Multicultural Teams

00:00
Paul Federwitz
I actually think what was important during that time was sitting down with people in their house and having a meal. That’s where the trust was built. That’s where the relationship was built. And that right there was all about identification. And that radically changed how I was able to work with them. 

00:25
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. I’m Rich Redowski. 

00:30
Emily Wilson
And I’m Emily Wilson. And we don’t want you to miss an episode of essentially translatable because each, you know, every other week, each episode is going to have new content. Pretty awesome guests. And how would they find out about how to get notified? Rich? 

00:48
Rich Rudowske
Well, Emily, they’re going to go to lbT.org slash podcast, where you can find every episode we’ve ever released. Or if you want to up your game, you already are a podcast listener, so you’re going to go to whatever podcast platform you already use, search on essentially translatable or LBT podcast, and you’re going to find us and subscribe. That’s going to notify you every time it comes out. Also, if you really want, like, to up your game to a level expert, tell us on Facebook or Instagram, follow essentially translatable and get all the behind the scenes things. And every time an episode drops, you’ll be notified there as well. So that’s the good stuff right there. 

01:30
Emily Wilson
I was going to say, if you really love us, you just cannot get enough essentially translatable. 

01:35
Emily Wilson
You can be a walking billboard for us as well. 

01:38
Rich Rudowske
Right? 

01:38
Emily Wilson
You can go to go lbt.org merch, and you’re going to find Lutheran Bible translators merch just across the board, but there’s also essentially translatable there. 

01:52
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And that hot new et pod hashtag one as well. A couple different options for essentially translatable wear. So you can look like Emily and wear your et pod wear. 

02:04
Emily Wilson
Be like Emily. 

02:05
Rich Rudowske
Be like Emily. 

02:06
Emily Wilson
That is the only time you will. 

02:07
Emily Wilson
Ever say that, ever. 

02:09
Emily Wilson
So for today’s episode, we got a chance to talk with Paul Federowitz, longtime missionary to Lutheran Bible translators. And you would have heard David Federowitz, his brother, a couple weeks ago. And we got a chance to talk with Paul about leadership interculturally and what that looks like within his context, but in the broader context of Bible translation ministry. 

02:35
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. Paul is the assistant director of program ministries and chief information officer at Lutheran Bible translators. He has the master’s in organizational leadership from Concordia University in Irvine. And his thesis topic was the topic that we talked about on our podcast today. We hope you enjoy this intercultural leadership lesson with our very own Paul Federwitz. Okay, we are glad to welcome to the podcast today. Paul Federwitz, great to have you with us. 

03:03
Paul Federwitz
It’s good to be here. Thanks. 

03:05
Emily Wilson
Welcome to the podcast, Paul. 

03:07
Emily Wilson
And we want our listeners to get to know you a little bit better because although you have been with the organization since birth, in a way, since birth. Since birth. Can you share a little bit about your context? What led you to serve with Lutheran Bible translators? 

03:24
Paul Federwitz
My parents were missionaries with Lutheran Bible translators. And so I was born and raised in Liberia. And so during that time not only loved growing up in Africa, but also my parents were really good about involving us in their ministry. And so we got to see firsthand the effect of Bible translation. And so know, even going back to the US and going to college, I always knew that I wanted to go back to Africa and be involved in this ministry maybe just a little bit different way. And so I got into it and now I’m in Ghana. We’ve been here for 15 years and my role has been it focused actually for probably about 30 years now. I’ve worked in it in different ways, so have continued to do that now in Ghana. 

04:10
Paul Federwitz
My role is changing again this year as we’ll be leaving Ghana and moving to Ethiopia and kind of stepping out of it and into some other areas. So just kind of a little bit of change over the years, I guess. 

04:23
Emily Wilson
So you’ll be listening to your wife’s podcast on transitions, is what you’re saying? 

04:27
Paul Federwitz
Oh, very much so. That is, the resources from her podcast are up on our walls right now. 

04:33
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I imagine so. Well, last fall you gave a presentation to other Bible translation colleagues at the bi annual Bible Translation conference, and that presentation was called principles in managing multicultural teams. So what led you to research this topic? 

