Darth Vader wasn’t that Bad of a Leader - think about it...
The first time I became aware of intercultural communication, which refers to the communication between people from two different cultures was when I was much younger and watched the movie Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back (1980); 2-hours and 7-minutes of my life will never get back (14 times). Reflecting on the whole Star Wars trope, Darth Vader wasn’t that bad of a leader. My question would be why are his kid Luke and a bunch of rebels from different cultures trying to kill him? If you look at the situation from the lens of Power Distance, referring to the degree to which members are willing to accept a difference in power and status between members of a group(s). Darth Vader held a leadership position inside the ‘Force’ that many considered ‘dark, gloomy, and deadly.’ On the other hand, Luke, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and the crew were also leaders that are hell-bent on killing the Empire along with Luke’s dad, Darth Vader. In retrospect, the ‘good side’ of the Force, if such a thing murdered, burned, blew up just as much like the Dark Side, but because of the author's word choices, scenes, setting, mood, and character traits - one side of the culture and their differences in power could not be accepted by either side, which becomes a real-life and movie schema for war. We see this in real-time every day from the over the 20-years it took the United States to remove the Taliban from power, only to place the Taliban back into power in Afghanistan. Someone has to be thinking about what side is the ‘dark side’ in this scenario. In simple clarity, Intercultural Communication is a study of how we relate; humans, animals, systems, and collective environments that in most cases can pinpoint intergroup conflicts and configurations that derail the information sent and sometimes not received creating chaos in those cultures.
Power Distance
My objective in this missive is to explain how a not-so-healthy learning environment exists for both undergraduate and graduate students but also come up with solid recommendations based on our reading and my experience as an authority on understanding what intercultural necessitates denote as meaningful engagement between staff and faculty inside a college school of education. One might argue the evidence is very clear, after so many years with the various “gaps” for children of color, there seems to be another gap created from inside the university classroom where if any competencies are taught, they are not retained nor transferred from theory to practice. Training people we rely on to make sure our children learn and graduate from high school is tough already; understanding intercultural communication vis-à-vis debunking whisper campaign perceptions, dismissals, and historical assumptions of what BIPOC students and educators need I see was low expectations during my tenure as a new teacher mentor. This becomes a reality in the classroom when non-white learners become the casualties of education – a place that is unbalanced, shaming, and classist to those who are trapped in violent socioeconomic circumstances with educators that treat them as mindless victims. My hypotheses hold true for all BIPOC learners as well; you cannot be what you do not see; if there is not a clean or defined path to success, the continued downward spiral of educational mistakes become more evident the farther away we move from a critical adjustment of training- the-trainers.
No, I will not be talking about my high school campus, but using a prequel that should be viewed before educators get to a high school campus by careful analysis of a teacher training school and what happens when there is no Intercultural Communication, in spite of what’s on the university websites next do the DEI-clickbait (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - the fantasy of ‘we are fair’ to a system, and far from it). This paper will be unprejudiced when looking at an intercultural communication challenge in my outlined workplace story and how intercultural communication might be helpful when addressing problems at work that are immersed in part by poor culture and accompanied by poor organizational communication. In this, we cannot dissolve the fact that in any intercultural communication challenge human behaviors in this construct must be observed to make sense of systemic breakdowns of workgroup cultures that lead to negative operational and racial microaggressions expanding poor work routines to the detriment of the workgroup. I will compare and contrast my problem with the following model of power distance (PD) from Guirdham, Maureen; Guirdham, Oliver’s “Communicating Across Cultures at Work.”
Power distance (PD) is what I will be comparing and contrasting in this paper as it pertains to the problem, which essentially is my challenge with the problem. As we know, PD is defined by the degree of separation between people of various social statuses, in this case, faculty, adjuncts, and trainees, or, to put it another way, the extent to which all members of this caste, including the less powerful, expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. Low PD cultures endorse egalitarianism (relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities). Again, high PD cultures endorse hierarchies. In high PD cultures, how capable managers consider the groups of which they are members is more strongly tied to higher rather than to lower status group members’ personal judgements. In low PD cultures, all members contribute to collective efficacy judgements (p. 30).
