Global corporate culture - in English

By Kim Jong-nam

Last week, I conducted training for about 40 managers from different countries. It was the second workshop held by this company to grow potential leaders; the topic of the first workshop was coaching skills, and the topic this time was performance management.

Even though I have conducted a lot of similar training before, this workshop was unique in giving me a serious opportunity to think about the ways in which Korean corporations can create a global corporate culture.

This may be surprising: Why would a performance management workshop inspire this line of thinking, as opposed to a workshop on cross-cultural understanding or communication?

To begin with, the training participants were from 20 countries from many different corners of the world: the Americas; Europe; Australia; Southern, East, and West Asia; the CIS; and the Middle East. The varied backgrounds of the participants led to an equal variety of different voices and opinions on how managers should work, how they should deal with employees, and how performance should be measured and improved.

Of course, opinions are culturally relative, which means that there is no single “right” answer. However, I realized that in order for a Korean company to truly “go global,” it will need to ensure that its subsidiaries in every country are aligned on these matters, in order to ensure that performance management is just and fair. Thus, it would be valuable to think about the most effective, globally-adaptable methods and strategies and how to share them. Without this, Korean companies will remain “global” only on the surface, while remaining “local” at their cores.

However, it is not enough to simply adopt these methods and strategies: I also believe that they should be taught and shared in English, in spite of the financial costs, length of time, and difficulty (due to language barriers) of doing so. A multi-cultural workforce will necessarily speak multiple languages, and English, as the most widely-spoken language in the world today, allows employees of many different backgrounds to communicate effectively and resolve issues of work effectiveness, global market responses, and global talent management and development. Take performance management as an example. Performance management is essentially about how to improve work processes. Conducting a workshop on performance management in English will allow Korean and non-Korean employees to have a shared understanding of various topics within this subject, such as evaluation methods and providing/receiving feedback, which will lead to a decrease in the conflicts and frictions that come from cultural differences.

Typically, Korean corporations deal with foreign managers and employees as though they live in a separate house with impassable walls even if they're under the same roof. Most Korean corporations provide funding to help their employees improve their English, but just a few companies provide training for their employees in English. Furthermore, they rarely educate their Korean and non-Korean employees in one place. How can employees improve their actual English skills without real-life use? And how can a company become global if employees from different countries are educated separately, on different subjects and with different instructors? Korean companies cannot become global without globally-aligned business management methods.

It is true that some Korean corporations will provide training courses in English when the courses are about cross-cultural understanding or global business communication. However, increasing the training opportunities through which Korean and non-Korean employees can gather and talk together about how to work more effectively will be more worthwhile than any other option. Korean companies usually emphasize their employees' general self-development; however, I think this is the time for them to begin to help their employees' global self-development. Conducting training in English can be a good start to creating a global corporate culture, as training then becomes a time when global mind-sets and solutions can be shared and tested. Without global competitiveness, the global market is not accessible.

Kim Jong-nam is the founding CEO of META (www.imeta.co.kr) and the author of two books, "Organizations without Meetings" and "Breaking the Silent Rules."