“The Nomad” is a fortnightly published series where I talk to expat PR and Comms professionals, then delve into the insights which inform and help other people to live or to do business in an intercultural world. If you or someone you know would be happy to share their perspective, please get in touch! I’d love to hear from you.
*The graphic design is inspired by Kyoorius Designyatra 2018
“The fact that diversity exists and that harnessing it can be beneficial for businesses has been known for a long time, and today we’re finally seeing more urgency around addressing the issue.”
As part of my series about how we can learn from intercultural insights to embed them into PR and Comms practices and help create positive social impacts, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tamara Makoni, Senior Communications Specialist at Deloitte. As an award-winning interculturalist, Tamara has recently been recognised by INvolve as one of HERoes Top 100 Female Future Leaders 2021. She uses her voice to move the needle for diversity and inclusion, to advocate for inclusive leadership and push for progress.
Describing her PR and Comms journey as “unconventional”, Tamara works with leaders to effectively make the most of intercultural insights. She stresses the need to adapt communication styles and ways of working in the hyperconnected world.
We had the age-old yet much-needed conversation about diversity and inclusion, stereotypes and biases, discrimination and marginalisation. Her knowledge and wisdom shone through, helping us acknowledge and understand our differences as humans, to make society a better place.
Thank you so much for joining us! How are you doing and what’s been keeping you busy recently?
Hi Son, thank you for inviting me to participate! I really enjoyed reading through season 1 and look forward to diving into more interesting content this season.
Recently I found out about the INvolve’s awards in recognition of my work on a number of initiatives to drive change and promote gender diversity and inclusion. It was a totally unexpected honour to be selected, and the past weeks have been a whirlwind of discussions with my company’s PR people in preparation of the lists going live on September 9.
One of the initiatives I worked on was facilitating inclusive leadership activation labs for senior leaders within Deloitte, and now that the summer break’s over we’re gearing up to resume with an enhanced format and content. I’m booked in to facilitate some live sessions, which is a little daunting after 18 months of exclusively virtual facilitation. Hopefully it’ll all come back to me just like riding a bike!
How do you describe your journey in PR and Comms so far?
Unconventional.
It was a former manager that encouraged me down this path. When he told me that I had a flair for comms and should look into it as a career, a lightbulb went on inside my head. Until then I’d focused on software development and project management, and had no real knowledge of corporate comms. To me, comms equalled journalism. But I realised I had been doing comms work for a long time without knowing it: running comms campaigns for software deployments, writing stakeholder updates and aligning on key messages, organising a webinar series, writing video scripts, etc. And I knew I liked this work and wanted to do much more of it.
My current role is strategic comms-focused: leading culture and comms efforts within multi-disciplinary teams that work together to win high priority, multi-million euro consulting bids. I work with leaders to construct an overarching narrative for the bid and specific client win themes and messaging, and coach them to understand the client’s culture and ways of working so they can collaborate more effectively.
When I look at job descriptions for comms roles I have the required skills and qualities, but I didn’t acquire them via the normal route (i.e. working in a comms team environment).
If you didn’t learn comms skills in a traditional way, how did you acquire them?
I’ve always enjoyed communication-related activities. I write for my own enjoyment, was a member of debate and public speaking clubs in school and university, and read vociferously. So I was drawn to workplace tasks that fed into these interests: for instance creating training manuals and videos for system users, and regularly posting articles on the intranet about go-lives. By doing this in many different project environments – and with stakeholders hailing from several different cultures – I was able to pick up and refine the key skills that communicators need.
“We have to embed collaboration in every interaction – e.g. not coming to meetings with ready-made solutions, but with ideas to put on the table and a meeting format that enables discussion.”
So you work with senior leaders to develop a bespoke intercultural communications strategy to win business. How do you describe your job and where does the intercultural competence lie?
