Based on Erin Meyer’s book “The Culture Map”. The Culture Map is a framework for handling intercultural differences in business. By understanding these differences, we can improve our ability to react to certain behaviors and collaborate.
At the time of writing (October 2022), we’ve got 16 different nationalities at Checkly, so cultural differences are pretty much unavoidable at this point.
<aside> 📚 You can use your learning & visiting budget to buy the book. It’s worth a read, even if you know the 8 dimensions of the Culture Map already!
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The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
(Check out her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”)
We introduced the Culture Map and its 8 dimensions one by one in our async bias and inclusion training. When introducing each dimension, the team members were asked to map out where they think Checkly’s culture is. This created initial awareness and prepared the team for the upcoming workshop.
At our company retreat, we hosted a cross-cultural collaboration workshop. We reintroduced the Culture Map and divided the team into cross-cultural and cross-functional groups of 4-5 people and gave each group 3-4 dimensions of the Culture Map. For each dimension, they were asked to mark:
After that we shared our findings in a group discussion.
After the retreat, we summarized all of this below:
❗The ideas, the explanations and also most of the examples come straight out of Erin Meyer’s book “The Culture Map”. We claim none of these as our own.
Blue diamond = where each group mapped Checkly’s current culture
Yellow star = where each group would like Checkly’s culture to be