Providing ongoing assistance in the development of international communications skills

In an earlier post I dis­cussed the dif­fer­ent levels of sup­port and train­ing offered by organ­isa­tions to their people when deploy­ing them onto inter­na­tional pro­jects, either as ex-pat’s or as home office based per­son­nel work­ing as with inter­na­tional offices.

Many organ­isa­tions, in my exper­i­ence and obser­va­tion, will give their per­son­nel some level of induc­tion and train­ing into the situ­ation they will be work­ing as part of the set up of the pro­ject, the level and con­tent of this will vary between company’s and even between pro­jects, some will have a min­imal level of train­ing, oth­ers more extens­ive and of course, sadly, some will do noth­ing for their people and leave them to work it out for themselves.

The next stage how­ever, where many company’s don’t do any­thing, is the sup­port of their per­son­nel while they are in these pro­jects. I believe that much of this idea, that ongo­ing devel­op­ment and sup­port is not needed, comes from the largely west­ern concept that all train­ing is essen­tially of a “fit and for­get” type, where once an indi­vidual has atten­ded the train­ing course, they have the skills for the rest of their life and will not then need any fur­ther sup­port; this is a reas­on­able obser­va­tion with many tech­nical or so called “hard” skills, but is rarely the case with the human­istic, “soft” skills. To sup­port this view I would point to the grow­ing num­bers of exec­ut­ive coaches offer­ing their ser­vices to the more enlightened company’s, some­thing many company’s would not need if they offered this internally.

So, what can company’s do to sup­port their per­son­nel on these inter­na­tional pro­jects?  I would pro­pose a couple of real­tively simple and low cost techniques;

• Identify and engage with internal com­mu­nic­a­tions coaches, per­son­nel who have been in sim­ilar situ­ations before, whether in the same coun­tries or not is a sec­ond­ary issue, and link these exper­ineced staff up with the new and less exper­i­enced ones, provide them with dfa­cilites to meet from time to time in a low pres­sure envir­on­ment and com­pare experiences.
• Provide on line mater­i­als that per­son­nel can access to help them with issues that arrise, these will never be fully com­pre­hens­ive but will deal with the major­ity of issues.
• Provide a forum (on line or simply a list of con­tacts) where indi­vidu­als can dis­cuss their issues, this forum could be mod­er­ated by seasoned pro­fes­sion­als who can step in with advice as needed.
• Offer fre­quent refresher courses and addi­tional train­ing for per­son­nel when things change within the project.
• Act­ively recruit addi­tional per­son­nel where needed with estab­lished inter­na­tional pro­ject exper­i­ence and once recruited, listen to their experience.
• Put an observer into some meet­ings and have them provide feed­back to the meet­ing par­ti­cipants after the meet­ing con­culdes, this does need care in select­ing the right observer and hav­ing them give the feed­back in a con­struct­ive and impar­tial manner.

All of these options could be executed with min­imal cost to the pro­ject and the organ­isa­tion and any cost incurred would, in my opin­ion, be recovered very quickly dur­ing the remain­ing life of the pro­ject, although the recov­ery is hard to quantify since it will avoid issues rather than rem­edy arising problems.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or com­ments to this post, I really appre­ci­ate any feedback.

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2010 Francis Norman

Related Posts:

• Do you need a com­mu­nic­a­tions coach?
• Tips for sur­vival in the deep end of inter­na­tional pro­ject communications
• Company’s options to sup­port inter­na­tional pro­ject com­mu­nic­a­tion skills

Tagged as: Communications training, expat, international communications, interpersonal skills