What do you do if you have a blend of many cultures in one team? How to create effective communications to cut down misunderstanding
In our multicultural society, and particularly if your company has global partners, you might find yourself on a team with Americans and Anglo-Canadians who like to recap everything and have the outcomes written down, Japanese people who read between the lines and look for visual and cultural cues, British folks who like to use dead-pan irony, and French workers who like to give negative feedback directly.
How do you navigate possible misunderstandings?
In such cases, low context processes can be extremely beneficial. Here are some tips on creating effective communications to cut down misunderstandings:
Be pro-active:
Learn and highlight the different communication styles of each culture. Reading books such as The Culture Map and discussing it with your employees can be a great way to start the conversation on both their opinion of cultural practices and how to collaboratively address them to reduce misunderstandings.
Don’t wait until problems arise:
Just because an issue has not come to your attention, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The best time to address these issues is when you’re putting your team together. The second best time is the moment you learn about such cultural communication differences.
Separate the Problem from the People:
Lay out the communication issues as kinks and knots needing to be worked through, not as ‘people who have communication problems’. Communication patterns emerge and evolve through hundreds of years within each culture as well as decades of communication practices within families, which are the smaller units of the said culture. Separating the person from the problem allows you to approach the issues with less defensiveness and negative assumptions about others.
Collaborate with your employees:
Ask your team to come up with solutions that would minimize misunderstanding. For example:
“What is the best way for you to receive feedback from a colleague or a manager?”,
“What are some ways that you would like mistakes to be pointed out and communicated to you?”
“What would a successful meeting look like and what are steps in achieving that?”
“How late is ‘late’?” (Arrival to a team meeting or submitting a report)
“Which decisions are made consensually in the team and which decisions are made top down?”
Create a list of such solutions and work through consensus to create a set of rules based on everyone’s answers to such questions.
A rotating structure of recapping meetings:
create a rotating task where each member of the team is responsible for recapping what was said in the meeting and outlining the actionable items in an email to everyone so everyone has a chance to read everything and correct any mistakes or misunderstanding on who is responsible for what.
Build consensus on the team’s culture:
Through collaboration with your employees set out the communication rules of your little community which is your team. Make sure this culture of the team was created based on consensus in order to get the most buy-in on the communication methods of the team.
Make time to review processes you are creating:
It doesn’t matter how well informed and researched efforts of cultural competency are, there will always be value in getting feedback for tweaks, to make sure your efforts are yielding the results you are looking for.
Whether we are aware of it or not, our cultural and familial upbringing affect our communication styles. These styles can clash with each other and create sticky conflictual situations. Simply learning about them and collaborating on creative solutions can move your team out of the pattern of miscommunications and misinterpretations.