04:49
Paul Federwitz
I’ve been working on a master’s degree in organizational leadership from Concordia University in Irvine. And during that time I had read so many great leadership books, but I was doing that master’s degree remotely. So I was connecting into classes, working with other students that were based in the US but living in Ghana. And so the principles were so interesting to me, but I would continually look at what am I reading as I’m sitting there on my veranda here in Ghana and thinking, how does that apply in this situation? Are these just principles for american leadership? Are they universal? And how do they apply in my local context? 

05:32
Paul Federwitz
And so dealing with that the whole time, when it came time at the end of the coursework to write a paper on whatever I wanted to, I decided to jump into that topic and figure out more because I had so much interest in it. And having lived cross culturally my entire life, there’s multiple cultures happening inside my household and possibly inside my own brain. And so trying to grapple with some of these things at times was really interesting to me. And so as I worked through that, being able to present that to others, my research and just my own, I’d say, wrestling with the topic. 

06:07
Rich Rudowske
Cool. 

06:08
Emily Wilson
So I am not actually Bible translation, professionally oriented. I get to hang out with a lot of you guys, but I watched the presentation as well. I had that blessing. To more recently watch your presentation, and you really broke down some principles on trust and conflict and accountability. So you said that there were more, but why is it that you chose these three? 

06:37
Paul Federwitz
Early on in my program, I read Patrick Lincilmi’s five dysfunctions of a team, and he talks about five areas that a team really needs. Trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and then results. And I found that I kept coming back to those five things throughout my research, throughout my classes, I kept coming back to those topics. And so when it came time to write a paper, I couldn’t do all of them. And so those three really kind of stuck out to me, trust, because I found that there were so many aspects of it that I really had no idea about. I always thought it was a really simple, kind of connected with integrity, but really simple definition. And as I dug into it, realized there’s so much more here. Getting into conflict, that’s just one of those where it just feels wrong. 

07:26
Paul Federwitz
Like if you talk about conflict, it sounds like something bad is happening, but also realizing that the best teams that I’ve ever worked on are those that engage in healthy conflict. And so how do we do that? Well, accountability was kind of a surprise to me because I think we often see accountability as a discussion you have when something’s not working. But as I dug into it and realized, accountability is really more about making sure that everybody knows what’s the goal, what’s expected of you to reach that goal, and how are we doing with that and realizing that I think that people actually crave accountability when it’s done well. And so that topic, it surprised me so much. And so I just wanted to dig into that a little bit more. 

08:16
Emily Wilson
So I was going to say Lindsioni was really writing from a monocultural perspective when he had that framework in his book. But you’re picking on it for a multicultural team framework. So why is that so significant to be able to look at those three. 

08:34
Paul Federwitz
Principles because they’re going to look so different from a different culture. Trust is we’re going to come at it from a different perspective. American culture is going to look at trust much more from a cognitive perspective, whereas other cultures might look at it more from a relational perspective. Conflict. That was intriguing to me because some cultures really try to get away from conflict no matter what. That harmony is so important, and so how do you do that in that type of a culture? So just looking at those things and realizing that they get messy when you go across cultural, but they still felt very important and relevant to me. 

09:16
Rich Rudowske
And when you talked about trust, you mentioned that trust can be categorized as cognitive or relationship focused. Why is it important for people working across culture to recognize the differences between those two? 

09:28
Paul Federwitz
So, again, this one kind of came as a surprise to me, because even though I’ve lived in other cultures, I do think of trust as cognitive. But seeing the relational side of it actually answered some questions for me that I didn’t even know that I had. So when you look at trust, there’s five aspects to it. Integrity, ability. So those are your cognitive ones. And I think that many Americans would probably stop at those two and even define trust as integrity. But then when you get into the relational side of it, you get into benevolence. Does somebody have your best interests at heart? Transparency. Are they open with you about what it is they’re doing and why? And identification, do they see you for who you are? 

10:14
Paul Federwitz
So when you look at these things together, one of the things that was surprising to me even as I was working through this, is realizing that there were some people that I had trouble trusting. But when I tried to figure out why, I stopped with integrity and ability, and I’m like, but they’re trustworthy. But there was still this niggling thought, like, something’s not right here. And so getting into those other sides really answered those questions for me about what exactly is going on here, but then also realizing that other cultures are going to start from those other sides for relationships and looking at benevolence and transparency and identification. And when you’re working on a multicultural team, if you’re only looking at the cognitive side, you may not be exhibiting the features and the aspects that are important for other people to trust you. 

