A Multicultural Person

A multicultural person is someone who is deeply convinced that all cultures are equally good, enjoys learning the rich variety of cultures in the world, and most likely has been exposed to more than one culture in his or her lifetime.

You cannot motivate anyone, especially someone of another culture, until that person has accepted you. A multilingual salesperson can explain the advantages of a product in other languages, but a multicultural salesperson can motivate foreigners to buy it. That's a critical difference.

No one likes foreigners who are arrogant about their own culture. Customers are turned off by monocultural salespeople. The trouble is, most people are arrogantly monocultural without being aware of it. And even those who are aware of it can't hide it. Foreigners sense monocultural arrogance at once and set up their own cultural barriers, effectively blocking any attempt by the monocultural person to motivate them.

Multiculturalism is a requirement that has been neglected too often in hiring managers for international positions. And this neglect is affecting every industry. Even if your company is not (yet!) a multinational one, chances are you're in touch with foreign customers or manufacturers. Do you have the right employee forging these relations?

For 20-odd years, I've run an executive-search firm from Brussels. When clients ask us to find the right person for a new pan-European sales or management position, I start by asking them to specify the qualifications their ideal candidate would have. Most often they list the same qualities they would want for a domestic position, but with the additional requirement that the new manager be fluent enough in English, German and French to cope with faxes and email. It sometimes takes me hours to persuade clients that the linguistic abilities they see as crucial are not enough. But after some discussion, we usually wind up specifying something like: "The new manager must be accepted throughout Europe. Thus, he or she must be multicultural. If possible, he or she should also be able to communicate in more than one of the major European languages."

Of course, it's far more difficult to determine candidates' multiculturalism than it is to check their language skills—but it's also a far more important ingredient to success. To seek out this crucial quality, I ask a lot of questions about candidates' early childhood, looking for evidence of contact with diverse cultures. And I probe for arrogance about their background and environment.

It's sometimes very difficult to make the call. I remember a company that asked me to check out a salesman they were planning to send to Mexico. He'd studied Spanish, and had grown up in New York City—the most culturally diverse place in America. But when I interviewed him, it turned out that he had no concept of the great pride Mexicans take in their culture, and moreover he was uneasy about Mexican restaurants and markets being dirty and unsafe. I rejected him—just as Mexican buyers would have rejected him if he'd been selected for the job.

Similarly, don't think for a moment that a proven American salesperson can be sent to Great Britain and be expected to sell there, since it's the same language. In nine out of ten cases, he or she will fail. The ones who succeed are multicultural people with the rare ability to gain acceptance from British customers.

And don't fall for the myth that a candidate's knowledge of superficial behavior like shaking hands or bowing is a sure sign of multiculturalism. An American businessman arriving in Japan is immediately aware of the cultural differences, even in the first hour. It only takes a few days to learn when to take off his shoes or how to eat with chopsticks—but he'll still feel like a bull in a china shop—and an exceptionally clumsy bull at that. Even moving as carefully as he can, he still finds himself sending all the china crashing to the floor and offending people right and left. A monocultural person gives up at this point, because even if he's ready to learn about another culture intellectually, he refuses to penetrate it emotionally. A multicultural person swallows his pride, learns from his blunders and in the end manages to get in touch with the spirit of the new culture, not just its superficial details.