How to reach full impact in your global calls

Posted on 14. November 20216. September 2024 by Tania Pellegrini

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

The first step to reaching full impact in your global calls in this age of less travel and more home-office, is to use cultural intelligence. Our business world seems to shrink day by day. When you look at your agenda in the morning it likely says:

07:30 am meeting with Japan
11:00 am with Switzerland
6:00 pm with the USA

We have conversations and discuss business strategies, on a daily basis, with people all over the globe. Yet, do we modify the way we describe our thoughts and strategies depending on whether we are speaking to a North American rather than a Korean? Have we learnt how to create a strong business relationship with a Finn, a Qatari and a Brazilian?

Today, more than ever before, our daily activities require us to be ever so alert about very different mindsets. If you want to reach full impact in your global calls, you need to switch off autopilot and consciously prepare your meetings in advance, according to the mindset of the people you are expecting to deal with. One way to do that is to use Cultura Intelligence.

What is Cultural Intelligence?

Cultural Intelligence is the skill of being able to interpret unspoken codes of culture and then switch our communication styles accordingly, so that we become more effective with the person with whom we’re dealing and therefore reach our goals

There are two parts to that statement above. Firstly, we need to learn to read the “unspoken codes”. That might entail understanding when a “yes” means a “no”; how to know whether the question being asked is used to display interest or displeasure, or perhaps knowing when a smile or a laugh is hiding loss of face or embarrassment.

The second part of the statement refers to modifying our communication. Without that adaptation, we often struggle in really reaching the impact we were hoping for. If you are successful in reading the unspoken code but persist on using the same communication and behaviour you started with, it becomes much harder to reach your goals.

Let’s look at an example of how to use cultural intelligence.

Asia-Pacific Conference call

Julie works for a multinational organisation in Western Europe where each colleague is responsible for a different world region. She has recently started a new role as Head of Asia Pacific. Once a month, Julie has a conference call with the managers and teams in her region, Australia, Vietnam, Japan, etc. It’s her responsibility during each call to learn what the best practices are from each team.

Julie prepares her meetings meticulously, practising the exact questions she will ask the group and then how she will distribute the information afterwards. What Julie hasn’t prepared, is how to understand the unspoken codes that the various cultural norms might influence.

Julie comes out of her first few meetings feeling as though she has not achieved what she wanted. Her goal is to supply her manager with the best practices from the region. The Australian team supplied her one and she may have received one or two other results. However, she is missing quite a few, namely, the Japanese best practices, and Japan is an important market for her.

Julie wonders to herself, why is it that she can rarely get the information she needs from the Japanese market?

Cultural intelligence can help you decipher the unspoken codes

Why is Julie not effective in communicating her request to the Japanese team? Let’s look at how Julie can use Cultural Intelligence (CQ) to figure our what she needs to do.

Step 1 of CQ is Drive. Is Julie driven? Yes, she is. She is motivated to modify her communication and behaviour to reach her goals.

Step 2 of CQ is Knowledge. This is a very important aspect. What does Julie know about the Japanese culture? Well, Julie has learnt through reading up on Japan, that Japanese people are usually collectivist, or group-oriented. This could mean that a colleague is not willing to show or share their personal opinion. They would usually rather express the opinion of the team. Therefore in Julie’s case, the Japanese team likely need to have a team meeting after each call to discuss what they have heard in the meeting and then be able to give their opinion on the subject as a team at a later date.

Lack of knowledge about cultural norms and values can lead us to false negative judgments

It is usually easier to read the unspoken codes if we have acquired an understanding of the different cultural values of the people we are dealing with. Without that knowledge we are often prone to rely on our biases and start judging our counterparts negatively. In this case, Julie might erringly think that the Japanese team members are not speaking up because they are not experienced enough or don’t understand her or that they are just plain shy.

Step 3 of CQ is Strategy. Once Julie feels she knows why the team is not speaking up, she then needs to create a strategy that will allow the Japanese team to display all their knowledge and talk about their best practices. There may be several different ways of doing this and each individual should determine what would work best for them.

Step 4 of CQ is Putting the strategy into Action. Once the strategy has been decided, put the thoughts into action and see what happens. The action can be verbal or non-verbal. It could be a different manner of asking questions or a distinct approach to writing emails. It might be as simple as transforming the method of building trust with the team.

I don’t have enough hours in the day to go through all of that

Well, yes, it can seem a little long-winded, but what happens if you don’t take the time to think through your strategy? Are you prepared to risk missing your desired goals and not reaching full impact in your global conference calls?

