by Erin Meyer
I was really taken aback when one of my Mexican employees gave me his resignation. I had given him some negative feedback in a meeting, but I did it in a way that sounded to me almost like a joke. The mood in the room was light, and after giving the feedback I quickly moved on. I felt it was no big deal and I thought everything was fine. But apparently it was a big deal to him. I learned later from one of the team members that I had seriously insulted him by giving this feedback in front of the team. He felt humiliated and worried that he was going to get fired, so he decided it would be better to quit first. It took me completely by surprise.
As this situation suggests, the first simple strategy for giving negative feedback to someone from a culture in quadrant D is Don’t give feedback to an individual in front of a group. This rule applies even if you use a lot of soft, cozy downgraders or rely on a joke to lighten the mood. And, yes, it applies to positive feedback as well. In many cultures that are less individualistic than the United States, it may be embarrassing to be singled out for positive praise in front of others. Give your individual feedback to the individual and give only group feedback to the group.
A second powerful tool for giving feedback to those from quadrant D—especially those from Asian cultures—is the technique of blurring the message. People from most Western cultures don’t like the idea of making a message blurry. We like our messages short, crisp, and, above all, transparent. But blurriness can be highly effective in many Asian cultures if it is used skillfully and appropriately, as I discovered early in my career.
I had been working as a consultant for an international training firm for about a year. One of my programs was a custom-designed international leadership course for the large Swiss-headquartered food multinational Nestlé. I co-taught the program with Budi, an Indonesian consultant who had been with the company for decades and was close to the founders. He had a reputation as a highly skilled trainer, but over the last couple of years his classroom performance had been declining dramatically, much to everyone’s chagrin.
Let me also add that it was politically useful to have Budi on your side. As someone very well connected within the organization, he could open many doors if he liked you, and he had done so for many of his favored colleagues in the past.
With all of this in mind, I winced when my contact at Nestlé gave me quite clear feedback that they wanted to eliminate two of the three sessions that Budi taught in the program based on mediocre evaluation ratings.
I went home that evening with a knot in my stomach. When Budi heard that I was replacing his sessions with two sessions led by a more junior consultant, he was likely to be hurt and embarrassed. To complicate an already difficult situation, Budi comes from one of the most indirect cultures in the world, where giving negative feedback to someone older and more experienced is particularly difficult and painful. I didn’t sleep well that night.
The next morning in an anxious stupor I set up a lunch with a longtime Indonesian colleague and friend and asked her for advice. Thankfully, Aini introduced me to some strategies for blurring the message.
The first strategy: Give the feedback slowly, over a period of time, so that it gradually sinks in. “In the West,” Aini said, “you learn that feedback should be given right here, right now. In most Asian societies, it is best to give feedback gradually. This does not mean that you beat the direct message in periodically, again and again. Rather it means that you make small references to the changes that need to be made gently, gradually building a clear picture as to what should be done differently.”
With Aini’s guidance, I composed a first e-mail to Budi, alluding to the fact that I would need to redesign the program in future months based on the feedback of the participants and that this would have an impact on his sessions. I mentioned that I needed to focus more on topic X, which meant we would have less time for topic Y. Budi responded kindly, saying that he would be pleased to discuss it with me when he was in Paris later that month.
Budi and I spoke by phone the week before his visit to Paris, and I mentioned that I would be sending the most recent client feedback so that he could see it before our meeting. I indicated that the program would be reworked entirely and that I would also be inviting our junior colleague to teach in some sessions. Bit by bit, Budi was beginning to get the picture.
This led to Aini’s second strategy: Use food and drink to blur an unpleasant message. Aini told me, “If I have to provide criticism to someone on my staff, I am not going to call them into my office. If I do, I know that they are going to be listening to my message with all of their senses—and any message I provide will be greatly amplified in their minds. Instead, I might invite them out to lunch. Once we are relaxed, this is a good time to give feedback. We don’t make reference to it in the office the next day or the next week, but the feedback has been passed and the receiver is now able to take action without humiliation or breaking the harmony between the two parties. In Japan, Thailand, Korea, China, or Indonesia, the same strategy applies.”
This would be an easy rule to apply. I told Budi that when he was in Paris I would love to have lunch with him at my favorite new restaurant near the Champs-Elysées, where I knew he would love the black squid pasta.
Aini’s third and final piece of strategy baffled me at first. She urged me: Say the good and leave out the bad. Was Aini suggesting that I could pass the negative message without saying it at all? Via telepathy?
Aini explained by using an example:
A while back, one of my Indonesian colleagues sent me a set of four documents to read and review. The last two documents he must have finished in a hurry, because they were very sloppy in comparison to the first two. When he called to ask for my reaction, I told him that the first two papers were excellent. I focused on these documents only, outlining why they were so effective. I didn’t need to mention the sloppy documents, which would have been uncomfortable for both of us. He got the message clearly, and I didn’t even need to bring up the negative aspects.
