APPLICATION 5.4 Summer internship in Ecuador
IESE MBA student Shipa Patel, originally from India and raised in Europe, spent
her summer business internship in Mindo Ecuador working for a non-profit
ecological foundation. 11 As she tells her story, the very first day of her arrival in
Mindo,she realized she knew nothing about the organization, its workings, its
people and its context. She felt like a complete stranger and, at the same time did
not feel she had a lot of time to explore these issues. So she asked the managing
director of the foundation to introduce her to its members , about forty Ecuador-
ians. She thought it would be a good idea to convene a general meeting so that
she could explain her work plans and ask her new colleagues about the principal
challenges of their jobs.The general manager agreed and most members joined
the meeting. At the meeting , however, her first reaction was that her colleagues
were hiding things from her . They did not seem receptive to her questions;things
were not clearly stated; and nobody took a proactive stance. She found that she
had to do most of the talking , while the others basically nodded with sympathetic
Culture and communication protocol
faces.Under the pressure of time, what seemed to Shipa to be an efficient
approach to communication I was not actually working.
After the meeting, she kept wondering what had gone wrong. Almost by
chance,she began talking with members in the street, on her way to and from
work, and during evenings at the local coffee shop. It surprised her that people
were so forthcoming and vocal in their opinions , after their comparative silence in
the meeting . She soon realized that they felt much more comfortable communi-
cating one-to-one, in a non-forma II setting. Talking in front of a meeting audience
was a communicatio n style alien to most of the members.Then she realized that
she had put her colleagues in a very uncomfortable position by asking them to
voice their concerns in front of others . She also possibly intimidated them by
taking notes;this was just an efficient way of recording impressions and ideas, but
they felt threatened by this and were extremely reserved in the little they said.
So Shipa changed her tactics and found that one-on-one conversations out-
side the office were extremely informative and could eventually develop a basic
view of the organization and its problems.Yes,, it paid a price in terms of time
and work efficiency, but she finally got what she needed.Her only wish was that
she could have understood earlier that when people travel to places that work
differently, they may need to change their expectations of accomplishments in
order to get things going . They may lose some efficiency but they may still be
effective overall.
On reflection other cultural factors were at play in the first meeting, too People
often defaulted to the opinion of those higher up in the ranks, and nobody
actually argued against what other members contributed. In fact, the members
only attended the meeting in the first place because the manager asked them
to do so
Commenting on her experience . Shipa concluded:
This experience improved my understanding of different communication dynamics
and challenged my preconceptions about information gathering and sharing. It is
important to adapt to new contexts changing your own behavior as needed, even
eventually at the price of efficiency . Personal exchanges, in pairs or small groups, often
take a lot of time and patience on the part of the outsider, but it is an integral part of
integrating in a dosely-knit community. It is a normal part of the ritual of relationship-
building in some cultures, and an important precursor to effective communication that
will then eventually happen.
Think about it __
(1) In your view, what are the principal reasons why Shipa's Ecuadorian col-
leagues did not open up to her?
Expert Verified