Influence across cultures at work without country score tables

You will be offered a shortcut. It takes the form of a table of countries with scores against a handful of dimensions, and the promise is that you can look up your counterpart's nationality the night before a meeting and know how to behave. Decline it.

The best known of these vocabularies, the split between high and low context communication, describes something that exists. The shortcut fails anyway, for a reason that has nothing to do with whether the scores are accurate.

You do not meet a country. You meet a person shaped by a family, a profession, a company, and a decade of specific experience, who may sit anywhere in a distribution wider than the gap between two national averages.

Applying the average to the person in front of you is as reliable as guessing someone's height from their passport. Once the score is in your head, you will see it confirmed; that is what people do with expectations.

The method that works is slower and cheaper: watch, test with something small, adjust. It requires no lookup and produces knowledge about the actual person.

What to take away

Why the lookup makes you worse

Three things happen when you enter a meeting with a cultural score in your head.

You stop observing. The score has already told you what the silence means, so you do not check. You treat the individual as an instance of a category. People can tell, and it is not a compliment.

You acquire an excuse: whatever goes wrong can be attributed to culture rather than to something you did. So you do not fix it.

There is a fourth cost that is easy to miss. The workplace has its own culture, often stronger than the national one.

Two auditors from opposite sides of the world share more meeting conventions than either shares with a designer in the next room. The score does not know someone's profession, and the profession often governs the room.

The loop

Replace the lookup with a loop that runs for the first few weeks of any new working relationship.

Watch. In the first two meetings, say less than you want to. Note what happens rather than what you expected to happen. Who speaks, in what order, for how long. What a decision looks like when it is made. What happens after someone says yes.

Test with something small. Make one low-cost request with a clear shape: a document by a date, an answer to a specific question, a fifteen-minute call. What happens next is data about this person, and it costs almost nothing to gather. A single small test tells you more than any table.

Adjust on the specific point. If the date passed without the document and without a word, you have learned something about how dates and silences work here. Change your handling of dates. Do not change your personality, your directness, or your whole manner, because that reads as performance and because most of it was fine.

Then run the loop again with the next small thing. Within a month you know how this person, and probably this team, actually operates, and none of it came from a lookup.

What to watch

The behaviors below vary enormously between workplaces and are visible in the first fortnight. None of them requires knowing where anyone is from.

Where a meeting turns out to be for ratifying, the deciding happened earlier in quiet one-to-one conversations. Japanese practice has a word for that groundwork, nemawashi, and the habit is far more widespread than the word: plenty of offices with no name for it run entirely this way.

Watch the second column for two weeks and the third column writes itself. If corrections arrive by hint, your direct feedback will land as an attack, and you will not be told that it did. If a meeting is for ratifying, arriving with an open question marks you as the person nobody consulted.

What to hold constant

Adapting everything is as much a mistake as adapting nothing. A handful of behaviors are valued nearly everywhere, and changing them to fit a guessed norm makes you harder to work with, not easier.

These travel because they are about reducing the other person's uncertainty, and uncertainty is uncomfortable in every workplace on earth. Keep them fixed and adjust the surface around them.

Attributing to culture what is not culture

The most expensive error in this whole subject is the sentence "that is just how they are there." It is used to explain a missed deadline, a silent meeting, a refusal, a delay. Sometimes it is correct. Far more often the explanation is individual, or structural, and the cultural label has stopped you from finding it.

The silent person may be silent because their manager is in the room, true in every country, and a missed deadline may be missed because the request was never actually theirs to deliver. A refusal may be a refusal.

Before reaching for culture, ask the ordinary questions: who decides this, what does it cost them, did they understand what was asked. Culture is the explanation of last resort, rarely needed.

Being legible

Everything above is being done to you too. The person opposite watches your silences, your dates, and what you do after you say yes, forming a picture.

Make that picture easy: say what your silence means, whether a date is firm, and your next step. Then do it, because predictable is worth more than cultural fluency across any distance, and it is entirely within your control.

The conversation these observations feed into is usually a negotiation, and the preparation for it is the same anywhere; see negotiation. Getting something done by someone you cannot instruct, which is the normal case across a distance, is in influence without authority.

Working out who has to be told, and in what order, when the order itself varies, is in stakeholder influence. Most of what looks like a cultural clash is a dispute about decision rights, described in conflict resolution, and much of what people are adjusting to is not your country but your position; see leadership influence.

Common questions

Surely some general knowledge is better than none?

Knowledge of a language, a holiday calendar, and the basic courtesies is useful and cheap. Knowledge that claims to predict how a person will behave from their nationality is not knowledge. It is an average, and you are not meeting an average.

What if I have no time to observe?

Then ask. "How do decisions usually get made here?" and "who should hear this first?" are questions people answer readily and accurately, and asking them is itself read as respect. The lookup is what people use instead of asking, and asking is better.

I adapted and it went badly. Why?

Usually because the adaptation was visible and read as imitation, or because you adapted a behavior that was fine and left the one that was not. Go back to the specific thing that went wrong and adjust that alone.

Does any of this apply within one country?

All of it. The distance between two departments in the same building can be greater than the distance between two offices on different continents, and the method is identical: watch, test small, adjust on the point.