The Culture Map

by Erin Meyer

  Simply explaining what you are doing can often help a lot, both by defusing an immediate misunderstanding and by laying the foundation for better teamwork in the future—a principle we also saw at work when Bo Chen described his reasons for remaining silent during most of our meeting. This is one of the dozens of concrete, practical strategies we’ll provide for handling cross-cultural missteps and improving your effectiveness in working with global teams.

  INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES THAT DIVIDE OUR WORLD

  Situations like the two we’ve just considered are far more common than you might suspect. The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work. This is especially true as more and more of us communicate daily with people in other countries over virtual media like e-mail or telephone. When you live, work, or travel extensively in a foreign country, you pick up a lot of contextual cues that help you understand the culture of the people living there, and that helps you to better decode communication and adapt accordingly. By contrast, when you exchange e-mails with an international counterpart in a country you haven’t spent time in, it is much easier to miss the cultural subtleties impacting the communication.

  A simple example is a characteristic behavior unique to India—a half-shake, half-nod of the head. Travel to India on business and you’ll soon learn that the half-shake, half-nod is not a sign of disagreement, uncertainty, or lack of support as it would be in most other cultures. Instead it suggests interest, enthusiasm, or sometimes respectful listening. After a day or two, you notice that everyone is doing it, you make a mental note of its apparent meaning, and you are able henceforth to accurately read the gesture when negotiating a deal with your Indian outsourcing team.

  But over e-mail or telephone, you may interact daily with your Indian counterparts from your office in Hellerup, Denmark, or Bogota, Colombia, without ever seeing the environment they live and work in. So when you are on videoconference with one of your top Indian managers, you may interpret his half-shake, half-nod as meaning that he is not in full agreement with your idea. You redouble your efforts to convince him, but the more you talk the more he (seemingly) indicates with his head that he is not on board. You get off the call puzzled, frustrated, and perhaps angry. Culture has impacted your communication, yet in the absence of the visual and contextual cues that physical presence provides, you didn’t even recognize that something cultural was going on.

  So whether we are aware of it or not, subtle differences in communication patterns and the complex variations in what is considered good business or common sense from one country to another have a tremendous impact on how we understand one another, and ultimately on how we get the job done. Many of these cultural differences—varying attitudes concerning when best to speak or stay quiet, the role of the leader in the room, and what kind of negative feedback is the most constructive—may seem small. But if you are unaware of the differences and unarmed with strategies for managing them effectively, they can derail your team meetings, demotivate your employees, frustrate your foreign suppliers, and in dozens of other ways make it much more difficult to achieve your goals.

  Today, whether we work in Düsseldorf or Dubai, Brasília or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, we are all part of a global network (real or virtual, physical or electronic) where success requires navigating through wildly different cultural realities. Unless we know how to decode other cultures and avoid easy-to-fall-into cultural traps, we are easy prey to misunderstanding, needless conflict, and ultimate failure.

  BEING OPEN TO INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IS NOT ENOUGH

  It is quite possible, even common, to work across cultures for decades and travel frequently for business while remaining unaware and uninformed about how culture impacts you. Millions of people work in global settings while viewing everything from their own cultural perspectives and assuming that all differences, controversy, and misunderstanding are rooted in personality. This is not due to laziness. Many well-intentioned people don’t educate themselves about cultural differences because they believe that if they focus on individual differences, that will be enough.

  After I published an online article on the differences among Asian cultures and their impact on cross-Asia teamwork, one reader commented, “Speaking of cultural differences leads us to stereotype and therefore put individuals in boxes with ‘general traits.’ Instead of talking about culture, it is important to judge people as individuals, not just products of their environment.”

  At first, this argument sounds valid, even enlightened. Of course individuals, no matter their cultural origins, have varied personality traits. So why not just approach all people with an interest in getting to know them personally, and proceed from there? Unfortunately, this point of view has kept thousands of people from learning what they need to know to meet their objectives. If you go into every interaction assuming that culture doesn’t matter, your default mechanism will be to view others through your own cultural lens and to judge or misjudge them accordingly. Ignore culture, and you can’t help but conclude, “Chen doesn’t speak up—obviously he doesn’t have anything to say! His lack of preparation is ruining this training program!” Or perhaps, “Jake told me everything was great in our performance review, when really he was unhappy with my work—he is a sneaky, dishonest, incompetent boss!”

  Yes, every individual is different. And yes, when you work with people from other cultures, you shouldn’t make assumptions about individual traits based on where a person comes from. But this doesn’t mean learning about cultural contexts is unnecessary. If your business success relies on your ability to work successfully with people from around the world, you need to have an appreciation for cultural differences as well as respect for individual differences. Both are essential.

