Module A: Classroom Training (1 day)

Cultural Awareness Building

• Understanding the concept of culture
• Culture comparison Vietnam/your culture
• Hofstede/Lewis/Hall/Trompenaars at a glance
• Cultures and values (quizzes and videos)
• Dos and Don’ts in Vietnam
• About Culture Chameleons, Culture Cowboys and Culture Masters

Finding your strategy in the intercultural field

• How to react in situations when perceptions differ
• Growing up in Vietnam – which experiences Vietnamese people have in their lives and how they affect their behavior?
• Agreements, making contracts and the power of money in Vietnam
• Culture profiling

Transforming cultural awareness and intercultural competence into success

• Communication in the intercultural field (training your communication styles to achieve your goals in Vietnam)
• Non-verbal communication training
• First steps into intercultural business communication
• Mastering real-life situations
• “Power Distance Training” (power distance in daily life and how you can use Hofstede’s insights to boost your success)

Up to two additional topics can be included depending on your specific situation and needs.

Module B: Contrast-Culture Tour  in Ho Chi Minh City or Da Nang (5 hours)

The contrast-culture tour lets you apply what you have learned in the classroom to real situations. We use the contrast- culture method to let you experience differences between your own cultural background and the new environment. You can test and improve your intercultural skills, which you need in business situations and in private life. A typical program contains several of the following stages:

• Bargaining game: You have a limited amount of money and need to negotiate prices. In this game, you can train your verbal and non-verbal communication in Vietnam. We will offer feedback to you on your performance and help you to improve your intercultural communication skills in Vietnam
• Teaching and learning across cultures: you will participate in an activity with a Vietnamese person who will teach you some new skills. Activities can be:
  • Driving lesson in a car in Ho Chi Minh City
  • Calligraphy lessons
  • Karate-course

You will experience how teaching and learning differ across cultures and what these differences can potentially mean for your role at your job.

• Interviewing entrepreneurs and discussing leadership styles
• and many more depending on your learning goals

Module C: Culture Retreat in the Mekong Delta (2.5 days)

Based on your role and goals in Vietnam, we will design an intercultural retreat in our training and coaching center in the Mekong Delta for you. We combine fun activities with learning and improving your skills and thus help you to become a master when living and working in Vietnam.

A sample culture retreat can include the following program points:

• Attending rice harvest in a rice paddy or fruit harvest in a fruit garden
• Motorbike tour to a remote island
• Cooking class while learning more about the importance of food in Vietnamese culture
• Doing pottery with locals and comparing different approaches when doing creative work
• Accompany a microfinance officer of a local microfinance organization to learn about how simple business models are built up in the countryside
• Herbal medicine tour - learn how to use traditional medicine from the elders

Most importantly, we want to let you do activities together with the locals and let you experience what has shaped the cultural imprints of millions of Vietnamese people.

Module D: Intercultural Coaching (3 hours)

Our Culture Master Program aims to help you develop sustainable and long-lasting strategies on how you can authentically behave in the Vietnamese culture. After completion of sections A-C, we will meet for transformation coaching. We use a classical coaching process and let you reflect on intercultural situations and how you reacted:

• Which challenges have you faced?
• How did you solve them?
• What was good/can be improved. Why?
• How do you want to make improvements in intercultural encounters?
• And more