This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Mobility magazine. Interviewee titles, organizations, and products mentioned were current at the time of writing but may have since changed.
If you’re part of a global company, at least some of your colleagues are likely to be scattered around the world, reporting in from their home bases of Germany, China, or the U.S., for example.
As the last several years have made clear, you really can work from almost anywhere, as long as you’ve got a high-speed internet connection. The cross-cultural mix with global teams comes with great reward: Team members tend to be more innovative, as they’re more likely to consider new and different ideas that are the result of different cultural perspectives.
But managing global teams also comes with a unique problem: the assumptions team members make about another’s culture. As a result, these assumptions can affect how team members relate to each other—and their mutual project. The trick comes in managing these cultural differences and expectations.
Cultural Subtleties Can Be Tricky
Managing those differences may sound easy at first blush, but the subtleties can trip people up. When you’re part of a global team, you certainly don’t want to make a gaffe based on an assumption about where the team member is based.
For example, someone from the U.S. may ask a colleague located in a Latin American
country to dive right into a project. But across Latin America and in Spain, people typically
want to establish trust and professional respect before they feel comfortable working together, says Dean Foster. He’s the founder of DFA Intercultural Global Solutions and president of Dean Foster Global Cultures, consulting with companies to aid cross-cultural communication, and he’s played a central role in developing the field of cross-cultural training and consulting.
“The need to manage a virtual team and still manage the cultural differences that arise in terms of teamwork is a critical skill in the 21st century,” Foster says. “Today, you can have a dispersed team in 10 different countries all working on a similar project, and the challenges can be many.”
Foster says that our ideas about the best way to communicate and build team relationships are based on culture, although that may not be immediately apparent.
“I know, as an American, for example, the preferred way for Americans to run meetings and get projects done,” he says. “But people in other countries may perceive things very differently. The way we look at the project may not be the same, but we may not know that.”
“If differences in the way we work and live are not understood and not managed, these can be real minefields for global teams. Projects can fall apart,” Foster says.
Stop Speaking at Cross-Purposes
Being able to recognize and understand these differences is the key to managing global teams. The cultural differences around work may be significant, Foster adds, and teams may not expect that.
“How they do things in the U.S. versus how they do them in China, for example—every aspect of work in those two cultures is very different,” Foster says. “But when cultures seem more similar than different, the differences that do exist can be even more of a problem because they’re not anticipated.”
For instance, a team member who grew up in the U.S. may take for granted that teammates in the U.K., Canada, or France have similar cultural assumptions around work. But working styles aren’t the same. “The French, for example, really value information that is organized according to a clear and precise thought process,” Foster says. “French culture demands a lot of detailed logic that leads up to the conclusion or action and requires end results to be based on well-established precedence, rules, processes, and procedures.”
The same is true for many other European countries as well as Japan, he adds. “This is opposed to U.S. Americans, who typically make decisions more akin to, ‘Let’s give it a try, here’s what we want to do, and here’s a way we think it could work.’ We don’t need to justify every detail with an underlying predetermined process,” he says. “But the French need these details and processes in place first to justify their conclusion.
“U.S. Americans typically come in saying, ‘Here is our end result and what we want to do,’
and that forces the French to ask a lot of questions: ‘How do we avoid this, what if such-and-such happens?’” Foster continues. “Then the U.S. Americans can feel like they’re being pummeled and asked about unimportant minutiae.
“The Americans might say, ‘We really haven’t researched that point, but we’re not concerned about it.’ To the French, that’s an insult.”
3 Steps Toward Cultural Competency
Cultural competency can help avoid these kinds of communication blunders. Foster defines cultural competency as understanding how others see you and taking responsibility for managing the cultural differences that exist between cultures. You then determine how to build trust and common ground across those differences.
He outlines three steps that global managers can follow to help attain cultural competency:
1. Recognize the Need
Acknowledge that your globally dispersed team faces cultural differences, even when a teammate calls in from Canada or any culture of similarity. The challenge is figuring out whatever differences exist and how they may play out in specific work situations.
