by Erin Meyer
On another team, made up of mainly Indians and French, the Indians complained that the French were rigid, inflexible, and obsessed with deadlines and structure to the point that they were unable to adapt as the situation around them changed. “If you don’t tell them weeks in advance what is going to happen in the meeting, in which order, it makes them very nervous,” one Indian team member said.
Why such contradictory perceptions of the French team members? A quick glance at the Scheduling scale (Figure I.6) shows that the French fall between the British and the Indians, leading to opposite perceptions from those two outlying perspectives.
When I described this experience to a group of Germans and British collaborating on another global team, one of the Germans laughed. “That’s very funny,” he told us. “Because we Germans always complain that the British are disorganized, chaotic, and always late—exactly the complaint the British in your example lodged against the French.” Note the relative positions of the Germans and British on the Scheduling scale.
FIGURE I.6.
So cultural relativity is the key to understanding the impact of culture on human interactions. If an executive wants to build and manage global teams that can work together successfully, he needs to understand not just how people from his own culture experience people from various international cultures, but also how those international cultures perceive one another.
WHEN CULTURAL DIFFERENCES ARE INSIDE US
I recently had occasion to place a phone call to Cosimo Turroturro, who runs a speakers’ association based in London. Simply on the basis of his name, I assumed before the call that he was Italian. But as soon as he spoke, starting sentences with the German “ja,” it was clear that he was not.
Turroturro explained, “My mother was Serbian, my father was Italian, I was raised largely in Germany, although I have spent most of my adult life in the U.K. So you see, these cultural differences that you talk about, I don’t need to speak to anyone else in order to experience them. I have all of these challenges right inside myself!”
I laughed, imagining Turroturro having breakfast alone and saying to himself in Italian, “Why do you have to be so blunt?” and responding to himself in German, “Me, blunt?! Why do you have to be so emotional?”
While most people spend most of their lives in their native lands, the scales in this book have an extra level of interest for those with more heterogeneous backgrounds. If you’ve lived in two or more countries or have parents from different countries, you may begin to notice how multiple cultures have helped to shape your personality. You may find that part of your personal style comes from the culture where you spent the first years of your life, another from the culture where you attended college and held your first job, another from your father’s culture, and still another from your mother’s culture. The following pages may not only help you become more effective as a businessperson; they may even help you understand yourself more fully than ever before.
TASTING THE WATER YOU SWIM IN
Culture can be a sensitive topic. Speaking about a person’s culture often provokes the same type of reaction as speaking about his mother. Most of us have a deep protective instinct for the culture we consider our own, and, though we may criticize it bitterly ourselves, we may become easily incensed if someone from outside the culture dares to do so. For this reason, I’m walking a minefield in this book.
I promise that all the situations I recount are drawn from the stories of real people working in real companies, though I’ve changed names, details, and circumstances to maintain anonymity. Nonetheless, you may find yourself reacting defensively when you hear what others have said about the culture you call your own: “It isn’t true! My culture is not a bit like that!”
At the risk of pouring oil on the fire, allow me to repeat the familiar story of the two young fish who encounter an older fish swimming the opposite way. He nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?”—which prompts one of the young fish to ask the other, “What the hell is water?”1
When you are in and of a culture—as fish are in and of water—it is often difficult or even impossible to see that culture. Often people who have spent their lives living in one culture see only regional and individual differences and therefore conclude, “My national culture does not have a clear character.”
John Cleary, an engineer from the United States, explained this phenomenon during one of my courses for executives.
The first twenty-eight years of my life I lived in the smallish town of Madison, Wisconsin, but in my work I traveled across the U.S. weekly, since my team members were scattered across the country. The regional differences in the U.S. are strong. New York City feels entirely different than Athens, Georgia. So when I began working with foreigners who spoke of what it was like to work with “Americans,” I saw that as a sign of ignorance. I would respond, “There is no American culture. The regions are different and within the regions every individual is different.”
But then I moved to New Delhi, India. I began leading an Indian team and overseeing their collaboration with my former team in the U.S. I was very excited, thinking this would be an opportunity to learn about the Indian culture. After 16 months in New Delhi working with Indians and seeing this collaboration from the Indian viewpoint, I can report that I have learned a tremendous amount . . . about my own culture. As I view the American way of thinking and working and acting from this outside perspective, for the first time I see a clear, visible American culture. The culture of my country has a strong character that was totally invisible to me when I was in it and part of it.
When you hear the people quoted in this book complain, criticize, or gasp at your culture from their perspective, try not to take it as a personal affront. Instead, think of it as an opportunity to learn more not just about the unfamiliar cultures of this world but also about your own. Try seeing, feeling, and tasting the water you swim in the way a land animal might perceive it. You may find the experience fascinating—and mind-expanding.