Well, I understood the concept, although the execution for someone from Two Harbors, Minnesota, was not easy.
The next week, I met Budi at the Italian bistro I had told him about. After forty-five minutes of catching up over delicious artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomato antipasti, the moment of truth had come. “Say the good, leave out the bad,” I reminded myself, easing gently into the subject, my heart beating just a little faster than normal.
“Budi,” I began, “your first session is very much appreciated. Although I am redesigning the program, I definitely do not want to touch this session. In fact, I thought I might build on your first session by working with our junior colleague on Tuesday morning’s session.”
Budi replied, “That sounds great, Erin! I much prefer to have a shorter amount of presentation time with a really big impact. And if that works for the program, it works for me.”
Hallelujah! Not a moment of discomfort! I had somehow managed to pass the message without ever giving the criticism explicitly. Thank you, Aini!
Here is one final warning for anyone working with people from a quadrant D culture. While indirect feedback is the norm, it is quite possible for a boss to give scathing negative feedback to an employee while remaining entirely within the realm of the appropriate. In these cases, the strongly hierarchical tendencies found in many quadrant D cultures trump their indirect feedback patterns. Thus, it’s not unheard of for a boss in Korea to berate an employee publicly or for an Indian boss to bark criticism to their staff in a way that shocks and silences any Europeans or Americans within earshot.
But you, the foreigner, should not try this. For your purposes, whether you are the mail boy, the manager, or the owner of the company, stick to the blurring and leave the direct downward vertical feedback to those who call that country home.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE POLITE?
Maarten, the Dutch manager we met earlier, explained to me once, “In the Netherlands, we give feedback very directly, but we are
always polite.” I love this comment, because a Dutch person’s feedback can indeed be both brutally honest yet delightfully polite—but only if the recipient is Dutch. If you happen to come from one of the 195 or so societies in the world that like their negative feedback a bit less direct than in the Netherlands, you may feel that Maarten’s “politeness” is downright insulting, offensive, and yes, rude.
Politeness is in the eye of the beholder. Giving feedback—especially when it’s negative—is a sensitive business at the best of times. It can be made a lot worse if the person receiving the feedback believes he or she has been spoken to rudely. Precisely what constitutes rudeness, however, varies enormously from place to place.
The sophisticated global manager learns how to adapt—to alter his behavior a bit, to practice humility, to test the waters before speaking up, to assume goodwill on the part of others, and to invest time and energy in building good relationships. With a little luck and skill, it’s possible to be perceived as equally polite in Amsterdam, Jakarta, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Paris, or Two Harbors, Minnesota.
3
Why Versus How
The Art of Persuasion in a Multicultural World
The art of persuasion is one of the most crucial business skills. Without the ability to persuade others to support your ideas, you won’t be able to attract the support you need to turn those ideas into realities. And though most people are unaware of it, the ways you seek to persuade others and the kinds of arguments you find persuasive are deeply rooted in your culture’s philosophical, religious, and educational assumptions and attitudes. Far from being universal, then, the art of persuasion is one that is profoundly culture-based.
That was the hard lesson learned by Kara Williams, an American engineer newly working as a research manager for a German firm in the automotive industry. As one of the leading experts in her field Williams had extensive experience presenting recommendations and influencing her American colleagues to follow her ideas. But when Williams began working in a German environment she didn’t realize that being persuasive would require a different approach. “When I think back to my first presentation to my new German bosses, I wish I had understood the difference and hadn’t let their feedback get under my skin. If I had held my cool I might have been able to salvage the situation.”
Williams has faced many challenges in her career. Before taking the job with the German firm, she worked for an Australian company from her home office in Boston, traveling frequently to the Sydney headquarters to give presentations and offer advice. “A lot of my job relies on my ability to sell my ideas and influence my internal clients to take the best path,” she explains. “I’m good at what I do, but I hate constant long-distance travel. When offered a similar position working for a German auto supplier, I jumped at the opportunity for shorter travel distances.”
Williams’s first project was providing technical advice on how to reduce carbon emissions from one of the group’s “green” car models. After visiting several automotive plants, observing the systems and processes there, and meeting with dozens of experts and end users, Williams developed a set of recommendations that she felt would meet the company’s strategic and budgetary goals. She traveled to Munich to give a one-hour presentation to the decision makers—a group of German directors.
“It was my first internal presentation, and its success would be important for my reputation,” Williams recalls. In preparation for the meeting Williams thought carefully about how to give the most persuasive presentation, practicing her arguments, anticipating questions that might arise, and preparing responses to those questions.
Williams delivered her presentation in a small auditorium with the directors seated in rows of upholstered chairs. She began by getting right to the point, explaining the strategies she would recommend based on her findings. But before she had finished with the first slide, one of the directors raised his hand and protested, “How did you get to these conclusions? You are giving us your recommendations, but I don’t understand how you got here. How many people did you interview? What questions did you ask?”