Before I move forward in addressing the traits of Power Distance as it pertains to my problem, we have to address the why’s of human behavior around the problem. In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (2002), he writes the list of overcoming human behavioral tendencies that he says corrupt teams are “absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results” (Lencioni, 2002). At this university, I felt powerless; in every course I took, I sat as the only Black American in each class. Only a few professors understood the dynamics of teaching Black children in economic trauma and when it was broached to the class, expressions of rejecting the topic as ‘not relevant because we have a Black president were sometimes voiced, shown with facial expressions as if to say we don’t need to talk about this or I should move on. The problem with Interpersonal Communication and all its moving parts is that the cum of the world's population or dual nature and functions have never had the conversations about what it means to send, receive and comprehend messages and their meanings other than the superficial ‘I don’t like you because you don’t agree with me,’ which has empowered the current impact of Cancel Culture moving far left from center to Aristotle's 4th-century BC Greek philosophy of Politics when aiming for the common good keeping clear of tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy - a word we now use incorrectly because of its meaning when perverted against the ‘common good’ - no, we shouldn’t have homeless K-12 students, but we do...common good? When we (humans) have a specific difficulty addressing power and people in the organization, we may point to a specific difficulty as the source. When the source has no readymade concepts floating around, though, people seek out like-minded allies, sometimes which means people that understand your cultural concerns, but might not be a part of your personal ethnic culture. Secondly, when something has gone wrong, some may feel that they did not have the information they needed to speak up; it might be information about the processes of the university, the status of projects in other departments, or the quality of their professors' lessons and outcomes. Because people sense that they are missing needed information, they blame lack of communication for the problem, ergo, one culture - the university hierarchy claims the high ground regardless of students paying the university thousands of dollars in a construct that should adhere to the responsibility of customer service for cash. This creates a submissive culture within universities; and erases life skills from higher education that fall under the category of negotiations. A series of missed opportunities that will implode on educational constructs within the next 15-months.
The Problem at work Part I
I was hired in early 2021 to be a New Teacher Mentor for a major private university’s school of education in the Twin Cities. I attended the university previously and while barely surviving one of the most racist and degrading graduate programs in Minnesota, I got a snapshot of serious dismissals of a culture where some decided to abandon the relevance of culture and assimilate to the values of a different culture leading people to accept influence and power over intercultural communication between departments and people - somehow ignoring the elephant with purple lipstick wearing Speedos in the corner of the room waving at everyone in the room. I graduated from two of the university's programs with a 4.0 G.P.A. but they still denied me entrance into the Doctoral program citing I was too controversial - a power imbalance that should never happen in academia. Although the provost of the university overturned the ruling, I had been accepted to the University of St. Thomas’ doctoral program and had no desire to speak to anyone at my former university, a dinosaur in culture, communication, and design. We, as educators must look at in what ways do K-12 public school systems and teacher training programs contribute to the exploitation of black educators, and what political, cultural, and economic ends does this serve - to what degree? And how do the current treatment and deployment of black educators hamper rather than further Black educational progress? In most cases, university systems are not set up to give credits for what you might know, so credit(s) for experiential learning cannot be acquired because of the university systems' designs in place. This researcher, currently teaching concurrent enrollment courses and grade 12 English was mostly overlooked in any creative organizational design-construct to provide credits for work experiences. The systems - broken if best, rejected the best practice of giving credit(s) for having their trainees in classrooms teaching, even more so, recruiting black-male teachers at this university seems to need better systems-designs in culture, communications, outreach, retention, and the human touch.
However, as a non-traditional learner, an older student, with practical experience in organizational design and corporate business models, it was clear to me that really smart people might have Doctorates but sometimes are not business-minded, therefore shutting down potential cash flow to the university. The physiological and social boxing gloves during this time were exhausting. I constantly found myself in meetings and classes as the only Black male. My observation in these classes was that instructors could not relate to the context of positive expectations for Black boys and girls in public schools. Conversations about black boys became surreptitious, mostly at the break, in one-on-one conversations that would have been beneficial for all but threatening to some; I get the historical and social implications of the black body being successful, but the need to address the issues of Black boys in the classroom by professors and students aren't politically convenient, nor is a classroom of 99-percent new White teachers being prepared for teaching and leadership with the biggest fear is the absence of cultural and linguistic cohesion inside many schools of education; intercultural communication is broken.
