Navigating Cultural Differences w/Katja Schleicher

Join Jennifer Arvin Furlong and Katja Schleicher as they explore the challenges of intercultural communication and the significance of effective communication within diverse teams. They discuss the importance of recognizing cultural differences, the desire to be understood, and practical strategies to improve communication across cultures. Discover how self-awareness and adapting communication styles can foster collaboration and reduce misunderstandings. Tune in to gain valuable insights on navigating the complexities of communication in a multicultural workplace.

Contact Katja at https://www.katjaschleicher.com/

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Transcript

[00:00] Jen: I could have talked for another hour. Well, at least another hour with Katja. She is an amazing storyteller, and I just really enjoyed having a conversation with her about cultural misunderstandings and how we might build bridges when the cultural divide seems so large. If you've ever found yourself wondering, why doesn't anybody understand me? And you've been wanting to know what to do about it, I am so glad you're here. Let's get to it. Welcome to the Communication 24/7 podcast, where we communicate about how we communicate. I'm your host, Jennifer Furlong.

[01:00] Jen: Today I have a communication expert. This is someone who really knows what she is talking about in the communication realm. I'm so excited to have this conversation with her. Known for her provocative style and she has a lot of fun with her audiences. She's really good on stage. She's not afraid to look deep into our communication issues, and our challenges, and she's not afraid to talk about them, which is another reason why I'm so excited to have her on the show. She has studied German and English language and literature, linguistics, and psychology. She's pursued an international career in PR and advertising and corporate communications. She speaks three languages. You all. So she does a lot of traveling and she can actually communicate wherever she travels. So that's a really nice thing to be able to do. She's got a couple of passports she's located in the Netherlands. So it's a little late for her while we're doing this interview, but I have no doubt that we're still going to have a lot of fun. Katja Schleicher, thank you so much for being on the show. I am so happy that you're here to talk about all things communication, but mostly intercultural communication. How are you doing?

[02:19] Katja: I'm very well. Hi, Jennifer. And the good thing is, for me, it's a midnight show, basically. And for you in Savannah, where they actually were doing midnight in the garden of good and evil. So that can be a coincidence, right?

[02:37] Jen: No coincidences, right? So I gave a really quick intro, nowhere near enough time to be able to talk about your background and all of the experiences that you've had in the communication realm over the past, what, 1020 years? How long have you been in the communication field doing this thing as a speaker and as an executive coach?

[03:06] Katja: That part is not that long. But in the communication business, if you would ask my mother, she probably would say two days. And then you started that. And I always call it I found an early calling because I cannot remember a time when I was absolutely convinced that communication is the only way to save the world. I thought like, okay, why do these people not talk to each other? It is not that complicated. Now, I learned later on that obviously there's a huge group of people who consider exactly that one. I didn't seem to have any problem with it, they consider that a problem. So indeed I turned it into a business under my own label in 2006. But before that, I've been in the business since oh God. Before the internet. Which was a huge step in communication. Which really huge.

[04:19] Jen: Oh, big time. I mean I feel like I sound like one of those old farts, right? Sometimes I talk to some of my communication students in college and I'm like back in my day, before we weren't able to Google stuff, we had to go to the library and do our research.

[04:38] Katja: The good thing is that when you know both, you even are more appreciative and you know the young generation is learning all the emojis and this subtle use of emojis is a very fun thing to do. So I think the richness of what we had, what we have, and what we're probably going to have with anything chat, GPT alike, we will see what comes from that. So communication has always been on the tip top of this golf. Whatever happened, we needed to talk about and this gives us a wonderful opportunity, don't you think?

[05:29] Jen: Yeah, absolutely. It's actually a lot of fun to see how technology has helped communication along, but it also presented some challenges at the same time. So it definitely is a skill, it's a separate skill that we're having to learn. You travel all over the place talking to all kinds of different audiences about communication skills. What have you noticed to be some of the most difficult communication challenges across cultural boundaries when it comes to using technology?