11:07
Paul Federwitz
One of the things that was a really great experience for me early on in my time in Ghana is made a decision to go ahead and visit a lot of the language projects that were happening throughout the country. And I was working with Gilbert, which is a whiplack member organization here in Ghana. And the IT department was based in the main offices in Tamale. And it was kind of expected that if project staff had computer issues, they would come there. And that made sense. That’s where we had the equipment to fix it and an Internet connection and all the things that were needed. But early on in my time started going around and visiting some of the project offices. And I came back from that time realizing that things had changed in my relationship with most of the project staff. 

11:52
Paul Federwitz
And for many years I looked at that and I said, oh, that’s because I was there. And I saw the electrical issues that they had and the Internet issues that they had, and I could speak to the actual issues they were dealing with, which I think is true. But looking back on it now, I actually think what was important during that time was sitting down with people in their house and having a meal. That’s where the trust was built, that’s where the relationship was built. And that right there was all about identification, and that radically changed how I was able to work with them, which has had really an impact on how I see so many things from then on. 

12:33
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I think that’s fascinating. Those different aspects of trust and the cognitive and the relational. I think if any of our listeners are leaders, even if you’re not in what you might think of as a cross cultural situation, if you’re working across generations, you could also reframe that and think you’re working cross culturally, because maybe that’s one of the leadership mismatches that happens in the current workplace is older generation. Younger generation is looking for more of those relational aspects of trust. And maybe if we’re just thinking, well, I have integrity and I’ve got the skill to do the job, and that’s all I really work on in conveying to the people that I’m leading. Then you’re missing the whole relational piece, which seems to, I mean, all kinds of research says that’s super important in the workplace. With the younger generations, it comes back. 

13:19
Paul Federwitz
To another question of what’s more important, the task or the relationship. And I think that many times we default to saying, well, the task, that’s why we hired you. Like, we didn’t hire you to be my friend, we hired you to do this thing, but you can destroy a relationship in that process. And so focusing on the relationship actually better enables people to be able to. 

13:42
Emily Wilson
Do the task right. 

13:43
Emily Wilson
It’s that qualitative result of what is it here that’s making the real difference of productivity changes when people have trust. And I love that it was broken down into those layers because I hadn’t really thought of that before, like, really just being able to identify what’s different here. Why do they have my trust? And I really appreciated the breakdown of identification. I think that really fits in beautifully with multicultural teamwork. So one of the other principles that you shared about was conflict. And in your presentation, you mentioned there’s relationship and there’s task and there’s process conflict. But there’s also this kind of thing that happens of spectrum of conflict, and that it can be artificial harmony, it can be extreme conflict. 

14:37
Emily Wilson
And then there’s like the healthy conflict that you’re really looking for, that moderate, but the artificial and the extreme can really lead to relationship conflict, which is a big no. So can you provide some hypothetical examples? What does this look like in a multicultural setting of maybe that artificial versus that extreme versus moderate? 

15:02
Paul Federwitz
So one of the things, looking at this, when you look at artificial harmony, it sounds good to have harmony, but what is it that is artificial about it? It’s this idea that there’s harmony not because people actually agree with each other, but because they don’t feel like they can disagree. And that can come from two very opposite directions. One direction could because they don’t feel like they’re allowed to disagree because maybe their boss doesn’t listen to them or the other team doesn’t listen to them, or they get really kind of yelled at if they disagree. And so they just feel like, well, I have toe the line. The other side of that can actually come from people that work together, that are also close friends. 

15:47
Paul Federwitz
And they can also get to a point of they don’t want to disagree, not because they don’t feel like they can, but because they don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings. And so both of those can get you into a situation where everybody’s toeing the line and not coming up with bigger and better ideas or different ideas that may take you in a completely different direction because of that fear of what could happen if they don’t. When you get into a cross cultural team or a multicultural team, realizing that people might have different ideas of what’s expected in a discussion. So the US culture actually attempts to be very egalitarian in discussions where if your team’s getting together to talk about a new idea, everybody interacts. 

