Duchess of Sussex and accusations of bullying: a case of cultural clashes at work
The Culture Map: Decoding how people think, lead, and get things done across cultures by Erin Meyer
In my last post, I wrote about the accusations of workplace bullying against Meghan Markle, Buckingham Palace’s investigation and what belies a fair and just investigation. In this post, I want to address how the lack of cultural competency and understanding of communication styles that change based on culture can lead to misunderstanding to such an extent that their impact can feel like ‘bullying’, ‘undermining’, and ‘disrespecting someone’s abilities’.
One of the allegations of bullying made against Meghan Markle was her repeated emails to her staff members outside of regular work hours, being very early in the morning or late at night. I am sure there is more to the story than simply these emails, but this brief example itself is indicative of two very different working styles that exist in the U.S. and Canada versus England and many of the European countries. What is often considered eagerness, being a team player, and contribution to the smooth functioning of a company’s work here, can often be seen as a way to infringe on worker’s rights, micromanagement, and the erosion of trust in other cultures.
In her book: The Culture Map, Erin Meyer brilliantly outlines how cultural differences, particularly in communication styles and patterns, impact the functioning of a team and an organization.
“Many of these cultural differences, varying attitudes (such as when to speak versus when to remain quiet and the role of the leaders) may seem small but if you are unaware of them and are not equipped with effective strategies, they can derail your team meetings, demoralize your employees, frustrate your foreign supplier, & make it much harder to achieve your goals.”
Meyer outlines eight key areas that leaders need to be aware of in order for a smooth functioning of their teams, and in this post I will only focus on Low context versus High context communication styles.
In cultures where there’s low context, there are a few shared reference points. In these cultures the majority of people communicate (or expected to communicate) with clarity, explicit statements and simple messages. “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”
The United States has the highest low context communication styles, followed by Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Germany and the U.K. In these cultures, we like to make notes of what was decided on in a meeting, to send an email summarizing our meetings and the actionable items, or often repeating ourselves to make sure we’re communicating our point across.
In contrast, in high context cultures because there are a lot of common references, there are many implicit and non-verbal cues of communications, and the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the listener to decipher the appropriate cues depending on the cultural context. Countries such as Japan, India, China and Iran rate high in the high context communication styles. In such cultures, sending written notes and reminders after a meeting might be viewed as undermining the abilities of the workers because many believe that they do not need written reminders of what their tasks were, they will remember them.
Let’s take the simple and yet profound example of the British versus the American use of irony, two cultures that are both low context but vary differently in their use of irony because the U.K. has a higher context of communication style than the U.S.. For example, Meyer explains that often when an American makes a joke particularly in a work setting, they will make sure that through both verbal and physical cues they communicate that what they said was a joke, even if it is the sentence of ‘I was just kidding’. By comparison in the higher context of British culture, jokes are often told in a dead-pan manner, to the point that not being from that culture might lead someone to interpret the dead-pan irony literally and get upset.
Let’s take another example of giving feedback between French (France) and English (The United States). The French language is a much higher context language than English. There are seven times more words in English than in French, which suggests that French relies on contextual cues to decipher semantic ambiguities. This can particularly show up in how feedback is provided.
In a French setting positive impacts/performance are given implicitly while negative impacts are given much more directly. In the American and Anglo-Canadian style of leadership, the positive performances are given much more directly and the negative messages are cloaked in a positive and encouraging way. This can create such misunderstanding to the point that an American or Anglo-Canadian boss giving a performance review to their French employee might be surprised at how their employee is not improving on the negatives that they’re suggesting because of the way they have communicated such negatives.
This is not to generalize an entire population of a country and the varied and complex ways that people within those regions communicate, rather this is to highlight that culture matters!
When you work on a multicultural team or a team whose members come from different countries, it is important to equip yourself and your team members with the different communication styles of each other, otherwise simple cultural practices of communications can be misunderstood and lead to impacts of feeling disrespected, undermined, not trusted, and even bullied.
Check out our resource of the actions you can take if you have a blend of many cultures on your team.