[06:03] Katja: Technologically little there is people want with technology. Some others are less. The bigger challenge to me is that I definitely think we live in our own bubbles. Oh yeah, the bubbles are perfect more or less. Because of that, we have so much trouble getting into someone else's bubble. The best thing that could happen to us in communication is that the bubbles are mixing and matching and to me, that seems to be the hardest part because we worked on our bubble so hard and everybody's bubble is perfect. That makes it so complicated. So why do I need to change? Why do I have to listen to you? Why do I have to follow your lead? And if you would start there are differences in hierarchies, there are differences in the tightness, in looseness of communication in indirectness, and all the intercultural aspects and clusters we can talk about. But this to me seems the most important one.

[07:37] Jen: I find it fascinating in intercultural communication, a lot of times we'll think in terms of international conversations, crossing the borders, and how challenging that can be to have a conversation with someone who comes from a culture that is just so vast, or at least we're perceiving it to be so vastly different from our own. But I think it's also important to note that even when we come from the same country as I know here in the United States, we're so huge. I mean, if you go to the West Coast versus the East Coast, or go to the North versus the South, so many different cultures are even within the same system, within the same United States. So it's not just about crossing intercultural boundaries, but even the person right next door. There's a good chance that there's going to be some type of cultural difference, that we'll have to learn how to navigate and communicate with them faster.

[08:43] Katja: Look, in one company, why the administration department is probably completely different from the marketing department? Very often I see that the marketing person from one country can get along with the marketing person from another country way better than the purchasing manager from one company with the marketing department from the same company. Because the cultural clusters, even in the same company, even if you say, okay, we are selling the same product, we are offering the same services, even then, the clusters are different.

[09:28] Jen: What are some of the common questions that you're asked from them in terms of how to improve their communication across different cultures? Do you see any common themes that tend to pop up?

[09:44] Katja: Now, as we all as human beings, we want to avoid pain.

[09:49] Jen: Yeah.

[09:50] Katja: We want to avoid being rejected. And we want to achieve belonging somewhere, to a group or whatever. And in between that, all the questions range. Why aren't they understanding what I'm meaning? Why am I always misunderstood? How can I improve that they understand me more easily, faster, friction-less, or friction-free? So this is the range. We want to be less misunderstood, we want to be more understood, and we want to be received with our messages in a way that the audience we talk to can intentionally do what we are planning. In the end, it is the same in intercultural communication as it is with every communication. We say something and somehow we want that the people we talk to, we speak with, we have a conversation with, that they are doing what we are intending them to do. Yes. And along the way, all the questions ramp up in intercultural contexts in different companies, or take a merger, take a company, take over, right? A company takes over another one, or there's a bio or whatever, and there even within the same culture or the same region, these questions pop up.

[11:39] Jen: That's a challenge. I agree. I think that's a challenge across the board. One of the things that I do as a media analyst is read and rate the news for reliability and bias, and I get to have conversations with other analysts from across the political spectrum. And if we disagree on how we're seeing a certain news story, sometimes we end up having a pretty robust conversation because of that. And sometimes no one is necessarily wrong. It's a different understanding of what it is that we're talking about within an organization, especially if you have organizations that have a multicultural staff, managers can have a big challenge in trying to get that staff to turn from a group to a team. Do you have certain tools or things that you have them put into practice to try to get a group to be able to turn into a team, to be able to communicate more effectively in that way, so that what they say is understood in the way they meant it to be understood?

[12:56] Katja: Now mostly communication, as you know, is not rocket science. But the thing about communication is you need to put it into practice relentlessly. It's like, really, the practitioner part is more important than the theory behind it. One thing that I found very helpful and has been working with many of my teams I worked with, is that you start like, in an orchestra or like in a choir, you collect more voices, what instruments you have, and you kind of assess what is there. And then after the assessment, you cluster. I say like, okay, oh yeah, you're this kind of instrument, and you're that kind of instrument. And then you start finding out what kind of tune, what kind of music that particular group would record, would produce without any connection to any biases or company. Important things just let them find out their own tune. It takes time. It's not a very fast exercise, actually, because sometimes, like an acquirer, you have to adapt to other voices. You have to listen to your own voice, which is not an easy thing. And afterward, then you can connect to the other clusters, to the other orchestras in your company or in other countries. And this part gives you much more self-confidence as a team because then it feels like you have something to offer. Hey, this is our music. Can you tune in to our music? And all of a sudden there is a conversation going on. I think this is a very helpful exercise that you learn to assess what you have in-house, how the tunes are, and how you play with each other to turn it into a team. Because then you learn that every voice is different, and then you start getting less judgmental, which we are by nature. We think, okay, this is good, this is bad, this is wet, this is blue. And we put a label on it. And that is very often not helping general progress. Let me put it like that.

