The Website of Dr. Mark Goulston

(excerpted from: MAPPING SECURITY: The Corporate Security Sourcebook for Today’s Global Economy, by Tom Patterson, Addison Wesley, (c)2005)

Solution 2: Listen Well. Communicate with Care

Americans have the toughest time perceiving foreign cultures and are often the most inaccurately perceived in foreign lands. In the interest of the best security possible, responsibility for overcoming these perceptions rests on Americans.

Mark Goulston, M.D. is a Los Angeles based executive coach, professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and author of Get Out of Your Own Way at Work — and Help Others Do the Same. He is also a former trainer of FBI and police hostage negotiators and an expert at equipping executives for leadership by helping them “get out of their own way and then help others do the same” (the putting oxygen on yourself first in a plane analogy). He says that doing the work up front to move into a new global corporate security setting will increase chances for your success.

Goulston has made a mission of helping senior executives begin to map their and others’ internal terrain by helping them focus on what he calls emotional intelligence. Coaxing individuals to understand how they come across in myriad situations-how they seem to those in cross-border settings-affords them the emotional intelligence to know how to act and react. Often what you think is the opposite of what is observed by those with whom you communicate. This is amplified in cross-border settings, and when applied to global corporate security, where the stakes are much higher, ignoring it may be tantamount to disaster. Imagine flying in to roll out a new security procedure amid a culture that you do not understand. If you are trying to get them to adopt your plan, and they are sitting there nodding politely, laughing at your jokes and taking you out in the evening, mark my words: You have failed. You need them to buy-in, not buy dinner.

“Often, Americans doing business abroad come off as disrespectful of culture and history because they have what I call an MBA mentality,” said Goulston. “That is, find the deal, negotiate the deal, do the deal, deal done. This type of transactional myopia, to someone from a culture that is deep and touched at times by ancient history, may find Americans too impulsive and adolescent. Americans also take too many turns-taking the first and last word is greedy.”

This tendency can poison a global corporate security environment. Like the souk transaction I described in Part 2, form must go before function when planning and implementing global corporate security. Know the countries that do not hold a straightforward style and know that your security training, earmarked as vital in Chapter 12, “Asia Pacific,” must account for it. Make sure you are not delusional about countries that operate in a more straightforward manner: As an American, you are still under a perceptual microscope.

“One problem with ambitious, aggressive, and successful business people is that they are unaware of how what makes them successful in their own culture can be perceived as pushy, bullying, inconsiderate, and even inappropriate in other cultures,” Goulston said. “The problem lies in a common, cross-cultural, universal human experience that takes place when you communicate-before people give you their minds, you have to pass the sniff test of their senses, meaning that as soon as you speak, the way you speak, the way you carry yourself, and the way you address them. People are comparing you with the hard disc of memories of people they like or dislike, people who have screwed them or people they’ve trusted.”

So while you are attempting to develop a security posture in a new country, people there are listening to you. They will either be drawn toward you, wanting to hear more, repulsed by you and driven away, or, almost worse, fall somewhere in between, wherein they act polite but do not really seek to give your more than the time of day.

“The best first impression you can make with anyone in a cross-border setting is by getting where they are coming from without them having to put out a lot of effort in the process,” Goulston continues. “You’ve studied the culture, and that’s almost problematic if you do not intentionally account for the awkwardness of cross-cultural communication.”

Brush Up Your Analogies Abroad
On my first trip back to South Africa after the death of apartheid, I tried to demonstrate my cultural sensitivity by including some thoughts about their fledgling black empowerment programs. I did so by relating some of my experiences with the U.S. government’s 8A minority set-aside program. So right out of the box, I referred to black empowerment as a minority program, only to be immediately interrupted and shouted down. Yes, I know that blacks are the majority in South Africa… and in this instance I learned that cross-cultural hell is paved with good intentions.

When you sit down for your first global corporate security meeting, it will be critical to verbalize such awkwardness. When something comes off as awkward because of cultural differences, alarms can sound inside each party-something doesn’t feel right. 1

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