should ‘be parked’. It is not as easy to do this when you are working with countries with quite different PDIs.

So what should you do?

• Mentors need to be curious, open-minded and at ease working outside their culture.
• Mentors and mentees will find comfort in similarity at the beginning of a relationship. The stress and stretch of working with someone completely different can be too much at the beginning so rapport will take longer and need more investment on the part of the mentor.
• Mentors need to really focus energy on building trust and understanding.

Create an action plan

You can use the framework of Andy Molinsky (2) when deciding how to work best with your mentee in a cross-national programme. Consider first how to diagnose the cultural code your mentee is using on these spectrums:

1. Directness
2. Enthusiasm
3. Formality
4. Assertiveness
5. Self-promotion
6. Personal disclosure

And then create a four-step plan which:

1. Diagnoses the cultural code of the mentee as above
2. Identifies the mentee’s own personal challenges working with you with your own cultural code
3. Customise your behaviour when talking to your mentee to talk the cultural code into consideration
4. Take this behaviour into your ‘muscle memory’ in your mentoring conversations.

You will find it is an easy way to consider some of the differences between you in a non-emotional and objective way, but also to help you build a plan to support you in how to work more effectively with your mentee.

Encouraging cross-cultural connections makes for incredibly rich learning in mentoring, but it needs to be well focused and you and your mentee need to be very aware of the challenges and work to ensure these are overcome.

(1) Hofstede G. Hofstede, G.J. et al. (2010) Cultures and Organisations – Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill Education

(2) Molinsky A. (2013) ‘Global Dexterity’ Harvard Business Review