[15:44] Jen: Inadequate communication skills can be costly in terms of relationships, reputation, and revenue. From staff to the C suite. All employees deserve quality training that will help them be successful. If your company is looking to improve employee morale and relationships, contact Communication Twenty Four seven today by visiting www dot Communication 24/7.com for a free 30-minute consultation. Communication 24/7 provides tailored training programs that help organizations create positive and productive work environments. Also, check out the Communication 24/7 podcast available wherever you listen to podcasts.

[16:22] Jen: I love the analogy, and I could see myself taking something like that and running with it, like, okay, you're a team. Pick your instrument, are you? And, okay, oh, you must be a trumpet. And you over here, you're the flute. Because of matching personalities and just I imagine you could have a lot of.

[16:48] Katja: Fun with that type of yeah, you do. As a group, we look for our place. We look for belonging. Oh, where am I in this group? How is my voice heard? How do I make myself understood? I always call that a finding exercise. First and foremost, it helps yourself, and that is important for communication, I think, more than anything else, it needs to start with yourself. If you only have an orientation towards somebody else and never listen to your own voice, you'll always have trouble expressing yourself. In my experience.

[17:43] Jen: Yeah. And those going with the same analogy, are the ones that I would call tone-deaf. Right?

[17:53] Katja: This is a good one. Yeah, I'm going to steal that. You're tone-deaf. Yeah.

[18:00] Jen: So you got to be able to peel back that layer, find it, find your voice.

[18:06] Katja: Sometimes it's even a tone. I'm already happy when people say, oh, I don't know, voice, but maybe I have a beep. Yeah, let's start with the beep. That's very often very helpful.

[18:17] Jen: Hey, there you go. You're a cowbell. Let's start with a cowbell. I love it. What a great way to start a conversation with a group, though, to get them thinking in just a different way on how to harmonize. And if there is some discordance, let's identify what's causing the discordance.

[18:39] Katja: Imagine only one instrument in a group. Yeah, I had a group half a year back, six months or something, and they were really struggling. They were put together from two teams. Right. And directions were not really clear, so everybody tried to find their place, and I did exactly that analysis, and there was one particular thing they were struggling with. They had a feeling as a team that they were not hurt by the board and by other teams. Okay, now, I took that in this first assessment exercise. It turned out there weren't any trumpets. There was nobody who could really blow the wall. No one. There were all violins and flutes. And after assessing the group, we were working on that in the sense of, okay, how can we blow the horn in this group here? A little bit more? Oh, yeah, we are missing that. Sometimes you simply don't know if you don't look right.

[20:02] Jen: Yeah, absolutely. I was working with a group one time. It's an international company, and they're based in Finland, and there was a gentleman who was hired, and he was from Latin America, so completely different cultures. And so I'm thinking about the analogy of the band or the orchestra and this poor guy, he told me he went over to Finland. He had to go over there and get training for a couple of months, and within a week, he was reported to HR. Just immediately reported to HR. And I asked, well, what did you do? Why did they report you? He said, Every morning I would go into the office and I would make sure that I said hi to every single person. I would ask them about how their morning was going, and how their evening went. He's wanting to, in Finland, create yeah, he's wanting Finland, have a meaningful conversation, create a relationship. And at the end of the day, what he was doing is he was pissing everybody off because they said he was bothering them because they were trying to work.

[21:17] Katja: A yes and a no is already a whole novel in Finland.

[21:21] Jen: Right.

[21:26] Katja: Time for him.

