Influence across cultures mistakes that experienced operators still make

Almost every mistake in this area has the same shape. Something happened, an explanation was reached for, and the explanation was culture when it was something else. The alternative explanation was usually available, ordinary, and one question away.

Nine of them below, each with what was assumed, what it usually turns out to be, and the check.

What to take away

Nine attribution errors

1. Reading a delay as a norm about time. Assumed: dates mean something different here. Usually: the request was never actually theirs to deliver, or it entered a queue you cannot see. Check. Ask where it sits and what is ahead of it.

2. Reading silence as deference. Assumed: people here do not contradict seniors. Usually: their manager was in the room, which produces the same silence in every country. Check. Ask the same person the same question one to one.

3. Reading indirectness as evasion. Assumed: they are avoiding a straight answer. Usually: the answer was given, softly, and you did not recognize the local form of a no. Check. Watch what happens to the thing described as difficult. If it never moves, it was a refusal.

4. Reading a hard challenge as hostility. Assumed: this person has a problem with me. Usually: vigorous public disagreement is how being taken seriously is expressed in this group. Check. Watch how they treat each other, not just how they treat you.

5. Explaining an individual by a population. Assumed: this person will behave the way the score says. This is the ecological fallacy in working clothes: an average across a population tells you almost nothing about the individual in front of you, whose position in the distribution you have no way to guess. Check. Two meetings of watching beats any table.

6. Explaining behavior by disposition rather than by situation. Assumed: that is how they are. This is the fundamental attribution error, and the cultural version is its most confident form, because it supplies a ready-made reason. Usually: an incentive, a constraint, or a piece of missing information. Check. Ask what would have to change for the thing to happen.

7. Over-adapting. Assumed: matching their manner will help. Usually: an imitated manner is read accurately and discounted, and it removes the thing that actually travels, which is being predictable. Check. Adapt on procedure and leave your manner alone.

8. Treating language difficulty as cultural difference. Assumed: their brevity or hesitation means something about norms. Usually: they are working in a second or third language and choosing safe constructions. Check. Move to writing and see whether the register changes.

9. Using culture to explain your own failure. Assumed: this did not work because of the distance. Usually: the ask was unclear, or it had no owner, or it cost somebody something you never named. Check. Ask what you would conclude if the same thing had happened with the team next door.

What was assumed, and what it was

Every row in the right-hand column is checkable in a single conversation. That is the argument for treating culture as the last explanation rather than the first: the alternatives are cheaper to test and correct more often.

The two directions of the same error

Under-adapting and over-adapting are usually described as opposite mistakes, and they come from the same source. Both are attempts to decide in advance what the other person is like, one by ignoring the question and one by answering it from a table.

The method that avoids both is not a middle setting. It is observation: watch two meetings, make one small request, and change your handling on the specific point where you were shown to be wrong. That loop is set out in influence across cultures, and the six things worth watching are in influence across cultures examples.

Three mistakes are not about distance. The delay, the unowned ask, and the unnamed cost are standard failures when asking someone who does not report to you, described in influence without authority.

Silence in front of a manager comes from position, covered in leadership influence. A hard public challenge misread as hostility is a manufactured dispute that then needs closing, which is conflict resolution.

Common questions

If I should not use country information at all, what do I read before a first meeting?

Read about the institutions rather than the people: how contracts work, what the regulator requires, what the working week looks like. Those are facts and they are useful. Then spend the first two meetings watching, which is where the information about the person actually is.

Is there no case for knowing a norm in advance?

For etiquette, yes, and it is cheap to learn: greetings, forms of address, whether to bring anything. Etiquette errors are forgiven almost everywhere. The errors that cost are procedural, and those cannot be looked up because they belong to a company and a team rather than to a country.

How do I check whether a soft phrase was a refusal without asking bluntly?

Watch what happens over the next fortnight, and ask a process question rather than a yes-or-no one: who else would need to approve this, and what happens next. A real maybe produces a name or a date. A refusal produces neither.

I have already over-adapted with a counterpart for months.

Change one thing at a time rather than announcing a new approach. Start with the procedural points where you were guessing, and keep the parts you were doing because they were correct anyway. Nobody notices a gradual return to your own manner; everybody notices an announcement about it.

What if the difference really is cultural?

Then you will find that out by observation, and you will know which specific behavior it applies to rather than carrying a general belief. That is a much more useful thing to hold, and it arrives at roughly the same speed as the wrong version.