Communication Self-Reflection

One of the perpetual questions, we as human beings, have been asking ourselves from the beginning of our history is “who we are?” With the help of IDI, which is a survey and report on individual’s cultural identity and core values, I start to understand more about my personal identity and core values. As the only child growing up in a traditional Chinese family, a student with more than 10 years education with English language and western culture, and a Fortune 500 employee with extensive international exposure, I once thought I could fit in any foreign culture smoothly and comfortably.

While thanks to the IDI report, I realized how much I need to improve. Every choice did help to forge my own identity. The growing up environment and education developed my core values. The international experience helped to shape my understanding on intercultural communications in the business environment. Also thanks to the IDI report, I started to remember the challenges I met when I was working in South Africa and studying in the United States. In this paper, I would like to discuss my previous experience and challenges during intercultural communications, reflect on my understanding of my own personal and cultural identity, and set my goals for development on intercultural communication knowledge and skills.

Reflections in South Africa

I would like to start with a story which happened in South Africa. John, a local accountant with ASA Metals (the company I worked for in South Africa, a subsidiary of a Chinese company with 1500 local employees and only 6 Chinese employees) received a €175 000 invoice for payment to another company. He soon got a call confirming the payment. Without double checking, John made the payment directly. Later on, we found out that the whole event was a business fraud. The Financial Controller (a Chinese employee) asked me to handle this problem. First I comforted John, because keeping up the morale and performance in Finance Department at difficult times would be more important than blaming someone for his negligence. Besides, as the only Chinese employee in the department, I need all seven local colleagues’ cooperation in the problem solving process. Winning the trust of local co-workers was crucial and I chose to be “one of them” instead of some arrogant supervisor. I think this move later helped me a lot during my problem-solving process.

This is an unforgettable experience, which I think signaled my acceptance with the local culture, and my understanding on universal rules in the business world. But I emphasized the similarities among the different cultures too much. At that time, I thought there would always be some universal rules in the business world, despite the cultural differences, and I was proved right in this case. I thought there should be no major problem with interaction between people whatsoever, since we all inherit