Only the most insular workplace doesn’t have an international component nowadays – even if that extends no further than an office manager who can order drinks in Portuguese. But, says Erin Meyer, our notions of cultural sensitivity haven’t evolved since the days of Basil Fawlty.
She should know. As affiliate professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD in Paris, Meyer is perhaps the world’s pre-eminent expert in building effective cross-cultural teams and smoothing misunderstandings between people of different backgrounds. She has shared her wisdom with dozens of multinationals and shows CEOs and other senior leaders how to become effective global managers. And in her debut book, The Culture Map, she has distilled her wisdom for the rest of us, creating a handbook for more culturally sensitive business.
People Management sat her down on a fine British summer’s day with a rich Italian coffee and a piece of Swiss roll, to find out more…
Surely, in our new globalised world, cultural differences have become less important?
That’s what you’d think, but culture is still impacting us in complex ways. As companies become more international, culture will become the biggest challenge of the 21st century. The problem is that you can never just ‘get’ it. The more you try, the more you actually create cultural stereotypes, which magnify rather than reflect what’s going on between people.
But rather than look for cultural negatives, it’s better to look at positives. It’s too easy to say that Americans are more direct, or that the Chinese don’t tend to say very much. To move forward, we must not fall into the trap of describing culture in terms of what it’s like, but try instead to describe how one culture perceives another. Brits perceive Chinese businesspeople as quiet and possibly shy. But these same Chinese perceive Brits as people who always interrupt and want to show off. They would see themselves as listeners. It’s not one easy universal view.
So there’s no one fixed definition of a culture?
Essentially, yes. In the UK and the US, punctuality is seen as a virtue; in Brazil it is seen as inflexibility, so cultural awareness should be about knowing where cultural misunderstandings are likely to occur. While some might say there is a global ‘professional culture' that supersedes all this, in my experience there is always variation in what people see as the appropriate way to do business.
What cultural misunderstandings have you seen?
There are lots! In practically every Asian country it’s perceived as rude to say ‘no’. I heard of a UK leader who asked how an IT relocation project in Japan was going. The answer he got was ‘yes, fine’, but when he visited three months later, he discovered it hadn’t even been started. The problem is that in Japan, deference is the dominant value, and businesspeople there have many uses of the word yes. It can mean everything from what we consider to be ‘yes’, to ‘I’m listening to you’ (it’s not yet happening).
Can people ever rely on what their overseas colleagues are saying?
My model is about identifying where countries sit on eight different ‘scales’, and seeing the relative positions of countries on that scale. For example, one of them is ‘confrontation’. France is at the extreme end of creating confrontation, while Japan is at the other. The UK is just off the middle. My view is that if you know the positions of different countries across different scales, you can then see that it’s both where they sit on it, and the relative positions vis-à-vis other countries, that matters. No research I have ever read suggests that cultures are becoming more similar, and this scales approach backs it up.
Do HR professionals still rely on unhelpful national stereotypes when it comes to recruiting different nationalities?
Undoubtedly. We think of the French as work-shy, clock-watching, and often on strike. In actual fact, French managers work longer hours than their British equivalents. The problem with stereotypes is that they are built on inaccurate information, which will always lead people to make erroneous decisions.
How can people become more culturally sensitive?
You don’t have to learn what each culture is like, just how cultures perceive each other. Plotting how cultures map against each other helps, because HR can see that in five areas, for example, they and their international colleagues are very similar, but in a few they’re very different. Appreciating and allowing for these differences will pay dividends. Until people stop judging others from their own frame of reference, they won’t be culturally aware. I’m still learning new things all the time, and I’ve been studying this for years…