Your team won’t succeed without the ability to recognize and navigate differences. Team members need to be able to work collaboratively and trust one another.
2. Develop Skills to Manage the Differences
You can find best practices out there, but having the skill to accomplish them and instill them into your own company’s culture takes training. You can develop competency through interactive training and coaching or self-paced information-filled courses, such as those offered by WERC.
Training can help move people away from their intuitive response to cultural differences, which all too often is misunderstanding and conflict. If you’re a U.S. American, for example, your instinct may be to talk at someone when conflict arises, explaining how the project will succeed when people do things your way.
Those initial responses often come from a place of ignorance and fear, Foster says. Your
newfound skills help you get to the second, more effective response of working together to
resolve differences. “[For example,] if you’re working in Japan, you need to understand the Japanese will work differently, you need to know where those differences will reveal themselves at work, and you have to know how to behave effectively given those differences,” Foster says.
Or maybe you need to know how negotiation styles differ between, say, the U.S. and Japan and between Japan and Canada, and how people from the differing countries resolve conflict.
Through learning and training, you’ll be able to navigate productively through those differences, Foster says.
3. Set Strategy
Finally, with these skills mastered, you can develop a proactive strategy for managing cultural differences. Foster says most difficulties happen due to different communication styles, including differing methods of conflict management.
Savvy global managers examine the degree to which cultural divides may occur as a project moves forward. How and when might they appear? Will the differences be significant or minimal? Where will they appear and cause friction?
And bear in mind that the differences may not be just between two countries. More likely than not, global teams need to manage multiple cultures. You then have to understand and be aware of different working styles among these other countries and set strategies to work with specific global differences.
For example, Foster says, if you now know that your French teammate will want detailed
information upfront—not just your decisions and suggestions—so that they can feel comfortable about your conclusions, your strategy should be to “provide far more detail than you might have expected to. Though different from the way you might have done things in the U.S., you’re going to have a far more effective meeting with the French if you do,” he says.
But once you’ve set a strategy, you still need to practice. “Practicing different methods of
working together is important,” Foster says, to help instill the ability to consider where other
cultures may be coming from.
Patricia Serwe particularly appreciates the ability to practice what she learns. Serwe took a course offered by WERC to keep her skills and certification fresh. She is global mobility regional lead for CGI Inc., a multinational information technology and business consulting services firm that employs 77,000 people around the world.
“The course had three distinct modules and included practical examples where I could practice,” she says. “I was asked: ‘What would you do or not do?’ in this situation. Or ‘What do you think would be the most appropriate behavior or decision in that situation?’”
One example dealt with American leaders leading a team with members from Europe, Asia,
and India. “That’s the type of situation I work with every day,” Serwe says. Since global teams depend on one another to get their jobs done, she says, it’s imperative to understand where your team members are coming from.
The course’s practical guidance helped reinforce that. In the U.S., for example, people are very task-oriented. Other cultures, less so, Serwe says, adding that they put more of an emphasis on building and maintaining relationships.
Say an American leader who has been successful in the U.S. is now heading a global team. She asks team members to design and return a report they need to work on together by a certain time, and the team misses the deadline. “Is she going to be forceful and [demand], ‘How come this isn’t done on time?’ or, rather, is she going to adapt her style and try to find out what could be the reason for the delay?” Serwe says.
With cultural competency, that leader can better understand and strategize. “In some cultures, if a person gets married, attends a wedding or funeral, or observes a religious holiday, the event takes precedence,” Serwe says. “It’s not that the team does not want to complete the work, but that aspect of their life is so important it will affect the outcome and needs to be planned for.”
Foster says that despite what we might hear about workforce globalization, there will always be cultural differences, so understanding them is the key to successfully managing global teams.
“We might think cultural differences are going away, but in fact, we’re encountering them more frequently and with more intensity than ever before,” he says. “Cultural ignorance is unacceptable—and will ultimately trip you up.”