  As if this complexity weren’t enough, cultural and individual differences are often wrapped up with differences among organizations, industries, professions, and other groups. But even in the most complex situations, understanding how cultural differences affect the mix may help you discover a new approach. Cultural patterns of behavior and belief frequently impact our perceptions (what we see), cognitions (what we think), and actions (what we do). The goal of this book is to help you improve your ability to decode these three facets of culture and to enhance your effectiveness in dealing with them.

  EIGHT SCALES THAT MAP THE WORLD’S CULTURES

  I was not born into a multicultural family to parents who took me around the world. On the contrary, I was born outside of Two Harbors, Minnesota, most famous among drivers on the road leaving Duluth as the home of Betty’s Pies. It’s the kind of small town where most people spend their entire lives in the culture of their childhood. My parents were a bit more venturesome; when I was four, they moved the family all of two hundred miles to Minneapolis, where I grew up.

  But as an adult I fell deeply in love with the thrill of being surrounded by people who see the world in dramatically different ways from me. Having now lived nearly half of my life outside of the United States, I’ve developed skills ranging from learning to eat mopane worms for an afternoon snack while teaching English to high school students in Botswana, to dodging cows, chickens, and three-wheeled rickshaws during my morning run while on a short-term executive teaching stint in India.

  Today, married to a Frenchman and raising two children in France, I have to struggle with cross-cultural challenges daily. Is it really necessary for an educated person to fold lettuce leaves before eating them, or would cutting the lettuce also be acceptable? If my very kind upstairs neighbors kissed me on the cheeks when I passed them in the hall yesterday, would it be overkill for me to kiss them on the cheek the first time I pass them every single day?

  However, the lessons in this book emerged not from discussions about lettuce leaves or mopane worms (interesting as these may be), but from the fascinating opportunity to teach cross-cultural management in one of the most culturally diverse institution
s on earth. After opening the French branch of a cross-cultural consulting firm, where I had the pleasure of learning from dozens of culture specialists like Bo Chen on a daily basis, I began working as a professor at INSEAD, an international business school largely unknown in Two Harbors, Minnesota.

  INSEAD is one of the rare places where everyone is a cultural minority. Although the home campus is located in France, only around 7 percent of the students are French. The last time I checked, the largest cultural group was Indian, at about 11 percent of the overall student body. Other executive students have lived and worked all over the world, and many have spent their careers moving from one region to another. When it comes to cross-cultural management, these global executives are some of the most sophisticated and knowledgeable on the planet. And although they come to INSEAD to learn from us, every day I am secretly learning from them. I’ve been able to turn my classroom into a laboratory where the executive participants test, challenge, validate, and correct the findings from more than a decade of research. Many have shared their own wisdom and their tested solutions for getting things done in a global world.

  This rich trove of information and experience informs the eight-scale model that is at the heart of this book. Each of the eight scales represents one key area that managers must be aware of, showing how cultures vary along a spectrum from one extreme to its opposite. The eight scales are:

  •Communicating: low-context vs. high-context

  •Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback

  •Persuading: principles-first vs. applications-first

  •Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical

  •Deciding: consensual vs. top-down

  •Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based

  •Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation

  •Scheduling: linear-time vs. flexible-time

  Whether you need to motivate employees, delight clients, or simply organize a conference call among members of a cross-cultural team, these eight scales will help you improve your effectiveness. By analyzing the positioning of one culture relative to another, the scales will enable you to decode how culture influences your own international collaboration and avoid painful situations like the one in which Webber and Dulac found themselves caught.

  PUTTING THE CULTURE MAP TO WORK

  Let me give you an example of how understanding the scales might play out in a real situation. Imagine that you are an Israeli executive working for a company that has just purchased a manufacturing plant in Russia. Your new position requires you to manage a group of Russian employees. At first, things go well, but then you start to notice that you are having more difficulty than you did with your own Israeli staff. You are not getting the same results from your team, and your management style does not seem to have the positive impact it did at home.

  Puzzled and concerned, you decide to take a look at the position of Russian business culture on the eight scales and compare it with Israeli culture. The result is the culture map shown in Figure I.1—the kind of tool we’ll explore in detail in the chapters to come.

  FIGURE I.1.

  As you review the culture map, you notice that Russian and Israeli business cultures both value flexible scheduling rather than organized scheduling (scale 8), both accept and appreciate open disagreement (scale 7), and both approach issues of trust through a relationship orientation rather than a task orientation (scale 6). This resonates with your experience. However, you notice that there’s a big gap between the two cultures when it comes to leading (scale 4), with Russia favoring a hierarchial approach, while Israel prefers an egalitarian one. As we’ll discuss in more detail later, this suggests that the appreciation for flat organizational structures and egalitarian management style so characteristic of Israeli businesspeople may be ineffective in Russia’s strongly hierarchical environment.