[21:27] Jen: Yeah. So the poor guy ended up in HR because he just and that was a perfect example. When he shared that with the group, I was like, oh, wow, this is such a perfect example of really needing to take a step back and understanding where we are and what the expectations are, and how that could have a negative impact on the workplace. Yeah. But I tell you what, the managers who came over from Finland, they just weren't having it quit bothering me. So I would imagine them as, like, the percussionists. They're just like, convenient. That was it. I just never in my life heard something like, to that extent where someone was reported.

[22:20] Katja: These are two extremes. I mean, these are really probably the two most extreme cultural differences in terms of nature. This is what you see. Culture is what we do when no one is looking right.

[22:37] Jen: Right.

[22:38] Katja: In Latin America, this is indeed probably fundamentally different from the way you start the day in Finland.

[22:45] Jen: Yeah. Don't bother me with your 20 questions about my personal life. I know some challenges will also occur in the workplace between men and women. That's something else that you talk about, and in some way, it's connected to culture. We all grow up in different ways and understand what our different roles and responsibilities are within different cultures. Do you ever have an opportunity where that ends up being the heavy focus of a session when you're working with a team and you're finding out, okay, I think I'm pinpointing some issues that are happening here. It's happened recently to me. So I was curious about your take on that within the workplace. Do you see that being an issue coming up often?

[23:48] Katja: Let me split a couple of things here. To answer your question. Yes, it happens frequently. Absolutely. So the good thing is that's hardly ever the problem. That's a good thing because masculine and feminine communication actually has nothing to do with men or women. We are brought up with both feminine patterns and with masculine patterns. Yes, we could give them different names, but psychology gave them that. For instance, the circularity of asking a question is said to be more of a feminine trade, and being more straight to the point is said to be more masculine. One of the two patterns making make us more successful in our upbringing. And statistically, it is very often the case that the feminine communication pattern makes girls, and young women more successful. Again, statistically, yes, not necessarily the case, right. But again here assessing what is my pattern and do I have only this one pattern. Is it my predominant pattern that is the only one that I'm using? Or am I able to switch? Because I think that cultural problems could be solved easily when we are assessing a situation and start from there. Of course, there are situations that require and everybody will understand at the moment, I'm giving you an example, that requires a feminine communication pattern. Let's assume you go into brainstorming with your team and you go into that brainstorming, you say like guys, immediately, ten ideas, everybody. Now, of course, this is well, a very masculine trait, but it's killing the brainstorming, right? No, brainstorming works like that. So brainstorming is a situation in business that requires a much more feminine approach. What could be the first thing that comes to mind? So, circular movement. Now imagine the opposite just to make it very illustrative. Imagine there's a car accident, right? And you're coming to that car accident and you are providing first aid and you are organizing everything at this spot where this accident happened. Now imagine yourself being the person asking the people surrounding you, sorry, could I borrow your telephone? Yes, or thank you very much. Could we possibly call 911? Yes. Thank you. The person would be dead, right? So here it needs a masculine approach saying okay, you call 911, you do this, you do that, and the rest of you shut up. Very simple, because urgency and timing seem to require a more masculine pattern. So it's a very simple example. But imagine you only can do one of the two, right? In good leadership, in good means here, successful impactful empathic. You need to be able to pull out the respective pattern according to the situation. And that means you have to assess the situation before that.

[28:00] Jen: That's right. And like what you were saying before, being able to just kind of like look within and understand what patterns do I tend to fall back on?

[28:11] Katja: Yeah, exactly. Because we are lazy. We fall back on what made us successful but it's not necessarily what will keep us afloat.

[28:26] Jen: Yeah, it's like you are really great at your job, congratulations, you got a promotion. Now you're in charge of all these people and all of the skills that you had before are worthless.

[28:39] Katja: What got you there won't keep you there. It's one of the important things. And the more you skilled in adapting your communication to the situation, to your audience, and to the greater good, the better it is.

[28:57] Jen: And I really appreciate something you said earlier to that effect regarding communication. You really do have to work at it. It's not something this is not going to happen overnight. It's not like, oh, I understand this now, I need to adapt and then you're just going to get it right. That's not how it works.

