We had a great session last month with Dr Ashley Somogyi, Director of Learning B2B at Busuu, a UK-based language solutions company, to discuss the many dimensions of intercultural business communication.
Using Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map as a basis for the discussion, Ashley touched upon the different ways of communicating as experienced in countries such as Brazil, the UK, Nigeria and Belgium.
If you missed what turned out to be a fascinating webinar, its full transcript and matching PowerPoint presentation are now available to members.
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For now, here are a few highlights of this session.
On Communicating
Dr Ashley Somogyi: “In this talk, I’m going to use a couple of words in those languages that I’m sure I’ll pronounce horribly but in Japanese there’s a phrase called kuuki ga yomenai, KY for short, and what that means is one who cannot read the air. The meaning of this phrase probably isn’t completely obvious at first because Japanese is a very high context culture, there’s a significant layer of in context cultural knowledge that one must have for communication to be successful. So if you imagine a Japanese person and an American person in a meeting together, the American would just go out and say, “Hey, what does that mean to read the air? I don’t understand. Can you explain it?” The new Japanese colleague would say, “Well, what this means is if we were talking and one of us felt uncomfortable or there was a disagreement, I would need to read that in the air, I wouldn’t necessarily need to ask directly about it, and if I can’t read the air of the room, read that person’s body language or the subtleties of their spoken language, then I’m said to not be able to read the air,” and that is a really ineffective form of communication within Japan cultures with different low and high context standards.”
On Evaluating
Dr Ashley Somogyi: “Some people just absolutely hate feedback of any kind, some people relish in it, and it varies wildly across cultures as well. So in a direct negative feedback culture, it’s somewhere that you can be very frank with your colleague, you can be blunt, you can be honest and just say, “Hey, I don’t think this is a good idea, I think we should do that,” and you might be able to even say this to your boss or a colleague on the same hierarchical plane as you. But that directness is valued. Indirect negative feedback cultures really dislike that, you need to be much more diplomatic. Often negative feedback is wrapped inside positive feedback and criticism is almost exclusively given in a private setting, almost never in front of colleagues or anybody else because it’s seen as something you can lose face over. So a great illustration of this is if we think about a, let’s say, Chinese manager and a Dutch manager and one thing I probably should have started at, all of this is based on research that Erin Meyer, an academic, did looking across cultures all across the world, and so I’m going to make some broad generalizations about certain cultures. This isn’t in any way meant to be offensive or stereotypical, this is actually research based and, of course, within every culture there are people that don’t adhere to a broad social norm, so just take everything, it’s all research backed, but also with a pinch of salt. So a Chinese manager will probably learn to never criticize a colleague in front of another, while a Dutch manager has probably learned to lead by delivering on a straightforward feedback, an American will most likely have learned to do what we call the compliment sandwich, so good thing, bad thing, good thing, maybe it’ll be delivered directly in front of other people, maybe it’ll be behind closed doors, it very much depends. And if you have ever worked in France, you might find that people like to debate things very passionately and openly, and there’s a very big reason for that that we’ll discuss in a little bit. But when you have all of these differences in a room, it might sound like it would be impossible to have a meaningful discussion because everybody is trying to get something different out of it.”
On Disagreeing
Dr Ashley Somogyi: “Disagreeing is never fun, well, actually it can be depending on which culture you’re from, it could actually be a lot of fun so it can be something that’s very positive for your organization if you are from a certain cultural perspective. So open confrontation is sometimes appropriate and won’t have a negative impact on your relationship and, if that’s the case, you’re from a confrontation-based culture. If you’re from an avoids-confrontation-based culture, disagreeing openly, especially if it’s in front of a team leader or the organization leader, can have a really negative impact, it can be seen as trying to undermine somebody and there’s a strong reason around that that certain cultures tie the idea in this person who has presented the idea together.”