  Here is a clue to the difficulties you’ve been having. You begin to reconsider the common Israeli attitude that the boss is “just one of the guys.” You realize that some of your words and actions, tailored to the egalitarian Israeli culture, may have been misunderstood by your Russian team and may even have been demotivating to them. In the weeks that follow, as you begin to make adjustments to your leadership style, you find that the atmosphere slowly improves—and so do the bottom-line results. This is an example of how we use the eight scales and the culture mapping process to effect genuine, powerful changes within organizations, to the benefit of everyone involved.

  HOW DID MY COUNTRY GET PLACED THERE?

  Each of the following chapters is devoted to one of the eight culture map scales. Each scale positions twenty to thirty countries along a continuum and guides you in applying the scale to dozens of situations commonly arising in our global business world. Because what is important on the scale is the relative gap between two countries, someone from any country on the map can apply the book’s concepts to their interactions with colleagues from any other country.

  Some may object that these scales don’t give adequate weight to cultural variations among individuals, subcultures, regions, and organizations. Understanding how the scales were created may help you see how such variations are reflected in the scales, as well as how you can most accurately apply the insights that the scales provide.

  As an example, let’s look at the placement of Germany on the Scheduling scale, which reflects how people in various cultures tend to manage time. The first step is interviewing mid-level German managers, asking them to speak about the importance of being flexible versus organized when it comes to scheduling meetings, projects, or timelines. Of course, individual responses vary, but a normative pattern emerges. A bell curve illustrates the range of what is considered appropriate and acceptable business behavior on the scheduling scale in Germany, with a hump where the majority of responses fall. It might look like this:

  FIGURE I.2.

  Of course, there are probably a few outliers—a handful of Germans who fall to the right or the left of the hump—but their behavior, judging by the average German’s opinion, would be considered inappropriate, unacceptable, or at least not ideal in German business culture.

  It was through this type of analysis that I began to map the country positions on each scale. I later adjusted the positions based on feedback from hundreds of international executives.

  When you look at the scales depicted in this book, you won’t see the hump for each country, but simply a point representing the normative position of the hump, as shown in Figure I.3. In other words, the country position on the scale indicates the mid-position of a range of acceptable or appropriate behaviors in that country.

  FIGURE I.3.

  When you look at the scales, keep in mind that both cultural differences and individual differences impact each international interaction. Within the range of acceptable business behaviors in a given culture, an individual businessperson will make choices in particular situations.

  For example, consider the Evaluating scale (see Chapter 2), which deals with whether it is better to be direct or indirect when giving negative feedback. There is a range of acceptable ways to give negative feedback in the Netherlands, and a Dutch businessperson can comfortably make a choice that falls anywhere within that range. Similarly, there is a range of appropriate ways to give negative feedback in the United Kingdom, and a British businessperson can choose a specific approach from any place within that range (see Figure I.4). The culture sets a range, and within that range each individual makes a choice. It is not a question of culture or personality, but of culture and personality.

  If you compare two cultures, you may find that portions of their ranges overlap, while other portions do not. So some Dutch people might employ feedback styles that are appropriate in the Netherlands as well as in the United Kingdom, while others may use techniques that seem acceptable in the Netherlands but would be considered inappropriate, blunt, and offensive in the United Kingdom. The eight scales can help you understand such
differences and evaluate individual choices within a broad cultural context.

  FIGURE I.4.

  THE CRUCIAL PERSPECTIVE: CULTURAL RELATIVITY

  Another crucial factor in understanding the meaning of the eight scales is the concept of cultural relativity. For an example, let’s consider the location of Spain on the Trusting scale (Figure I.5), which positions cultures according to whether they build trust based on relationships or on experience of shared tasks.

  FIGURE I.5.

  Now ask yourself a simple question. Is Spain task-based or relationship-based? If you are like most people, you would answer that Spain is relationship-based. But this answer is subtly, yet crucially, wrong. The correct answer is that, if you come from France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, or any other culture that falls to the left of Spain on the scale, then Spain is relationship-based in comparison to your own culture. However, if you come from India, Saudi Arabia, Angola, or China, then Spain is very task-based indeed—again, in comparison to your own culture.

  The point here is that, when examining how people from different cultures relate to one another, what matters is not the absolute position of either culture on the scale but rather the relative position of the two cultures. It is this relative positioning that determines how people view one another.

  For example, consider what happened when the British consulting group KPMG created several global teams to standardize the implementation of management software systems developed by enterprise software developer SAP. One global team was composed primarily of British and French consultants, and throughout their work the British complained that the French were disorganized, chaotic, and lacked punctuality. “They take so many tangents and side routes during the meeting, it’s impossible to follow their line of thinking!” one British team member said.