One of my favourite business books of the last decade is The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer. It has helped me to build multinational cultures with organisations around the world.
There’s still an assumption that you can throw different generations of people together from different backgrounds in different countries and expect work to just happen. However, that’s not the case.
Meyer, who teaches at INSEAD, tells of a manager who nearly lost his job because he failed to decode his British boss. The boss had suggested he think about doing something differently. Here in Britain, that is an instruction to be followed.
Meyer’s research places cultures on a scale for negative feedback. The Dutch and the South Africans (for example) sit at the blunt end. The British, famous for understatement, sit towards the gentle end. One Korean employee in her examples arrived in the Netherlands and found the criticism rude and arrogant.
Both sides think they are approaching it in the right way. However, they are using different cultural ‘communication dictionaries’.
National patterns are averages and your team is made of individuals, so the map should always be a starting hypothesis. What makes the difference, however, is asking people to share their different cultural communication approaches, so that misunderstanding and potential offence can be avoided.
What might be honest for you, could be hurtful for someone else, so best to think about it first, rather than regretting it later.