Realign your global remote teams to create a powerful team culture

Posted on 21. January 202129. November 2021 by Tania Pellegrini

Are you ready for the next step? The start of a new year brings new-found energy with it. Now is an ideal moment to realign remote global teams to create a powerful and inclusive team culture. Bring your team communication to the next level in 2021 by building on what the team recently experienced. Although studies show that working from home can be beneficial for both the employee and the company, there are several challenges. "The main challenges that arise are communication, knowledge sharing, socialisation, performance evaluation and security."

Let's not get intimidated by the word "Culture". In our case, it means, "the way things are done around here". It is a set of accepted ways of behaving, communicating and getting things done that everybody on the team is comfortable with. When the team creates its own culture, each individual feels valued, included, engaged and is therefore more productive.

A strong team culture generates motivation, team-spirit, good communication and knowledge sharing. This in turn builds trust and helps the team deliver its goals. A thriving team culture is one that allows each team member to speak up and give their point of view on what their preferred communication style is.

The powerful team culture communication meeting

Bring the team together (officially) to discuss their team culture. Individuals have had the festive season to ponder over and informally discuss what they enjoyed and what they didn't enjoy about working from home. Use this as a catalyst.

Let's start with communication. An easy way to start the discussion right now it to ask about how productive or not the last six to eight months have been for each individual. Firstly, ask them to consider at what stage, and using which medium, they felt the communication flowed best? When you have good communication flow, creative ideas spill out.

Were they most productive over the phone, during a team zoom session, in one-on-ones, when the kids were in bed, or over a virtual coffee chat? Which communication means make them apprehensive and therefore less productive? Was it long-winded emails or short-handed WhatsApp messages? Individuals will talk plainly about what is best for them, as a result, you leverage on each individual's ideal situation. If you know that "John" is most creative spurting out quick WhatsApps then use it to help him shine and also share the best ideas.

remote team coffee breakSocialisation and trust create a strong team culture

When we socialise with our teammates, we learn more about them as people and not just as business colleagues. This creates trust, which in turn helps us and them to open up and share our ideas more freely. Socialisation is one of the areas that remote teams suffer the most in general and especially during lockdown moments. Socialising does not come naturally when individuals are sitting in front of their laptop feeling cut off from the world. Socialisation has to be consciously worked at on remote teams.

You could consider spending a few minutes at the beginning of team meetings running an ice breaker. Think about creating informal situations for colleagues to chat and meet even if it needs to be virtual. Virtual "aperos" work wonders. Socialisation and therefore trust create team spirit and allow each individual to feel valued.

Knowledge sharing and the dreaded 9pm conference call

If your multicultural team members sit in offices around the globe, it's vital to bring up the topic of time zones. Joining two-hour conference calls, three times a week at 9pm, after a long day of work is not sustainable and it is not very motivational. On top of that, if the participants are passive listeners rather than colleagues who need to actively speak, it becomes even worse.

the dreaded 9pm conference call

Therefore an important topic to discuss is always related to what time of the day these calls should be made. Ask the team at what time of the day they feel they are most productive. If the weekly facilitator is comfortable skipping dinner with the kids for a meeting, that doesn't mean everybody is. Too often, the accepted time zone for such meetings is where headquarters are based. For a motivation boost, consider rotating the meeting facilitator each week. This can be particularly engaging for the facilitator, and what's more, it allows individuals who are not very forthcoming to show a different side of themselves.

A team is made up of individuals

It's vital in such a "team culture creation session", to ensure everybody gets a chance to speak up. If you have a culturally diverse team, with members who perhaps come from hierarchical or collectivist cultures, you may have colleagues who are unwilling to speak up in such a public gathering. There are a number of ways to help them speak up. Tell them in advance what will be expected of them in such a meeting. Let them know that they will be expected to participate vocally. That will give them a chance to prepare something and not feel put on the spot when it occurs. Rotating the facilitator gives every team member a chance to speak up. As a result, it will also give the team a very different perspective each time on what is considered important and who prioritises what.

Keep the powerful team culture alive - write a team charter

Whatever the team decides as the best way to proceed, write it somewhere so you can look back at it occasionally. Choose four or five topics that are the most consequential during the discussion. These should be topics in which the team finds consensus. Use these topics to write the team charter. Most importantly, keep the discussion alive as time passes and as pressure increases. It's easy to stick to "good intentions" when we are not under pressure. However, when tension increases, we tend to fall back on what is the "normal" way of behaving for us. What is normal for one individual, may not be what was discussed as the best way for the team to move forward.

Remember, if culture is, "the way things are done around here," then it needs to be accepted by the whole team to allow each individual to feel included, valued and engaged.

Financial Times or Caffè Latte? Conference-call with Japanese.

Posted on 8. September 202025. November 2021 by Tania Pellegrini

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.