An Italian sports-event manager, Elisabetta, has just finished a conference call with Japanese clients. She switches off her webcam and thinks about the meeting she just held. Her gut feeling is that she wasn’t very successful but she can’t really place her finger on what went wrong. Why did she have the feeling that her Japanese business associates didn’t really consider her to be competent and reliable?
We often hear that we need to adapt when working with people of different cultural backgrounds. Is that still important with the current pandemic? Travel is close to impossible so we don’t need to learn to use chopsticks in Japan or avoid using our left hand at the table in Qatar. Do we still need to worry about whether we should “bow, kiss or shake hands”?
It is just as important to adapt your style in virtual communication. Actually, it’s perhaps even more important. It is easy to misinterpret a message through email. There is usually little context to help you grasp the real message being sent.
Building Trust
If trust is the key to creating high-performing multicultural teams or earning new clients, then we need to learn to build trust through our virtual communication, be it a conference call with Japanese or an email to a Swiss person. The way we build trust with an Indian is different to how we build trust with a Finn or a Filipino.
Let’s go back to Elisabetta. Nobody had ever told her that firstly she needs to control her emotions in Japanese business meeting and secondly that silence is common. Silence can mean many different things in Japan and should not be interrupted, especially not in virtual meetings.
However, knowing something is not necessarily automatically going to help. Milton Bennet says that intercultural sensitivity is not natural and that ‘Adaptation means we need to consciously shift our perspective and intentionally alter our behaviour[1].
Japanese tend to say,”Only a dead fish has an open mouth”.
Italians tend to wear their heart on their sleeves. If they’re happy they’ll smile and laugh with joy, if they’re angry they’ll grimace with frustration. If they’re confused, their forehead will wrinkle in a puzzled frown. Japanese tend to say, “Only a dead fish has an open mouth”. This means, a true professional controls his/her feelings in business meetings. Loss of control is deemed unprofessional. Therefore, Elisabetta’s gut feeling was probably spot on. Her meeting was likely unsuccessful due to her constant large gestures and the fact that she kept interrupting the silence that she was “hearing” from the Japanese side.
Silence to Elisabetta means there is a lack of communication or misunderstanding and she feels she needs to break the silence. Elisabetta adds more and more information into the silence meanwhile her constant chatter doesn’t allow the Japanese clients to digest what she is saying.
Building trust with your clients, colleagues or service providers of different cultural backgrounds requires “code-switching”. This means adapting your communication and behaviour. Whether we’re writing an email, leading a conference call or meeting face-to-face, we need to deliberately work at certain skills that are not innate. This could be for example, not using too many facial gestures (in Japan) or learning the cultural values of your multicultural team to know what motivates them. It could also require learning to give feedback indirectly to an Indian service provider.
Step 1: An effective conference call with Japanese, Indians or Finns – Know yourself
The first step to becoming interculturally competent is to know yourself. Take a good look at yourself and ask, “What are my preferred ways of communicating? How do I usually behave in meetings and in situations of conflict and how do I problem solve?”
Let’s take a concrete example. You are the project lead of your team. Your preferred way of communicating is through email and you tend to be very task-oriented. You write short messages and get straight to the point in all your messages. In most cases you don’t even add a greeting or a salutation because you find it unnecessary.
The software company you have outsourced in India is not meeting your timeline needs. This frustrates you because you cannot accept any more delays in your project. You need to consider the best way to tell the Indian service provider that you are not happy with their service. Typically you would do that in a short email with bullet points that specify what you are not happy with, expecting this to get them moving faster. (Stop…. don’t click on send…yet).
Step 2: Effective conference-calls: Learn the values of the ‘other’ culture
The second step is to learn the values of the other person. What is the cultural background of this person? How might they perceive me and my communication style according to their values?
Let’s go back to our scene. Indians are generally relationship-based. As a result, they like to exchange personal information with the person they are dealing with. Secondly, they are usually high-context communicators, that is to say, they read into the body language that is being used to interpret the message rather than just listen to the words. Words that are negative, like, “no”, can create disharmony and loss of face. Moreover, they are quite hierarchical, therefore they usually wait for the manager to give them instructions on what needs to be done.
Therefore your short, negative bullet-point message, straight to the operator is unlikely going to get the response you are expecting.
What should you do?
Step 3: Code-switching – adapting your style
The third step is to ‘code-switch’. That is to say, adapt your behaviour and communication to motivate the person you’re dealing with and still get the point across.
Code-switching can be verbal or non-verbal. It’s the way you adapt your emails or even which communication medium you decide to use. It means saving face by giving indirect negative feedback. It also means that your once a fortnight task-related mails may not be the most efficient way of reaching timelines.
Is email the correct medium to use in our above case? Switching on the webcam in a conference call with Japanese or Indians could be more effective as visual aid helps read body language. Consider what words can be used that are not negative (see previous article on building trust remotely.) Especially consider whether your conversation needs to be addressed to the manager of the company or to the operator.
So how do you think Elisabetta needs to code-switch with her Japanese clients? Should she read and cite the Financial Times to improve their perspective of her competency or should she rather sip on a caffè latte in a weekly non work-related virtual, “webcam-ed” exchange with them?
[1] Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity”, Intercultural Press, 1993. 21-71.
