So… ‘It is all about culture’!
The cliché that justifies our failures, stress, and miscommunications at work!
All social sciences dealing directly with human beings have adjusted their models to fit our ‘contexts’ when it comes to application. Yet, we can see some acquired values but not much when applying those ‘tailored’ systems and western models to our countries. This is simply because such imported models and systems do not touch the very deep roots of our culture; those concerned with the embedded values and beliefs created by inherited traditional and religious systems. Unfortunately, if we think about making our own models and systems, we must admit that we suck at developing or inventing our own ‘way’ of doing things and suck even more at motivating people to think outside the box!
Away from systemized and processed work, we tend to be poor at accepting and applying the very basic and globally accepted rules of work. Our respect to time is at its lowest; our productivity is far behind the average of human productivity, and instead of asking about loyalty, we might start to ask ourselves about how disloyal we are to our jobs and organizations! The attempts to change such basic values are far more challenging than we can imagine.
Sadly, given such ‘agreed’ characteristics of our culture at work might undermine our potential to develop or behave in accordance with the normal work standards. The biggest fear is to get blended into the fabric of such negative and unproductive values and then behave accordingly. When it comes to work, such cultural negativities have bad influences on our career progress as they break globally accepted norms. We must accept the reality not only that we live within this culture, but that we are as well part of it. I believe success is living the culture as it is but having a different approach in dealing with things.
Although such approach should be extremely different to adjust for our cultural fallacies, it should be adaptable to culture as well. The ability to let people believe we are within the culture even if our behaviors stem from different cultural values is the key to be accepted and happy. It seems that changing our culture at a Macro – level is far from reality. Yet, at a personal level, we should start thinking of ways to pick positive values and behaviors and neglect ‘a lot’ of the negative stuff. We should be adaptable to our culture yet not translating its negative work values into behaviors. We should not use our culture to justify our low performance or explain our faults. It might be the time to stop blaming our culture but blame ourselves for not being able to adapt to a blameable culture!
By: Sahim Kasht
Editor: Hadeer Salah Aldeen
Photography: Mahmoud Mansi