16:37
Paul Federwitz
The boss is supposed to interact along with it, but then it’s very hierarchical when the decision actually happens that it’s actually up to the boss to make the final decision. This is what it is that we’re going to do. And so they want everybody to kind of talk to them and discuss all these things. And then we get to that point, you say, okay, well, now this is the final decision. Other cultures might see that a little bit different. In some cultures, there’s an expectation that the decision is actually going to still be a group decision. So the boss doesn’t necessarily have more sway in the actual decision process than anybody else. Some cultures see it as well. Once the boss has said something, that’s the decision. And they can’t actually disagree with the boss. 

17:18
Paul Federwitz
It would actually bring shame to the boss for them to disagree. And so if you have a situation where maybe there’s some discussion and the boss realizes, oh, this group over here hasn’t really given input, they might say to them, do you agree with this? Well, they might not. They didn’t feel like they could because the boss was talking. And now the boss has asked a yes or no question, do you agree with this? And they have to say yes because it would be so rude and to say no. And so creating an environment at that point where people can disagree, which might mean a couple of different things. It might mean that the boss actually has to leave the room during the discussion. 

17:59
Paul Federwitz
That might be a little bit extreme, but getting themselves out of the situation so that everybody else can disagree a little bit more or even asking more open ended questions rather than do you agree with this? Just say, is there anything of this that you’d like to comment on? Or do you have a different perspective on some of these areas that you would like to share and kind of bring people into that conversation? And especially in multicultural situation, even specifying ahead of time, we are planning to have an open discussion right now. We’re not making a decision. Please come with your ideas and let’s talk about them and we’ll make the decision later or something like that, but being a little bit clearer about what are we actually trying to do in the moment. 

18:45
Rich Rudowske
So how would a leader learn this about their team if you’re working multiculturally, like what approach to take? 

18:52
Paul Federwitz
I think that there’s a couple things that they could do. One is really just exploring what are the different cultures that are in their team? What are the expectations there? Aaron Meyer has a book called the Culture Map, which I have found extremely helpful in being able to talk about different cultures of the world in kind of a generic like this is what they would be expecting, asking questions of the person or maybe finding an insider from that culture that you can have an interaction with and ask them more questions in that way. 

19:24
Paul Federwitz
But the biggest thing right off the bat is being aware that everybody in the room is coming from a different perspective in what’s expected in that situation and trying to find ways that you can elicit their opinion, even if they may not be comfortable in that situation, giving it so. 

19:43
Emily Wilson
Also, in the presentation, you introduced this term called fundamental attribution error, which is quite fancy. Can you break down? What does that mean as you’re working on a multicultural team? 

19:57
Paul Federwitz
So fundamental attribution error is when we make the default assumption that the other person is doing something different or wrong. And I’m going to put wrong in quotation marks there, but they’re doing something different or wrong on purpose. They know what the right thing is and they have deliberately decided to do something different. And so we often look at other people when somebody else makes a mistake. Our default assumption is that it’s a motivation issue. They are motivated to do this wrong. They have something against me, they’re lazy. Whatever the case may be, we assume that it’s a motivation issue. If we make a mistake, we immediately have all kinds of excuses of why were not able to do that. My boss didn’t give me the right support. They didn’t ask me the right question. We do that automatically. 

20:48
Paul Federwitz
That goes to another level when we’re working across cultures. My wife and I have enjoyed watching Trevor Noah. He’s a comedian that comes from South Africa and now lives in the US. And I’d say that there’s a lot of things that he says that he observes about the US that I find quite hilarious. But one of the things that he was talking about, were watching this the other night, he was talking about people’s accents, that he reads people’s accent on what they’re like when they’re speaking English. So different accents. He reads some people based on their accent, that they are maybe strong or they’re weak or they’re intimidating, all from their accent. But then he made a really interesting point. 

21:33
Paul Federwitz
He said, but when that same person starts speaking their own language, maybe they pick up a phone and they start speaking their own language on that phone. Then immediately his brain is like, oh, well, they’re just different. But because they had been in his context, they were speaking his language, then he essentially applied all of his cultural perspectives on them, even if they might not have known any of those perspectives or any of those ideas. He completely applied that to them because they were in his context. When they went into their own context, then his brain switched that off and it’s like, oh, yeah, they’re just different. 

22:08
Paul Federwitz
And I think that happens a lot with this idea of fundamental attribution error, that when somebody’s in our context, we default to, they did it wrong because they intended to, not because they had no idea that this is the way that they were coming across to me in that situation. 

