Prya Kaul: Personal Adaption to Global Context

Priya Kaul is a practicing therapist in Bangalore, India. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she moved to the United States of America where she spent nine years. Since the last four years, Priya Kaul now resides in Bangalore, India with her husband and two daughters.

She has spent much of professional life dealing with people across multiple settings. She started her career in Mumbai working with children and adolescents in a school. Ms. Kaul then moved to the United States of America where she worked in the school system with adolescents. Priya was able to use her enthusiasm for working in fast paced mental health environment in at Baylor-Richardson Medical Center, Texas. Here she was able to work with crisis stabilization in mental health and chemical dependency. Priya has worked community-based organizations in Texas like C.I.T.Y. House that funded programs for working with children and families in North Dallas. She worked with Families United Program, which helped assess family environments for the best interest of children that were experiencing loss through divorce in the Dallas Court system.

After relocating to Bangalore, Priya works as a consultant with CWSolution Pvt. Ltd., a firm that facilitates workshops on leadership development and professional skills. A part of the CWSolution team since 2006, Priya, brings over ten years of experience to her role in business development and as a facilitator. Her areas of expertise include communication, cross-cultural awareness, coaching.

Priya continues to develop new and inventive ways to apply her experience of working in health and personal growth and development in both India and the USA in her role at CWSolution, helping to make the programs meaningful and effective.

Priya also enjoys maintaining an interest in the field of psychology and offers her services as a counselor with 1to1help, an EAP (Employee Assistance Program) company based in Bangalore, India.

Priya holds Master’s degrees in Clinical Psychology and Social Work. She has completed a nine-month course in Transactional Analysis. Her professional memberships include Bombay Psychological Association (BPA) and National Association of Social Workers (USA). Priya is also certified to administer and debrief the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which she likes using to give her workshops psychological depth.

Priya Kaul is doing mostly group facilitation with IT companies, financial services companies and some detail sector companies from out CW Solution. The workshops are about leadership development, communications skills, cross cultural collaboration and teambuilding

A lot of the clients depend on technology to a large extent because they are not in the same place. So they do have to work double hard to keep establishing the connection and rapport, to keep trusting each other as teams to work together.

In the workshops Priya Kaul gives communication is crucial, which is why they focus a lot on behavioural skills that the clients are going to use: to show that you understand, (instead of just understanding it in your head), to show confidence, to learn to present professionally, to be aware of body language, to develop verbal skills, to manage expectations, to make clear what you need, what you expect, what you want, what you want to do with your team, what you want to do across with the global teams. Priya Kaul argues that at work you can’t be like you are at home. You can’t be laid back; you can’t expect things to happen because the people around you don’t know you for twenty years, like your family would.

To establish trust in a technology environment I is not easy. Integrity, sharing information in an honest fashion is a first requirement. Of course there is a ‘share what they can share’; sometimes there is confidential information you can’t share, but acknowledging things that are happening; sharing that information factually.

Secondly it is important to show capability; giving the work that you commit to give and on time, because if someone sees you doing what they would like consistently, they will end up trusting this team. Thirdly it is important to be clear about intentions; to realize for your self what the purpose of an email is and to be able to show that expectation up front. Building reputation is a fourth requirement; one has to realize that trust travels between people; the relationship one builds with one person will generate trust when one learns to know a connected third person.

Part of cross-cultural communication is perception of how I perceive another person. A certain physical presence may trigger some opinions about that. As the conversation continues, those perceptions are checked and possibly changed.

When things are very unfamiliar there are a lot of vices that come into play. Priya Kaul thinks that is part of the hurdle really with cross-cultural communication. It is difficult to say who would be biased with what, but definitely there are certain biases that come into play. The challenge is to realize, argues Kaul, that there are biases and what your own are, so that you know what to look out for as you go ahead.
It is difficult to step back from your bias and look at yourself. Such self-reflection sometimes needs a distance from one’s own culture and home to realize the values one actually cherishes just like the fish that doesn’t know what water is until it is out of the water.

Kaul notices that when people realize that things aren’t going the way they want, it’s maybe the time to look at why they are not going the way they want. And to look at yourself at what you have done and what you have said, acted on, rather than at the next question. Of course you have to look at the other persons response as well. Once you go into a global atmosphere like we have now, we are thrown in a lot of other cultures that are now put forward. So it is a balancing act to some extent where you have to balance out your personal cultural needs, social demands, what is globally required in a professional atmosphere, not easy

Cross-cultural communication is happening all the time right now. All people are communicating with accents, all of us are communicating in a global place. We are all collaborating that is the nice part about where we are at, finds Kaul.

Right around the world people can support each other and leverage strengths. When there is a crisis in one country there is a lot of support, other countries take a stand, become involved and actually say their views. This is also possible because of technology. But Priya Kaul also warns for becoming so homogeneous that we forget our own identity. There is something about being unique that’s equally nice and maintaining that and people are bridging from that.

To be able to work in a global context people have to learn and adapt to cross cultural communication. For Kaul ‘learning’ shows more of a curve, where ‘adaptation’ shows more that you own that particular learning. Some adaptation is acceptable for people, for instance small things like using soda etc.

Other adaptation is more difficult. People adapt necessarily because of economics, because the job demands it. From the social engineering perspective in the global companies Kaul notices that people adapt to that flow periodically; when they go home, they leave that adaption at work. Every human being has the potential to adapt or not to adapt to things that can be done. Physically people have certain limitations and certain capabilities, but everyone can adapt.

The more we learn to appreciate the human being’s uniqueness in global adaptation processes, the more we’ll end up preserving it, argues Kaul. Certain processes have to be standardized, that’s how it works well. But within that, we will make room to accommodate strands that are different. Standardization opposes creativity Kaul argues. If you need an entire team functioning in a productive way, you do have to have a plan, how you proceed on things. Also, standardization helps in crisis for people to know what they have to do. Everyone cannot have the presence of mind or gets solution focused in a crises. But when you are discussing what could be options in a certain scenario that’s a time to be creative.

On a personal front Kaul thinks there are many times that we have to sort of subdue our own crisis and concentrate on what’s happening at work. It’s not easy and sometimes it is about acknowledging it and maybe getting some support at work.

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