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Suspend Judgment. A final step that we have to take to overcome the barriers is to reduce the extent to which we evaluate and judge others. Now, this is very difficult for most of us. That's because we spend so much of our lives standing in judgment of others (e.g., managers evaluating job performance, teachers assessing student performance). The problem is the criteria we use to make those judgments. Most of us use our own values, styles and beliefs as the criteria for how we assess others (this is the essence of ethnocentrism). The more alike someone else is, the more positively we judge them (and the more comfortable they make us feel). However, people from different cultures may be unlike us in terms of values, styles and beliefs. It is then that we must suspend our judgment and try to understand others as individuals. And we must attempt to gain this understanding from their cultural perspective, not from our own.
The best way to do this is to be more accepting of others. Acceptance refers to a willingness to support and validate others even when you disagree with them. You can be totally accepting of a person while still disagreeing with their ideas or certain beliefs that they hold. You can demonstrate acceptance by actively listening to others, attempting to understand where they are coming from and trying to address whatever issues or concerns they raise. Remember, communication is always more effective when it supports and validates the other person. In addition, you will often find that when you suspend your judgment, you discover that you have far more in common with your colleague than you ever realized. We often think that our differences outweigh our similarities but the opposite is almost always the case. We just need to do a better job of using our similarities to build a bridge across our differences. Suspending judgment is a great place to start!
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