1. Ask an employee (subordinates) from a different culture to teach you.

2. Ask fellow managers from a different culture to teach you.

3. Tap community resources, such as the Anti-Defamation League, Urban League, Korean Business Association, etc.

4. Read about different cultures.

5. Observe without judgment. Pay attention to how people of different cultures behave in groups. Pretend that you are an anthropologist who wants to know how to succeed in that culture socially.

 6. Share what you observe about other cultures for supportive feedback. You will learn about individual differences within groups and how much more objective you need to be to better understand the subtleties of cultural differences.

7. Conduct focus groups. You can organize groups of employees of the same culture to get information via discussion.

8. Conduct employee or customer surveys to collect culture-specific information.

9. Take risks in order to experiment. If you don’t know what to do with someone who is different, experiment rather than freeze. People are in general far more forgiving than we think. Trial and error learning may be difficult, but it does lead to learning.

10. Spend time in other cultures. Being a tourist for one or two weeks is insufficient. Immersing yourself in another culture may be as simple as turning to an international television channel or sitting in the park in Chinatown. Being a tourist is helpful if you take care to stay at a bed & breakfast in a village or stay with a host family. You can also ask a friend to take you home for an Italian celebration or Jewish New Year celebration.

Based on: Gardenswartz, Lee, and Anita Rowe. Managing Diversity: A Complete Desk Reference & Planning Guide (Alexandria, VA: Society For Human Resource Management, 2010).