Chaos to calm: International culture and its impact on communication with Sarah Black S4 E10 

In this final episode, Jenni talks to Sarah Black, global communications consultant, about the factors to consider when communicating within an international culture. Sarah talks about the challenges of working across different cultures, miscommunication when it comes to corporate values, and leadership expectations. As well as how small things can cause discontent, a lack of connection, and why people might even come across as rude when that’s completely unintended.  

They share tips and tools to help unpack where you are and where you come from, and really delve into how to think around the environment you are in. 

Global teams can be tricky to engage with so working with Sarah to help people think differently about building strong teams around the world is brilliant when you’re looking at intentionally changing culture. In her latest blog, Sarah shares her tips which include the need to get curious and how to be time zone sensitive. Sarah’s blog – Redefining Communication

Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:

Don’t Shoot the Messenger Podcast – Vicki Marinker Season 2, Episode 6 with Jenni Field on How to build a cohesive and diverse culture that’s fit for purpose. 

World Time Buddy : a practical tool for looking at time zones for global meetings. 

Cultural Intelligence Center: lots of free resources and info about how you can develop your ability to relate and work effectively in culturally diverse situations. 

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer - book and website 

Americans Are Fake and the Dutch Are Rude! By Batja Mesquita, The Behavioral Scientist 

How cultural differences can impact global teams, Harvard Business Review, 2021 

Leading with cultural intelligence – David Livermore 

Get in touch with Sarah here on LinkedIn or through their website www.athrucommunications.com  

You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn

Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be joined by Sarah Black, who is a global communications professional with over 30 years experience, having worked in consultancy for major brands and nonprofits in the UK, Ireland, the US, all over the place, currently residing in Scotland, I believe, Sarah. And we’re going to be talking today about the challenges in global organisations where you’ve got different cultures coming together and some of the chaos that can come from that and how you can navigate it. I’m very excited about this conversation. And I feel like I’ve said this in most ones this season. I could be here for hours talking about this.

So, thank you for joining me. 

So, to kick us off, let’s talk a little bit about the challenges that you see in organisations that are global and… 

What are the kinds of challenges or the chaos that comes from some of those? 

Impacts on employee engagement and alignment

So, some of the things that come up working across cultures is you might have a situation where the head office culture becomes quite dominant. So, whether that’s Jakarta or Johannesburg or Chicago, they kind of try and set the organisational culture and it doesn’t really work everywhere. And so that impacts things like employee engagement, employee alignment. 

Micommunication

And the other thing that you see quite often is just miscommunication. So, take something like your corporate values. Do those really translate across cultures? Like, do they really mean the same things? I mean, you can literally translate, but does that land in the same way in terms of what people, how people internalize that or how that outcomes behaviour?

Leadership

So different cultures think about leadership and their expectation of leadership differently. But if your leaders are behaving in a way that’s suitable to the culture in which they were trained, raised, or operated, exposed to, whatever that happens to be, then you can have real misunderstanding and you can have real disconnects and teams not performing well. And it builds then to things like credibility, trust, and also, and I feel like I’m stealing from Advita’s episode a little bit here.

Sorry, Advita, that’s going to happen a bit. Is that if you’re looking at things like inclusion, but what’s driving that is one culture’s version of that. But also if you’re not communicating in a way that’s sensitive, and it’s even like small things like, you know, you jump onto a Zoom call and you say, good morning, and half your team’s going, well, it’s six o’clock in the evening here and I have to have tea with my kids. You know, holiday, small. They may seem like small things, but they can really, you know, create sort of discontent in organisations and make people feel that there’s, you know, they’re not part of one global team that they’re, you know, off on the side. And so see a lot of that. 

Interpersonal relationship barriers

And then also interpersonal relationships. You can have real barriers because you’re just not connecting. People might think you’re being disrespectful or rude. I get a lot of feedback, certain cultures that I’m very direct. Some people love that. Some people are a bit like, oh, that’s a bit, oh, dial it back. And I have to be careful about that from a communications point of view, and I’m more aware of that now. And even things like using humor with your colleagues. I’m from Northern Ireland. We have a very distinctive sense of humor.

And I, working in the States, really had to marshal that, shall we say. And that’s, those things all become like from the interpersonal to the global to the structural can become very complicated. And a lot of it is just not stopping to think how does this land with someone who doesn’t think about these things.