[29:18] Katja: I'm working with a company right now on getting their feedback processes, I'm not saying getting them in order, it's more like streamlining them and adapting them to what the team needs and what the team wants. And during that work with them, it was exactly what we experienced that people said, okay, now we have a process. Now we can follow the process. And nothing happened. Of course not, because this dripping every day a drop. Every day a drop and another drop. And probably there is a day when you think, oh wow, that was quite a successful conversation I had today. Maybe there is another day where I think, oh my God, all my conversations went totally, but really totally past shaped today. Nothing went right. That's a good sign if you're already realizing that it didn't work out and then you go in the next day and try again. So this is a good thing about communication that you can learn so much by just practicing it every day and yeah, the mistakes you make are building the throne you can sit on later on.

[30:40] Jen: That's right. This is a long game that you have to go that's not no.

[30:52] Katja: I think it's beautiful because it requires little to be successful. The only thing you have to do.

[30:59] Jen: Is to do it and to focus on yourself more than everybody else. If you go through life expecting everyone else to adapt to who you are and your communication style, you're going to be a miserable person for the rest of your life. But if you can just take one thing as you said earlier, assess it, take a step back, and assess what went wrong today. If I could do this all over again, what's one thing I could change? And that may have a huge impact.

[31:29] Katja: On the situation and feeds on what went well. Same thing. Oh, unexpectedly. I did weight in this question or in this presentation, whatever. And don't chew too much. This is something I really see very often that people think, oh come on, I can take on this big chunk. So small, small baby steps every day a tiny little bit.

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Yeah. What do you say to someone? Because I'm sure you probably have heard this. I've heard this. Well, I can't just change who I am. This is who I am. This is how I talk. This is who I am. I can't change it. I'm not going to change it. How do you approach someone like that? Because I don't think we're asking anyone to change who they are.

[33:12] Katja: Indeed. Exactly. The perspective is incorrect. Right. What you then work on, and this is mostly a one-on-one session, this is mostly a coaching project you do you're changing the circumstances where the person wants to change.

[33:35] Jen: Yeah. I really do think you have to understand the power that exists behind being an effective communicator. It is so incredibly empowering to know that you can do just the tiniest little thing that you can do if you know that you're doing it. And it's going to have a huge positive impact. I have a confession to make. I'm not a very empathetic person. I'm not very empathic. Empathy, as far as my personality is out of everything that exists is really low in the scale of all of the strengths that I have. I mean, it really is. I've got this harder shell. It's kind of difficult and it's actually a joke amongst a lot of my friends and family. But someone challenged me the other day and she said, no, I think you are very empathic. You come across as very empathic when we have conversations and when we're working with people and together. And I said, what I have learned, this is the communication part of it, is I've learned how to switch up my listening style depending on what's needed. And so people perceive me as being empathic when I'm just shutting up, when I know that they need someone who's just there to give that empathic listening, just to be there, let it rip. If you just want to complain, you complain. I'm not going to try to solve it for you. I'm not going to give you any suggestions.

[35:09] Katja: Exactly. Just listening.

[35:11] Jen: Yeah, it's listening. So there's the perception, though, that I can put myself in your shoes and that I'm going to feel what you're feeling. But really at the end of the day, I'm not really going through that part of it. I can feel bad for something and I can feel bad that you're going through something bad, but I don't internalize it to the point that a lot of other people that I know tend to.

[35:41] Katja: It's not even necessary. Yeah, it's not necessary. Yeah, you can something and there will be a lot of things where you are feeling something this is not a necessity to be an impactful communicator, not to that extent, but to listen carefully, just to be able to rephrase what someone else said and to get it to an essence. Now, this is something that is indeed key to conversational success.

[36:18] Jen: And I mean, there have been times sometimes I do just want to say something and I think, this is not the time, it's not the place, and it's not going to get anywhere.