* * *
When I arrived back in my apartment in Paris after the session with the Bernards and Bo Chen, I thought back to the advice from Bo’s mother. I Googled her words, “you have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth and you should use them accordingly,” expecting the quotation to begin with “Confucius says” or at least “Bo Chen’s mother says.” No such luck. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus seems to have said something similar, but as far as I know he never lived in China.
That night, instead of dreaming about fruit disappearing from my shopping cart, I lay in bed thinking about why Bo Chen didn’t speak up and why I kept speaking in the face of his silence, while—irony of ironies—I was running a session on cross-cultural effectiveness. I thought again about Mrs. Chen’s advice and wished that I had followed her suggestion that morning.
Mrs. Chen’s advice is sound, not just for Chinese children, but also for all of us who hope to improve our effectiveness working across cultural barriers. When interacting with someone from another culture, try to watch more, listen more, and speak less. Listen before you speak and learn before you act. Before picking up the phone to negotiate with your suppliers in China, your outsourcing team in India, your new boss in Brazil, or your clients in Russia, use all the available resources to understand how the cultural framework you are working with is different from your own—and only then react.
1
Listening to the Air
Communicating Across Cultures
When I arrived at my hotel in New Delhi, I was hot and, more important, hungry. Although I would spend that week conducting classes for a group of Indian executives at the swank five-star Oberoi hotel, the Indian business school hosting me put me up in a more modest and much smaller residence several miles away. Though quiet and clean, it looked like a big concrete box with windows, set back from the road and surrounded by a wall with a locked gate. This will be fine, I thought as I dropped my bag off in my room. Staying in a simple hot
el just steps from the bustle of workaday New Delhi will make it that much easier for me to get the flavor of the city.
Lunch was at the top of my agenda. The very friendly young man behind the concierge desk jumped to attention when he saw me approaching. I asked about a good place to eat. “There is a great restaurant just to the left of the hotel. I recommend it highly,” he told me. “It is called Swagat. You can’t miss it.”
It sounded perfect. I walked out to the road and looked to the left. The street was a whirlwind of colors, smells, and activities. I saw a grocery store, a cloth vendor, a family of five all piled onto one motor scooter, and a bunch of brown-speckled chickens pecking in the dust next to the sidewalk. No restaurant.
“You didn’t find it?” the kind concierge asked in a puzzled tone as I re-entered the hotel. This time the young man explained, “Just walk out of the hotel, cross the street, and the restaurant will be on your left. It’s next to the market. There is a sign. You can’t miss it,” he said again.
Well, apparently I could. I tried to do exactly as instructed, crossing the street immediately in front of the hotel and again looking to the left. As I saw no sign of the restaurant, I turned to the left and walked a while. It was a little confusing, as the street was jam-packed. After a minute or so, I came to a small side street full of people, food stalls, and women selling sandals and saris. Was this the market the concierge mentioned? But after careful examination of what I felt to be all possible interpretations of “on your left,” I began to wonder if I was being filmed as a stunt for some type of reality TV show. I headed back to the hotel.
The concierge smiled kindly at me again, but I could tell he was thinking I really wasn’t very smart. Scratching his head in bewilderment at my inability to find the obvious, he announced, “I will take you there.” So we left the hotel, crossed the street, turned to the left, and then walked for nearly ten minutes, weaving our way through traffic on the bustling sidewalk and passing several side streets and countless heads of cattle on the way. At last, just beyond a large bank, perched quietly over a fruit store on the second floor of a yellow stucco building, I spotted a small sign that read Swagat.
As I thanked the concierge for his extreme kindness, I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t told me, “Cross the street, turn left, walk nine minutes, look for the big bank on the corner, and, when you see the big fruit store, look up to the second floor of the yellow stucco building for a sign with the restaurant’s name.”
And as this question floated through my mind, I could tell that the kindly concierge was wondering, “How will this poor, dim-witted woman possibly make it through the week?”
As my search for lunch in New Delhi suggests, the skills involved in being an effective communicator vary dramatically from one culture to another. In the United States and other Anglo-Saxon cultures, people are trained (mostly subconsciously) to communicate as literally and explicitly as possible. Good communication is all about clarity and explicitness, and accountability for accurate transmission of the message is placed firmly on the communicator: “If you don’t understand, it’s my fault.”
By contrast, in many Asian cultures, including India, China, Japan, and Indonesia, messages are often conveyed implicitly, requiring the listener to read between the lines. Good communication is subtle, layered, and may depend on copious subtext, with responsibility for transmission of the message shared between the one sending the message and the one receiving it. The same applies to many African cultures, including those found in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and to a lesser degree Latin American cultures (such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and Latin European cultures (such as Spain, Italy, Portugal) including France.