I think one of the things I’m looking at the moment I’m really interested in is how does our cultural background affect how we think about work. So, what are our expectations of work? What’s the relationship with work in terms of where it fits in the whole pie of my life?

You know, that’s really interesting to me because then that impacts your leadership, your communications, everything about how you do the business of work. And so I’m super interested in that. So all of those things can, you know, just cause all kinds of chaos.

And, I’ve got so many questions. And I don’t want to get too far into the solutions, but I think the values piece is really interesting to me because it’s something we talk about a lot in organisations, about the importance of having behaviours linked to values. And I read some statistics recently that it was something like only a third of organisations map behaviours to values. And I’ll have to dig it out and put it in the show notes. But I was baffled by the fact it was so few organisations map the two.

In a global organisation and the culture that you’re trying to create, do you just have different values in different places?

Or is it trying to find something? Because trying to, I always say when you’re trying to please everybody, you don’t please anybody because you’re trying to be all things to everybody. And I don’t know how you get around that. When you’re looking at things like values, where you’re trying to create a culture where we can all belong and feel part of something, but they mean such different things in different places. 

I think part of it’s to do with how you develop those values. 

You know, depending what countries you’re working in, are you sitting down with the team and going, what does that word mean to you?How does that? And then it’s the stories that you build around them. So, and how do you demonstrate those?

So the outworking of that, what does that mean? How does that resonate? And I think a lot of collaboration and a lot of listening and being smart about how you ask the questions so that it’s a tendency with companies that get bigger and bigger that gets a bit top down and head office-y and those sorts of things happen. So, I think being aware that it lands differently for other people is a good starting point, but then it’s the ability to adapt. 

And also I think there’s a, sometimes we focus a little bit too much on the differences and there are arguments for the things that we do have in common, right? And so finding ways that you bring people together around shared things, shared experiences, shared values. And I was actually listening to you talking about servant leadership being that, you know, the cultural fit piece on an interview that you did recently. We can put that in the show notes.

And also it’s to do with sort of a little bit of honouring the local culture. So if you look at something like, you know, say a McDonald’s, their restaurant offering will be adapted slightly to local markets, right? So it’s still McDonald’s, it’s still the same experience, it’s still the same culture, but there is local adaptation and flexibility. And that really is the heart of this idea of cultural intelligence. So it’s not enough to just go, yes, I’m very sensitive to my colleagues in wherever. It’s how do we adapt? How do we flex? And how do we have a strategy for meeting those differences?

I love, the McDonald’s example because I always remember people being really excited that you get alcohol at certain McDonald’s in different parts of the world. But there’s also, there’s that sort of interest of, oh, what’s different about it here? That curiosity that I think often comes. But I think it’s such a nice example of how you can have a brand and an experience and a culture that’s adapted but still feels part of something. I think that’s a nice one that most people can probably relate to.

And I think, you know, you think of sort of to look at the brand experience and kind of we’re focusing more on kind of what happens within the organisation. But you look at organisations launching products, brands into new markets. They do a stack of research. Doesn’t mean that it always goes well. There’s lots of examples of it not going brilliantly. But I think sometimes that isn’t done when it talks about internal comms or leadership or equipping managers to lead across cultures. It’s, you know, it’s just like a missing piece a lot of the time. So it’s about putting those pieces back into the process. 

And the time zones thing is interesting as well because that comes up. That’s come up in conversations I’ve had with people for probably the last, you know, five, six years. And when I was global head of comms, I remember working early to talk to Asia and working a bit late to talk to the U.S and you just navigate your day around those things and have some flexibility.

But navigating that, even with clients that I’ve got where they’ve got completely global, fully remote organisation, learning to work differently. I think it’s part of that challenge. Like, not just acknowledging the different time zones on the call, but accepting and being mindful of not booking calls in at what’s a good time for you, but actually really inconvenient for someone else. 

And having that flexibility and that understanding that you might not. You know, all be on the same call at the same time. And do we record it? How do we marshal it? And are there different ways of, you know, communicating that don’t involve us all having to be like somebody up at 6 a.m. and somebody up at midnight? Are there more sensible ways of working together that aren’t Zoom calls? 