[36:30] Katja: Actually. In communication, the best or one of the most important parts and one of the hardest lessons in silence. Silence just letting the system do its work. Sometimes things unravel themselves. People show themselves who they are without our doings, without our words. Although it sounds contradictory, this is one of the important things, is observing and being silent with all the words we use. My grandmother always and I was a cheeky girl all the time and I was talking all the time. And then my grandmother said to me, you know what? There's a reason why you have two ears and two eyes and only one mouth. But cheating me answered my grandmother, yeah, I know, but can you imagine with all the things I'm saying how much I hear and see? No, silence is an important part of it because again, too much pressure creates an anti-pressure. And sometimes it really helps just to take the pressure off and let someone else ventilate and tell what needs to be told without indeed what you said, right, I can't solve it. It doesn't change this situation. So let the person ventilate. Sometimes it's the best thing and very often that's a fun part. I love that someone else is talking and you listen and talk and you listen again and you're still listening and the person is talking and renting and talking and renting and all of a sudden the person says something like, why we could do this or that okay, solution present themselves. Right. Most of the time everything is in us and it just needed a little bit of air and ventilation and all of a sudden the solution finds its way to the daylight.

[39:03] Jen: Yeah, that is such a difficult skill, I think, for so many to develop, to be able to just kind of sit back, have patience and let it unfold. Because I think we've been conditioned. Let's get this done now. We want to get this done now. We're going to solve this now. We're going to move forward with all of these things. And not everything needs to move at the speed of the Internet.

[39:28] Katja: No, especially grass doesn't grow if you pull it, right?

[39:33] Jen: That's right. So incredibly true. So when you travel to all of these different places, what do you do to prepare for these different areas that you go into? You kind of go into the unknown. Do you do anything to help prepare you to make sure you can make sure that if you're? Going into a different culture or just a different scenario, a different organization. Do you have anything set in place that you're like, okay, these are the steps that I do, or these are the things that I make sure that I do in order to set the right tone or in order to make sure that we're starting off in the right place. When having these conversations.

[40:24] Katja: It's setting your radio antennas right. I really like that. And all of a sudden, here's reception. So that's all it is. You recalibrate your own system. When I'm on a plane or on a train, then I'm saying, okay, where are we going? What are we having? And then I try to I always call it to make myself as translucent as possible so that I can get as much light into myself as possible and as many impressions as possible. And what else happens when I get a chance is shadowing. So for sometimes an hour, sometimes longer, just to walk, that the person I'm working with. Accompany a day, accompany a couple of meetings or projects. That is extremely helpful, these two things.

[41:33] Jen: It sounds like that would be pretty helpful just for individuals within an organization to be able to do that, to shadow each other, maybe even across departments. Like you were saying earlier, those are different cultures, right? Different departments. Maybe if you shadow each other, you can kind of get a different perspective or expand your understanding of how it is.

[41:54] Katja: The headline would be one day in Accountancy. My nightmare would be not my nightmare, but I can get right. This is helpful. This is helpful to learn different tunes.

[42:08] Jen: Yeah. And then they can be like, so that's why you are the way you are.

[42:11] Katja: Are, but it's why you treat this particular aspect. Very often we have to differentiate between who we are and what we do and how we do it. Very often we get to know people outside their office hours, and all of a sudden it looks like, oh, this is a completely different person, but my work is just a part of what I am and how I am.

[42:41] Jen: Yeah. It's like, I had no idea you were a pilot. Exactly. It's amazing what you can find in those conversations. What is the most difficult challenge that you have encountered going into these organizations and going into different areas of the world? Have you just personally experienced anything so challenging that it kind of changed your perception of things or changed how you move forward in creating the relationships that you create as you meet new people?

[43:28] Katja: Maybe it's not the most it wasn't a traumatic experience or anything, but what I really see again and again and again is individuals leave companies don't leave companies. They leave their bosses. And this is something where I think we should be much better. We should be much further in the meantime. And reasons for that is mostly individual reasons. I don't have a voice, nobody listens. I've been ignored. Human stuff.

[44:18] Jen: Yeah.

[44:20] Katja: Most trouble is not because a system doesn't work, but because people do not relate to each other. And that, to me, gets companies in trouble.

[44:37] Jen: Right? Yeah.

[44:39] Katja: To me, if you would work on that much more focused, we would have so much better results. Yeah.

[44:49] Jen: Who doesn't want to feel acknowledged, right?

[44:51] Katja: Yeah, exactly.

[44:53] Jen: Who doesn't want to feel like they have a place?

