Working internationally is difficult and demands special skills to ensure success. However, highly effective managers and professionals often under perform when working with people from different cultural backgrounds, who do not share the same values and working practices. This challenge is yet more complex in multicultural teams where managers are required to build relationships and achieve business success across a number of different realities, values and perspectives.

A world of difference is for organisations whose business depends on high-quality international relationships, and who need support in making international teamwork effective. The programme focuses on a video dramatisation of an international team, brought together to launch a new product. It illustrates the complex challenges that individuals and teams face in working internationally.

It covers:

• How conflicting assumptions about communication style, feedback, task and relationship handling ' if unmanaged ' can lead to poor results
• The essential international skills needed to work successfully and manage effective teamwork across cultures
• Issues of building trust, teamwork, people management and remote communication in a multicultural context.

The benefits

• Clearly illustrates how business counterparts from other cultures can have differing approaches and attitudes to basic business variables
• Provides a clear framework for experienced and inexperienced international professionals to understand the challenges and complexities of working in a world of difference
• Helps to develop the practical skills and attitudes required to work with differences, rather than against them, in the pursuit of an organisation's international goals