22:25
Rich Rudowske
Right? Yeah. And of course, as you mentioned, if we are the ones who are in the wrong, we want people to give us grace and to understand where we’re coming from and to seek to understand. But it can be a lot harder to be the one to say, okay, we have reached a point where something is not what I expected it would be, and I would like to understand more about why that would be. And the fundamental attribution error, how we might start to think about people in certain ways can, as you mentioned, comes from your culture and comes from your background, and there can be all kinds of facets of that, right? I mean, if you had a difficult relationship with your dad, then you may have trouble working with men in general. Right? If you have a difficult relationship with. 

23:09
Rich Rudowske
If you’ve had a bad boss at some point, then you’ll have trouble trusting your next boss. Right? 

23:14
Emily Wilson
I was going to say, as you were presenting on the fundamental attribution error, it really reminded me of the biblical worldview that we have of a tendency to judge our brother and sister. This idea of taking the spec out of the other person’s eye and the log that’s in our own and just this need to see how there is an equalizer like that. Maybe we don’t understand what is actually happening. Maybe the motivation is different than we would have assumed, but it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, that it can just be different. But to be able to withhold judgment on a multicultural team and to be able to ask clarifying questions and to really seek understanding, I think is so powerful. 

24:06
Emily Wilson
Like you said, even in the US, when there’s that tendency of that cross generational team how to be able to posture oneself in a christian worldview of, this is my neighbor and how can I be more loving? 

24:23
Paul Federwitz
I think the biggest thing is just realizing in the moment. Like, our brain makes a lot of judgments immediately and realizing in the moment, I just made a judgment. Was it correct? And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of years, is catching myself and realizing I just made an automatic judgment, and I need to verify that’s actually truth and that I’m dealing with the facts as they are, not just my own assumptions. Emily, you made a great point earlier. Just across, when you’re going across different generations, there’s something I saw recently that people of the same generation in different countries actually have more in common with each other than they do with people a different generation that are in their own country. 

25:11
Rich Rudowske
Wow, that’s fascinating. 

25:14
Paul Federwitz
And I think that’s something for us to consider in all of this. 

25:17
Rich Rudowske
So in your presentation also, you talked about accountability, and you had two different categories, the team accountability versus individual accountability. What’s that look like, the concept in general? And then when you start to have cultures where people are more collective by nature instead of individual by nature, how does that also look different there? 

25:37
Paul Federwitz
Team accountability is looking at what are your goals as a team and how are you doing on those and looking at them, having every person kind of involved in that process of saying, this is where it is that we’re going in order to get there. We’re expecting to be at this point right now, are we there or are we not? And what can we do to kind of make up the difference? And so you’re doing that as a group discussion. Individual accountability is getting a little bit more one one with somebody, especially if there is a problem that they are bringing to the team that you don’t necessarily need to bring in front of the entire team. Everybody already knows about it. I can guarantee you that. But that doesn’t mean that you need to address it in front of everybody else. 

26:23
Paul Federwitz
But being able to address it one one and say, this is an issue that I’ve been seeing. How can we work through that as far as how to address that in a culture that is much more about the group? I wish that I had a perfect answer for that I was like, oh, you just do this and that. But I think it gets a little bit more complicated than that. It’s definitely, you do not want to call them out in front of the team. That just brings a lot of shame to them. And honestly, it kind of brings some shame to you, too, that you didn’t handle that in the right way. But working with others, especially somebody else from that culture and understanding from them what is the appropriate way to do this. 

27:06
Paul Federwitz
There’s also a lot of things you can do in more indirect fashion. This isn’t so much about accountability, but I have a friend who was a missionary in Burkina Faso and other places in West Africa. And he’s been kind of processing through his missionary experience. And he’s talking about, recently posted about whenever he would do interviews in Burkina Faso, when he’d ask a question, know, tell me about an experience with this or how would you deal with this particular issue, which is a common interview question. More likely than not he would get a story and it wouldn’t be a story about them. It could be a parable, it could be something else. 

27:40
Paul Federwitz
And so using that type of an idea where you’re being much more indirect, they’re going to pick up on exactly where the issues are and hear what it is that you’re saying. And if that’s not working, you might have to get more direct. But again, pull somebody else in that understands that culture better than you do so they can give you a hand with it. 