The Problem at work Part II
In 2020, I was asked by a local consulting firm to be a New Teacher Mentor for my former university. I said, sure! In the first meeting online with some of those same professors that denied me tenure in the doctoral program, including a Black female professor and the chair of the department who actually came to my high school classroom as part of an interview process to hire me to teach two courses at the university: Schools and Society and Multiculturalism in Education, I must say it was uncomfortable. In the candid Zoom meeting, they said I was here because they “needed my input’ and I would be a great mentor for their School of Education teacher training program. They promised me a nice stipend, professional development, and Black/Brown new teachers that were in-service or finishing up their master’s programs. The stipend was reasonable to meet once every couple of weeks with mentees to talk about highs and lows associated with being a BIPOC educator. The mentees also received stipends. From the front end, it looked great - I had a camping trip to pay for later in the summer of 2021. The culture clash happened between the Black female professor and me. After four-weeks into the program, my mentees (none Black or Brown, all Asian females) started to complain about not getting their stipends, and the conversations during our meeting all focused on why the professors and program leads did not answer their questions about this issue. Unbeknownst to them, I hadn’t received a penny for my work after a couple of months. Yes, I was a little concerned about it, and when it came time to speak with the mentees, my anxiety up ticked to levels that made ‘flight’ a viable option rather than meeting with the mentees. After contacting the university’s accounts payable department thinking that they might not have my information, a full fiduciary investigation was launched into the program for mentors and mentees to see if there was any basis for misspending. I never meant my emails and telephone calls asking about stipends for the mentees and me to be punitive, we were not getting the information we needed, and the professor leading the program didn’t think highly enough of us to bother with giving us accurate information and telling us to “email this other person for answers.” The breakdown in organizational communication, and in this case, the power distance, and cultural imbalances were well defined. For example, in Maslow's self-actualization the philosopher writes: “...the longer a person goes without food, the hungrier they will become” and growth needs do not stem from a lack of something, but rather from a desire to grow as a person. The intercultural relationships of a university and students inside of the construct become a whole part of the system and should be viewed as such along with adjuncts, tenured professors, and community stakeholders. In most cases, the Power Distance - big ‘I’s’ and little ‘you’s’ neglects the meaning of collaborations, considerations, and consensus from what Guirdham, Maureen; Guirdham, and Oliver called, “Barriers to intercultural leadership and management” (p. 234).
(Sub)cultural differences in leadership and management, as Chapters 7 and 9 showed, may extend to whether the leader/manager represents or leads the group or organization, whether or not the leader is first among equals and decision-making consensual, whether leaders are given wide discretion or not, whether leaders’ focus is on competing outside their own team or on team members and whether leaders emphasize long-term plans and strategies or quick results. There are also (sub)cultural differences in how managers perform specific functions such as compliance gaining, mentoring, giving feedback, and international project management (p. 234)
The leaders, especially the Black American female professor, had the power of consensual decision-making with wide discretion. She spent a lot of time focusing on competing outside her own team (attempting to be relevant as a Black body inside of a construct that has consistently excluded the BIPOC community on that campus), therefore excluding the possibility for quick results in the mentor/mentee relationship. The subcultural differences in how the professor performs specific functions are reminiscent of the Willie Lynch syndrome. Mental slavery is a subliminal tactic used to keep Africans in America in psychological chains for generations. In 1712, Willie Lynch prophesied this method of control that would push an inferior mentality on the enslaved and eliminate the strength in numbers that unity provided Africans in America. Lynch stated that the correct use of his methods would control these Africans in America for 300 years or more. We can see that has come to fruition within academia with the help of continued historical assumptions, the media, and Black educators having to qualify themselves at every level regardless of experience and degrees. What has not been fully addressed is whether education, in this case, teacher training programs deliberately supports the white supremacist agenda or whether media participation transformed into something less intentional, but equally dangerous.
Formulas for Differentiation in Interpersonal Communication in Teacher Training Programs
As we know, “systems dislike being diagnosed” (Lencioni, 2002). To fix the culture inside of an educational system so the system respects differences is difficult. Here are some solutions I propose for cultures to engage intercultural communication inside teacher training constructs:
1. Self-Monitoring -Here, subcultures need to be aware of stereotypes and how they impact our communication (Guirdham and Guirdham 186).
Because someone looks a certain way, don’t dismiss the impact they might have on the education system and teaching our children.
2. Emotion Regulation Ability -Which is our ability to control our emotions while we are communicating (187).
While hate is surreptitious, we have to move past historical assumptions.
3. Being non-judgmental -This is important because it requires us to view people based on their behaviors and not on assumptions or stereotypes (190).
Here again, the judgment of a person, group, or system is also surreptitious; the tone can be set by having conversations about assumptions or stereotypes.
4. Unlearning and learning -Here, we need to unlearn past assumptions and biases and move towards a current/accurate understanding of cultures (188).
Intercultural communication in the simplest terms means that you understand, have awareness, even though you’re not connected with the cultures inside your construct. You don’t know what you don’t know.
5. Awareness of Context -This includes understanding the power balance, cultural assumptions, attitudes, and the encounter itself (187).
The subdued and the subduers do not speak the same language (Baldwin), Power Distance must be consensual, collective, and a choice; there will always be fast-food workers and people that clean buildings, this doesn’t mean they’re less. Your integrity shows in how you treat people that you think cannot do anything for you.
My challenge (or problem) at work leans on intercultural communication, but also organizational communication. If a system meant to train new teachers in Minnesota in a time when BIPOC people are at the tipping point of disparities for everything bad, it would be beneficial both socially and economically to training systems to start forming new systems. The value in alternative thought processes and actions that start to change group think, political alignments, and personal agendas that block new cultures in a time of cultureless-ness.
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