[44:55] Katja: I have a place, and I have a good place, and I have experience and all that. And very often this is too little heard and too little seen.

[45:06] Jen: Yeah.

[45:07] Katja: And communicated.

[45:08] Jen: I think what a lot of organizations don't realize, too, when people who are communication experts come in to help, this is in some ways the fun stuff, too. Like, you get to realize the connections that you can have with those within the organization, and that's fun. That's the cool stuff. When you get to see each other as human beings and you start having these conversations you otherwise never would have had, developing these relationships. And sometimes you got to get through the hard stuff to get to the good stuff that's on the other side, the conflict and all of that.

[45:46] Katja: Although most of the conflicts could be resolved way earlier.

[45:51] Jen: Yeah.

[45:53] Katja: If he would give everybody a certain visibility, audibility A voice, and many, many conflicts in a company wouldn't even occur.

[46:04] Jen: So what can the boss do to ensure that their employees are heard?

[46:10] Katja: Find two things. Go. And that's maybe interesting. We always talk about finding commonalities, which is a good thing. And I like commonalities. But much more fun, much more thrill if you want, is what happens at the borders. So one of my favorite exercises in team building, or a boss with teams you decide is to walk the border so that you talk to each other in a way like, okay, what are our biggest differences? When are you totally different? And why I think this is so much more thrilling than the rest is. Exactly. Because that is the reason. Because we go on holiday.

[47:03] Jen: Yeah.

[47:05] Katja: We don't go on holiday to experience the same thing as we did at home.

[47:10] Jen: That's so true.

[47:11] Katja: Now we want to do the difference. Now we want to eat different things. We want to see different things. Oh, they have different means of transport here. Oh, my God. What is it? Go there. Because everything is different and everything is kind of new and it's kind of prickling our brains. This is what's cool. And if we start in this team building exercise again, don't forget the commonalities, but walk the border and experience your next-door neighbor, your colleague, as you would go on vacation. In a sense of, wow, everything is what is the biggest difference? And then talk about geese. Not in the sense of conflict. Contrast. The contrast is good. Black and white makes better photos, right?

[48:06] Jen: Yeah.

[48:06] Katja: And after that, after that first exercise, you go into another commonality exercise. And by doing that, in doing that, I think everyone in a leadership position learns and experiences so much about that team that actually cannot go wrong.

[48:27] Jen: What a fantastic thing to do as well. I could see that could be a lot of fun.

[48:32] Katja: Yeah, it is.

[48:34] Jen: Really? Turn that into something fun. So conflict doesn't have to be negative.

[48:41] Katja: If you take it as contrast, conflict. But confession is good. Conflict is trauma.

[48:48] Jen: Well, thank you so much for all of this wonderful information. You are just a wealth of good ideas. I think any organization that has you come and work with them for any type of communication, whether it's intercultural communication, or interpersonal communication, I could see you doing a lot of good out there and I think we just need so much more of that. Final thought you would like to give to the audience before we sign off?

[49:16] Katja: I would say that is what the audience should ask themselves. Why didn't I, as a leader in my position, why didn't I do more of this when they listen to the podcast? Because very often what we experience, that communication seems so easy. So it isn't taken very seriously in comparison to a new CRM system or whatever, but it should be. So everybody listening to that, go back to your teams and ask them what they would like to do to make their conversations more lively.

[49:57] Jen: Wonderful. Yeah, that's a great way to start it. Thank you so much again for being on the show and helping us understand communication just slightly better. Again, we're in it for the long haul. One little bit at a time. Don't try to chew too much at one time. So how do we get in touch with you? How does the audience find you?

[50:21] Katja: Very simple. I'm very big on LinkedIn and there is only little number of people with my name. Kanye is easy. So, of course, the internet, we already talked about that. The good old Internet helps a lot. So you find me on Katyashlaija.com and you find me on Twitter. Yeah. Coaching on Twitter. It's pretty easy to find.

[50:45] Jen: We'll find you out there in the Twitterverse.

[50:48] Katja: Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. What a profitable hour.

[50:52] Jen: Yeah, absolutely. All right, everyone. Hope you have a great rest of your day and put this to practice. We'll see you soon. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and a review.