Then another director jumped in: “Please explain what methodology you used for analyzing your data and how that led you to come to these findings.”
“I was taken aback,” Williams remembers. “I assured them that the methodology behind my recommendations was sound, but the questions and challenges continued. The more they questioned me, the more I got the feeling that they were attacking my credibility, which puzzled and annoyed me. I have a Ph.D. in engineering and expertise that is widely acknowledged. Their effort to test my conclusions, I felt, showed a real lack of respect. What arrogance to think that they would be better able to judge than I am!”
Williams reacted defensively, and the presentation went downhill from there. “I kick myself now for having allowed their approach to derail my point,” she says. “Needless to say, they did not approve my recommendations, and three months of research time went down the drain.”
The stone wall Williams ran into illustrates the hard truth that our ability to persuade others depends not simply on the strength of our message but on how we build our arguments and the persuasive techniques we employ.
Jens Hupert is a German director at the company Williams worked for. Having lived in the United States for many years, he had experienced similar failures at persuading others, though the cultural disconnect ran in the opposite direction. Hupert recalled the problems he’d had the first few times he tried to make a persuasive argument before a group of his American colleagues. He’d carefully launched his presentation by laying the foundation for his conclusions, setting the parameters, outlining his data and his methodology, and explaining the premise of his argument. He was taken aback when his American boss told him, “In your next presentation, get right to the point. You lost their attention before you even got to the important part.”
Hupert was unsure. “These are intelligent people,” he thought. “Why would they swallow my argument if I haven’t built it carefully for them from the ground up?”
The opposing reactions that Williams and Hupert received reflect the cultural differences between German and American styles of persuasion. The approach taken by the Germans is based on a specific style of reasoning that is deeply ingrained in the cultural psyche. Hupert explains:
In Germany, we try to understand the theoretical concept before adapting it to the practical situation. To understand something, we first want to analyze all of the conceptual data before coming to a conclusion. When colleagues from cultures like the U.S. or the U.K. make presentations to us, we don’t realize that they were taught to think differently from us. So when they begin by presenting conclusions and recommendations without setting up the parameters and how they got to those conclusions, it can actually shock us. We may feel insulted. Do they think we are stupid—that we will just swallow anything? Or we may question whether their decision was well thought out. This reaction is based on our deep-seated belief that you cannot come to a conclusion without first defining the parameters.
Hupert’s time in the United States taught him that Americans have a very different approach. They focus on practicalities rather than theory, so they are much more likely to begin with their recommendations. Unfortunately, this reasoning method can backfire when making presentations to an audience whose method of thinking is the opposite—as Kara Williams discovered.
TWO STYLES OF REASONING: PRINCIPLES-FIRST VERSUS APPLICATIONS-FIRST
Principles-first reasoning (sometimes referred to as deductive reasoning) derives conclusions or facts from general principles or concepts. For example, we may start with a general principle like “All men are mortal.” Then we move to a more specific example: “Justin Bieber is a man.” This leads us to the conclusion, “Justin Bieber will, eventually, die.” Similarly, we may start with the general principle “Everything made of copper conducts electricity.” Then we show that the old statue of a leprechaun your grandmother left you is 100
percent copper. Based on these points, we can arrive at the conclusion, “Your grandmother’s statue will conduct electricity.” In both examples, we started with the general principle and moved from it to a practical conclusion.
On the other hand, with applications-first reasoning (sometimes called inductive reasoning), general conclusions are reached based on a pattern of factual observations from the real world. For example, if you travel to my hometown in Minnesota one hundred times during January and February, and you observe every visit that the temperature is considerably below zero, you will conclude that Minnesota winters are cold (and that a winter visit to Minnesota calls for a warm coat as well as a scarf, wool hat, gloves, and ear warmers). In this case, you observe data from the real world, and, based on these empirical observations, you draw broader conclusions.
Most people are capable of practicing both principles-first and applications-first reasoning. But your habitual pattern of reasoning is heavily influenced by the kind of thinking emphasized in your culture’s educational structure. As a result, you can quickly run into problems when working with people who are most accustomed to other modes of reasoning.
Take math class as an example. In a course using the applications-first method, you first learn the formula and practice applying it. After seeing how this formula leads to the right answer again and again, you then move on to understand the concept or principle underpinning it. This means you may spend 80 percent of your time focusing on the concrete tool and how to apply it and only 20 percent of your time considering its conceptual or theoretical explanation. School systems in Anglo-Saxon countries tend to emphasize this method of teaching.
By contrast, in a principles-first math class, you first prove the general principle, and only then use it to develop a concrete formula that can be applied to various problems. As a French manager once told me, “We had to calculate the value of pi as a class before we used pi in a formula.” In this kind of math class, you may spend 80 percent of your time focusing on the concepts or theories underpinning the general mathematical principles and only 20 percent of your time applying those principles to concrete problems. School systems in Latin Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal), the Germanic countries (Germany, Austria), and Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina) tend to emphasize this method of teaching.