Clearly when we submit a proposal to Company X, Company X doesn’t read it. Specific individuals within Company X do, and they make the purchasing decision based on whether they feel our proposition fits with the company’s strategic direction and their personal ambitions and preferences. So my job is about helping teams understand company values and stakeholder priorities on a deeper level, and developing creative ways to articulate our proposition so our message resonates meaningfully.
Intercultural competence comes in on many levels: Company X’s culture is different to our organisation’s, so we need to adapt our communication style and ways of working accordingly. All the deals I work on are cross-border, so there’s the national culture diversity element too. There can be several layers to this, as a recent bid demonstrates: the client was a UK subsidiary of a Japanese conglomerate, and all the decision makers were Italian. And cultural adaption is of course more than saying to a consensus-driven client “let’s work hand in hand”. We have to embed collaboration in every interaction – e.g. not coming to meetings with ready-made solutions, but with ideas to put on the table and a meeting format that enables discussion.
Let’s talk about being a third culture kid – TCK! How does the intersectionality of that and the experience of travelling around the world help you become a better communicator?
Shout out to my fellow TCKs and TCIs (third culture individuals)! For those unfamiliar with this, a TCK/TCI is someone who spends all or part of their childhood and adolescence in a culture that is different to their parents’ culture or the culture of their passport country. For instance, I was born in the US to Zimbabwean parents and spent my formative years moving between the US, Zimbabwe and the UK. Classic TCI.
Of course growing up like this has its disadvantages (imagine never feeling like you truly fit in), but one major advantage is that you get comfortable with discomfort. There’s no illusion that ‘everyone does things in this way’ and that they will understand your frame of reference, so you quickly learn to adjust to the environment you are in and how to engage with people in multiple ways. Ambiguity and contradictions are innate to how you live. In my opinion, this kind of flexibility is essential to being an effective communicator. And travel is a great means of honing one’s flexibility skills, since you get exposed to a whole host of new cultural experiences.
Nevertheless, of course every TCI’s experience is different, and being a TCI doesn’t necessarily make you a good communicator. However, I do believe it gives you a great foundation to become one.
“Get comfortable with discomfort. Try to adapt to situations and do as others do – and understand that doing so doesn’t necessarily mean losing your own values or changing who you are. On the contrary, it will allow you to better understand your own culture, and discover new things that can enrich your experiences.”
There’s research about language, social identity and intercultural communication. “One major contribution of the sociocultural perspective to the study of language, identity and intercultural communication is that it theorizes language as a tool for achieving social and psychological ends, and hence as a resource for managing everyday activities, including the negotiation of identities”. Being a communicator means that we have to understand the nuances of language. Part of the process of communication involves grappling with the acquisition of new verbal and nonverbal communication systems. What’s your take on that? How can we become better intercultural communicators?
I love that quote! Moving to Belgium (where English is widely spoken but not an official language) certainly made me aware of the intersection between language and identity. And the related power dynamics: as a native English speaker I’m often afforded a certain status by non-native speakers, and language in Belgium has historically been a source of discrimination and marginalisation. But even as a native English speaker, working multi-culturally has made me acquire a new communication system. English is the lingua franca of business, but only 27%* of English speakers count it as their first language. To be understood, I’ve had to tone down considerably on things like colloquialisms and idioms. No more murdering cups of tea or waiting for pigs to fly.
And though verbal communication – which language(s) you speak, how well you speak them – is important, in my experience non-verbal communication is arguably more so. For instance, soon after arriving I joined a dance class. Although at that point my language skills weren’t up to taking part in meaningful conversation, I joined my classmates in carrying out ‘la bise’ (giving a kiss on the cheek) at the start and end of each class. Doing what the others did helped me feel part of the group, and I felt acceptance from them in return.
How to become a better intercultural communicator? Listen, observe, and ask questions respectfully. Read books like The Culture Map by Erin Meyer to gain insights into different cultural values and behavioural styles. Get comfortable with discomfort. Try to adapt to situations and do as others do – and understand that doing so doesn’t necessarily mean losing your own values or changing who you are. On the contrary, it will allow you to better understand your own culture, and discover new things that can enrich your experiences.