The fact is that the hotel concierge provided all of the information necessary for someone from his own culture to find Swagat. An Indian living in the same Delhi cultural context would likely have figured out quickly where the restaurant was by the clues provided; she would have been eating her lunch while I was still wandering wearily around the streets.
My quest for the Swagat restaurant illustrates that being a good listener is just as important for effective communication as being a good speaker. And both of these essential skills are equally variable from one culture to another.
* * *
It was springtime in France, where I had been living several years, when I was asked to give a presentation at a human resource conference in Paris sponsored by Owens Corning. A leading global producer of residential building materials, Owens Corning is headquartered in Toledo, Ohio—a good eleven-hour drive from my home state of Minnesota, but still within the tribal boundaries of my native midwestern American culture.
When I arrived at the conference, I found fifty human resource directors assembled in a typical Parisian hotel space with high ceilings and sunshine streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows. Thirty-eight of the participants were from Toledo; the rest were from Europe and Asia, but all had been working for Owens Corning for at least a decade. I took a seat in the back corner of the room just as the presentation preceding mine was beginning.
The speaker would be David Brown, the company’s CEO. Relaxed and unimposing, wearing a blazer but no tie, David strolled into the room wearing a warm smile and greeted several of the attendees by their first name. But from the hush that descended when he stepped to the podium, it was obvious that this group of HR directors considered him a celebrity. Brown spent sixty intense minutes describing his vision of the company’s future. He spoke in simple words, repeating key points and reinforcing his messages with bullet-pointed slides. The group listened carefully, asked a few respectful questions, and gave Brown an appreciative round of applause before he departed.
Now it was my turn. My job was to talk about the subject I know best—cross-cultural management. I worked with the group for an hour, explaining in detail the Communicating scale and its value as a tool for understanding how various cultures convey messages. As if to reinforce my theme, Kenji Takaki, a Japanese HR executive who had lived for two years in Toledo, raised his hand and offered this observation:
In Japan, we implicitly learn, as we are growing up, to communicate between the lines and to listen between the lines when others are speaking. Communicating messages without saying them directly is a deep part of our culture, so deep that we do it without even realizing it. To give an example, every year in Japan there is a vote for the most popular new word. A few years ago, the word of the year was “KY.” It stands for kuuki yomenai, which means “one who cannot read the air”—in other words, a person sorely lacking the ability to read between the lines. In Japan if you can’t read the air, you are not a good listener.
At this point one of the Americans broke in, “What do you mean, ‘read the air’?”
Takaki explained, “If I am in a meeting in Japan and one person is implicitly communicating disagreement or discomfort, we should be able to read the atmosphere to pick up on that discomfort. If someone else doesn’t pick up the message we say, ‘He is a KY guy!’”
The American chuckled, “I guess that means we Americans are all KY guys!” Takaki offered no comment, which I read as an indication that he agreed. Then Takaki continued:
When Mr. Brown was giving his presentation, I was working hard to listen with all of my senses—to make sure I was picking up all of the messages that he was trying to pass. But now as I am listening to Erin I am asking myself: Is it possible there was no meaning beyond Mr. Brown’s very simple words? And with all of you in this very room, whom I have worked with for so many years, when I read the air during our discussions, am I picking up messages you had not intended to pass?
This was a very astute question—and a very disturbing one. The group fell silent, with a few jaws hanging slightly agape, as Takaki quietly read the air.
* * *
The contrasting styles of communication represented by the managers from Toledo and their colleague from Japan are often referred to as low-context and high-context, respectively.
Under these circumstances, it’s highly likely that, while speaking with Sally, you will explicitly spell out your ideas, providing all the background knowledge and details necessary to understand your message. In low-context cultures, effective communication must be simple, clear, and explicit in order to effectively pass the message, and most communicators will obey this requirement, usually without being fully conscious of it. The United States is the lowest-context culture in the world, followed by Canada and Australia, the Netherlands and Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Though cultural norms are transmitted from one generation to the next through means that are generally indirect and subliminal, you may remember receiving some deliberate lessons concerning appropriate ways to communicate. I certainly received such lessons as a child growing up in the United States. My third-grade teacher, Mary Jane, a tall, thin woman with tightly curled hair, used to coach us during our Monday morning circle meetings using the motto, “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” When I was sixteen, I took an elective class at Minneapolis South High School on giving effective presentations. This is where I learned the traditional American rule for successfully transferring a powerful message to an audience: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” This is the philosophy of low-context communication in a nutshell.