28:00
Emily Wilson
We know on teams, regardless of where you are in the world, there’s long term and short term goals. And you made the assertion in your presentation, which I really appreciate, that long term and short term can get in the way of each other sometimes and can actually work against one another. So contrary to the indirect way of responding, I was going to ask, could you provide an example of when you’ve seen that in your ministry, but also how a multicultural team can avoid those kinds of errors? How can they rise above that kind of tension between long term and short term goals? 

28:39
Paul Federwitz
Let me start out with an example from my research because it kind of caught me by surprise as well. The example that was given was a sales team that has a short term goal of increasing sales, but a long term goal of improving the brand value. In that case, a short term goal of increasing sales. One way to do that is to cut your price, put it on sale, cut that price and you’re going to increase sales. But that immediately goes against your long term goal of improving brand value because as soon as you cut the price, the value of your brand also goes down. So in Bible translation, we actually deal with this a lot because we have this short term goal of Bible translation, and that doesn’t seem like a short term goal because we’re looking at 510, maybe even more years. 

29:27
Paul Federwitz
But our long term goal is actually scripture impact. And what we know is that from our experience is that in order for scripture impact, I shouldn’t say in order for it to happen, but it is most likely going to happen in situations where the community has had a lot of involvement and has been engaged in the entire process and has had a voice in the process. So that short term goal of Bible translation? Yeah, you’re looking at, we need people in the office working on translation, but that long term goal means that they actually need to be out in the community, engaging with the community, which is going to keep them from the office and being doing that actual translation. And so when you look at this, one of the best things to do is to figure out what is it that you’re measuring. 

30:12
Paul Federwitz
It’s really easy to measure Bible translation at how many verses were translated. It’s really hard to measure how well is the community engaged. And so that’s a piece that I feel like we’ve been working on over the last few years of saying, yes, we have to measure Bible translation. We have to know how many verses were translated. We have to keep that in mind and make sure that we are continuing on a process with that. But we also have to have some measurements to say, have we been adequately engaged in the community? Have we been getting their input? Have they been a part of the process throughout all of that? And so we’ve been involved with, we’ve been developing program indicators that help us look at both of those things. 

30:52
Paul Federwitz
So you’re not measuring one or the other, but you’re continually looking at both of those things and figuring out how are we doing in each of those areas. 

31:00
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, because I’m sure somewhere in your leadership training, you also learn what’s measured is what is repeated. Right. And what’s valued by measurement is what’s repeated. So to find a way to measure some of those intangible things is also a way of communicating. This is what we value. 

31:16
Emily Wilson
So all of these principles of trust and accountability and looking at conflict, how is it that we can apply this in ministry? How do you think that these principles will assist leaders to better in their work, but also in that idea of that christian worldview, how does this impact us? 

31:41
Paul Federwitz
Every one of these things is relationship focused. And something that I feel like I’ve really been realizing lately more than I did in the past is God is a God of relationship. What happened in the Garden of Eden broke that relationship between God and man and Jesus coming to die on the cross. Yes, that was about sin, but it was also about restoring that relationship. I feel that the job of a leader is not to be in control. It’s not their job to tell everybody else what to do. Their job is to create an environment where everybody can do their best work. And a lot of that comes down to relationship. So when you look at trust, making sure that people can trust each other, not just you as the leader, but their coworkers as well. Conflict. 

32:35
Paul Federwitz
Being able to find that balance where there’s enough conflict that people are actually having ideas and they’re able to bounce ideas off of each other and sharpen those ideas but not have so much conflict or so little conflict that people can’t actually get their work done and it’s causing relationship issues. Even accountability is about relationship and helping people know what’s expected of them by you as the leader, by the team around them. Are they meeting those expectations? And if they are, let’s celebrate that. We haven’t really talked about that here. With accountability, when things are going great, let’s celebrate that. 

33:13
Paul Federwitz
If they’re not, let’s figure out what we can do to fix it or to improve it, not just to find that opportunity to write somebody up or find that problem and point it out, but what are we doing to actually help people through that? I find that lately I talk about leadership much more as walking alongside people. Sometimes you might be walking a little bit ahead of them and saying, hey, this is the way, but you’re not way out there ahead of them. You’re just kind of that step ahead, kind of pulling people along and saying, this is where we’re going. Sometimes it might be a step behind and kind of like a little bit of hand in their back and kind of pushing them forward and saying, hey, you can do this. This is what we’re going to do together. 