*reference: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-english-and-where-is-it-spoken
Cultural difference is emotionally charged. We have to deal with a lot of stereotypes or have to let go of the idea of a fixed culture. If we have to respond to cross-cultural situations, what would be your advice?
Suspend judgement. As you observe, culture isn’t fixed – and for many things there’s no intrinsic ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of doing it. The emotion and (often) fierce protection comes from the fact that humans are generally ethnocentric: we judge the values and customs that we are familiar with to be right, moral, even superior to others. I think we’d do better to acknowledge that difference is just that: difference. And to ask questions to better understand contextual nuances and each other’s experiences.
Speaking of stereotypes and biases, at the moment, we are seeing a lot of straight white male leaders whom “we give far more latitude to a number of ways men show up and appear in the workplace”, meanwhile people from underrepresented groups, especially women and women of colour, have to look, sound, and act in certain ways to be “professional” and “respected” and it’s distressing. What’s your take on that? How can we create a culture, and I’m talking about workplace culture, where we can reduce biases and stereotypes?
I was talking about this exact thing with a friend recently! She described her male colleague’s behaviour – such as routinely coming to meetings late and unprepared – and it triggered a frank discussion about how different the consequences would be if we did the same thing. Instead of an eyeroll and slap on the wrist, we would likely be branded ‘unprofessional’ or ‘not up for the job’. In my experience, women and people from other underrepresented groups typically hold ourselves to a far higher standard because we know dismissive notions like ‘boys will be boys’ or ‘but he gets results!’ don’t apply for us. And it’s not some misguided belief: studies have actually shown women were considered up to six times more obscene than men when they used the same swear word.*
What Works by Iris Bohnet provides some interesting clues to answer your question about building a new workplace culture. The book looks specifically at gender diversity, but her key message about using design to change behaviour and influence outcomes resonates across the diversity spectrum. It’s been proven to work – and yield far better results than more conventional methods like trainings that aim to make participants aware of bias and prejudice. There’s no silver bullet when it comes to D&I; humans are complex and each organisation’s context and challenges are unique. But through trying new things, noting what works, and designing for the change we want to see, we can certainly move the needle.
*Reference: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210514-why-swearing-could-have-a-place-in-the-office
How do you see the future of intercultural training and competence?
To be blunt, I don’t see it going away any time soon. The fact that diversity exists and that harnessing it can be beneficial for businesses has been known for a long time, and today we’re finally seeing more urgency around addressing the issue. People want to see real change from the companies they work for and buy from, and won’t be fobbed off by a shiny marketing campaign or token diversity hire. Intercultural competence – and intercultural theory – can play a huge role in driving inclusion and equity.
In the future I’d like to see more nuanced ways of looking at culture come to the fore. There’s still a tendency to focus on visible diversity markers (gender, ethnicity, age) while leaving out ‘hidden’ aspects like cultural diversity. And at the moment I’m researching national culture dimensions to understand how relevant they are today and what we can use to replace/complement them. It would be great to see trainings like ‘how to work with Germans’ evolve into something that better reflects our multi-cultural, globalised reality.
If I go to Brussels and Belgium, can you recommend one place I should go to or one dish I have to try?
On a sunny day, nip to Parc d’Egmont – a hidden gem tucked in the centre of Brussels between Sablon and Avenue Louise. It’s the perfect spot to sit for hours buried in a book, and the restaurant there does a mean brunch on weekends.
If you want to venture out of the city, I strongly recommend visiting Fondation Folon in La Hulpe. Even if you aren’t an art lover, I don’t think you can help being moved by Jean-Michel Folon’s stunning watercolours and sculptures, including his famous illustrations for the UN’s 1988 edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a bonus, to get to the museum you have to wander through the Domaine Solvay, a great spot for walking and cycling on the edge of the Sonian forest.
