Soft Skills II: Leveraging Unrecognized Skills in a Multicultural Workplace
Details
Our workplaces are no longer composed of people who all share the same culture. In the past, managers focused on minimizing the challenges related to diversity – reducing cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstanding, and encouraging employees to collaborate across cultures. Now it’s time to move beyond that perspective and look at how to leverage cultural diversity as a strategic advantage. This is especially pivotal for organizations around Silicon Valley, where there is an especially high level of cultural diversity.
At this session, we will offer two concrete ways you can leverage the benefits of diversity in your organization:
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Draw on employees who are themselves bicultural (e.g. Indian-American, Russian-American) as people who are natural boundary-spanners.
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Map and make use of language skills in the workplace.
By the end of this session, you should have a clearer understanding of how to leverage these valuable aspects of often-overlooked human capital already existing in your organization. This session will be relevant, no matter your cultural background, language skills, or role in your organization.
Agenda:
12:00 p.m. - Mingle, network, and eat
12:30 p.m. - Presentation and workshop
Facilitators:
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Sheila M. Puffer
University Distinguished Professor
D'Amore-McKim School of Business
Northeastern University, Boston
Sheila M. Puffer is University Distinguished Professor at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, Boston, USA. She is also a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. In 2015 she was a visiting research professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University where she studied entrepreneurs and other professionals from the former Soviet Union and their contributions to the US innovation economy. Dr. Puffer has more than 150 publications, including 75 refereed articles and 11 books. She has been recognized as the #1 scholar internationally in business and management in Russia, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. She earned a degree from the executive management program at the Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy in Moscow, and holds BA (Slavic Studies) and MBA degrees from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Stacey R. Fitzsimmons
Assistant Professor of International Management
Peter B. Gustavson School of Business
University of Victoria, Canada
Stacey R. Fitzsimmons (Ph.D. SFU Beedie School of Business, Canada) joined University of Victoria's Gustavson School of Business (Canada) in 2014, after three years as an Assistant Professor at Western Michigan University (USA). Her research objective is to improve the way people work with others across cultures. She does this by examining how bicultural and multicultural employees contribute to global teams and organizations. Stacey's research has been published in Academy of Management Review, Human Resource Management Review, Organization Studies, and Organizational Dynamics. She won the 2013 International Human Resources Scholarly Research award from the Academy of Management, for publishing the most significant scholarly contribution to international human resources management that year.
Soft Skills II: Leveraging Unrecognized Skills in a Multicultural Workplace