33:58
Paul Federwitz
But it’s about that relationship. And so I see each of these pieces as playing into that. 

34:05
Rich Rudowske
This has been great for folks that are currently on a multicultural team or maybe realizing, hey, this team I’m on is multicultural, or that plan to serve one. What resources would you recommend for them to strengthen their skills and be more aware of some of the issues you’ve been talking about? 

34:22
Paul Federwitz
The biggest thing is being aware, just sitting down and saying, oh, there’s things happening here that I didn’t realize, or I’m doing things that I wasn’t aware of and maybe even asking others, hey, how did that come across to you? But two resources that I have found have impacted me a lot in this area. One is the culture map by Aaron Meyer, which I mentioned before. Honestly, I think I’m going to read that, like, every two years. 

34:46
Paul Federwitz
I’ve read it twice now, and I feel like every time I read it, there are new things that I learned that I’m like, whoa, that’s how these two cultures interact and that’s why this is not working or is working really well, the other book that’s had a profound impact on me is called crucial accountability by Patterson and a bunch of other people that are involved with that. And it looks at two areas. One is, what’s the story in your head? It makes you stop and say, what is the actual story that I’m telling myself? And what are the facts like? What’s the emotion that is making me have this fundamental attribution error? So what’s the story in my head that I’m telling myself? Is it true? And let me get the actual facts. 

35:29
Paul Federwitz
And then the other piece of it is looking at is the problem that I’m looking at an issue of motivation or an issue of ability. We default to saying that the other person is not doing it because they don’t want to or they like it’s an intentionally, I don’t want to. When honestly, more often than not, it’s an issue of ability. Maybe they don’t have the skills. Maybe they don’t have the structure in place that allows them do that. What are those things can be helpful. I would say that book has actually had more impact on my parenting than on any other aspect of my life. 

36:02
Paul Federwitz
I have two and a half teenagers in my house right now and stopping to say before I address them, and I don’t do this every time, but before I address them with the issue, what is the story? What’s the story I’m telling myself? And then is this a motivation or an ability issue? And that has changed so much of how I engage in issues. Again, not perfectly, but when I do catch myself and think through these things, it’s had a much bigger impact. 

36:30
Rich Rudowske
Thanks. This has been great. We’ve been talking with Paul Federowitz from Lutheran Bible translators, the associate director of program ministries and chief information officer. We appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us today. 

36:41
Emily Wilson
Thanks, Paul. 

36:42
Paul Federwitz
Thank you for having me. 

36:48
Rich Rudowske
Well, it’s really great to just dig into leadership with Paul. I love the stuff he talked about and really the nuance. When you think about in one culture and context, you’re going to emphasize this particular aspect, but in other places you also need to be considering these things. And yet some things are in a sense universal, like that fundamental attribution error and recognizing that in ourselves and dealing with that and recognizing where people are coming from and how we’d like to be treated as the same way we treat others. 

37:17
Emily Wilson
Yeah, I know that as he was learning about this content, it was really from a perspective of organizational leadership in a monocultural setting, but being able to apply those principles interculturally is just so powerful that it’s going to look different. And I was very much reminded of like as you were talking about the attribution error of good, bad or just different, and that scale in between and how we react to people who may be different than us, and that it’s something that can be celebrated. Sometimes it’s challenging, but it’s definitely something to be worked through and then glorifying to God. 

38:00
Emily Wilson
And I think that when people hear all of these, not only concepts of leadership, but also some techniques to be able to work through and to love people in christlike ways within the church, within your organization or company, that it will just be an encouragement for growth all around for the church. 

38:23
Speaker 5
Thank you for listening to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. Look for past episodes@lbt.org Slash podcast or on your favorite podcast platform. Follow Lutheran Bible Translators’social media channels on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s word in their hands. The essentially translatable podcast was produced and edited by Andrew Olson. Our executive producer is Emily Wilson. Podcast artwork was created by Caleb Rotewald and Sarah Lyons. Music written and performed by Rob Weit. I’m Rich Rudowski. So long for now.