Tips for managing across cultures

- A few years back, a Finnish entrepreneur and friend of mine decided to spend a few weeks in Washington, D.C. I arranged a lunch for him with another friend, a female entrepreneur in the same line of business. During the lunch, the American lady invited him for golf with her husband. His blunt response: Do you really mean it, or are you just being polite? Neither side was aware that Fins tend to be extremely direct and are not known for small talk. As this example illustrates, people are the products of their cultures, the implicitly shared norms, values, and assumptions of our society. Cultural differences can often become a source of needless misunderstanding, mistrust, and even hostility. Thus, people working for a global company have to become skillful at avoiding the pitfalls they will almost certainly encounter when interacting with people from other cultures. What could you do to avoid these pitfalls? First, educate yourself about any other cultures you will interact with. This can be done by reading up and talking to people from or with experiences in these cultures. Second, understand the real rather than imaginary differences across cultures. Be aware of simple generalizations, like North Americans act this way, or all East Asians act like that. Third, be sure you focus on the individuals and not on cultural stereotypes. The 330 million Americans are not all alike, nor are the 1.3 billion Chinese or the 120 million Japanese. Never forget that you will be interacting with specific individuals, and any of them could be an outlier within the larger culture. People generally feel insulted if you treat them as representatives of cultural stereotypes. Fourth, embrace cultural differences without being judgmental. Becoming judgmental creates barriers to developing empathy and mutual respect. Also, since it's almost impossible to mask a judgmental attitude, it can breed resentment. Fifth, invite people from the other culture to teach you. People love to talk about their own cultures. They also don't expect you to be an expert on their cultures. So they'll often accept an invitation to teach you. Six, become bicultural. And to the extent you can, cultivate biculturalism in others. Take the case of Microsoft. After it opened a research lab in Beijing, the company had no difficulty hiring top talents from the leading universities. But as products of a hierarchical culture, the new recruits would just sit there waiting for the instructions rather than taking initiative, which is so crucial in a research lab. So what was the company's solution? It told the recruits that they wouldn't be assigned any projects. Instead, for the next four weeks, they could talk to anybody in the company worldwide. After that, each researcher had to propose the top three projects he or she would like to work on. This approach made sure that the bright young researchers would take ownership of their projects and also learn to become more self-driven. Over time, they became bicultural, Chinese within China but also more American within the company. And last, rely on others to serve as cultural bridges. If you're headed for an important meeting with someone from a different culture and you are unsure about your knowledge of that culture, ask someone who is bicultural to join you and serve as a bridge. Everybody makes mistakes. The goal must always be to learn faster than the pace at which you commit mistakes.