I think it’s a really interesting part. And being sensitive to that and respecting people who will lean in and want to flex with you and people who are like, no, I have really clear boundaries. 

And also, again, culturally, some people will feel they have to say yes to that because that’s kind of the work culture, perhaps, that they’ve grown up with. And so they might feel they can’t say no to the boss. Yes.

What is the danger of stereotyping?

And you have to be aware of that. So you have to find a way to make it, you know, possible for them to say no if that’s how you want to do it. And there is a danger, obviously, in stereotyping. And one thing I did want to make sure that we touched on today was that when we talk about geographical and national culture, culture comes in lots of different forms. And this is just like one layer of it. Obviously, there’s lots of other intersectionality. Again, I’m going to direct people to Edwita’s episode, I feel, at this point.

But thinking about inclusion and thinking about crossing cultures, because it’s not just about national and geographic, and also to avoid the danger of stereotyping. Yeah. Right? Because, you know, we’ve all experienced it. Certainly having lived in different countries, I’ve experienced it. People think the Irish are all a certain way. It’s worse than Stary Girls. It’s largely true. But there is that thing. And you do have to be really careful about that because there’s the individual and, you know, as well. So, is someone behaving like this because it’s cultural or is that because of how they, as an individual, are?

And it’s unpacking all of that. And it’s an important point to make because we are really talking about the geography side of it here, just based on some of the work we do. But there is that intersectionality piece about it, which is really important. So we’ll pop some links in the show notes to some resources that we’ll talk about off air, just to make sure we’ve got the support for people. 

What solutions can there be around the concept of intersectionality and cultural intelligence?

But I want to move us into sort of the cultural intelligence and the solutions piece, because I think that’s the bit that’s really helpful. Otherwise, we end up, you know, learning about different cultures. Yeah. But they’re not really learning and stopping. Yes. Yes. This was really helpful and insightful, but I don’t know what to do next. Yeah. And so cultural intelligence is an idea that’s been around for a while.

CQ. So, like, think of your IQ, your EQ, and then your CQ. Okay.

And it’s sort of a four-part model that takes you beyond that. Oh, well, I know that. I know how to behave in this context with this individual. And so, it starts with one of the things I love that a colleague of mine, Tricia Carter, often says is it’s like a muscle. You can build it, right? So, drive the curiosity. Why do I want to know about this? How do I learn about it? Is it as simple as like trying the local food, bonding over things? So, kind of being that curiosity, stoking that curiosity, that kind of drive to learn more and be open-minded.

And also hold the idea that my view of the world and your view of the world are both equally valid. And it’s not the judgement thing or, you know, it’s just, okay, that’s how you see that. I’m interesting. That’s how I see it. Let’s try and figure it out. 

But it goes beyond that to look at building your knowledge as well, but also then looking at strategy. How do I adapt? How do I make this work? How do I get to whatever my objective is in a way that is effective, right? I’m not going to alienate you. We’re not going to miscommunicate. We’re going to have a good conversation. I’m not going to patronise you, but we will actually be able to do business together, to work together. And then kind of looking beyond that, just building your skills and getting into actual action.

What am I going to do? So, I have a plan and I also have action. So, what are the things that I can do to make this, you know, relationship work better, to build a more global outlook, to work differently across cultures?

And so, it’s an ongoing process. And, but I think having, putting the cultural intelligence in, whether you work with people to help you do that in your organisation, whether you work with specific interculturalists, because that’s a thing that let other people know that are incredibly well-qualified interculturalists. It’s a profession. I work with some amazing interculturalists who will help you understand a particular culture and help you think about adapting and how you cross those cultures. So, that’s something that I would never say I understand everything in the world. I don’t.

Shocking. But I work with really smart people who do understand lots more than me. So, thinking about that, you know, if you’re struggling with a particular part of the world, thinking about people who can really explain it to you and then explain why you’re different.

And if we’re looking at the geography, the time zone, some of those elements of it, I think there’s often a tendency for people to sort of say, “Well, we’ll schedule it at this time. And we’ll do the same time each week or each month,” which then means it’s really inconvenient for me every week or month. 

But it’s sort of semi-inconvenient for someone else and okay for someone else. The advice I often give is sort of mix that up. And I just want to sort of check that with you as more of an expert in the space. So, that there is that, we’re all feeling uncomfortable in equal measure about the fact that we’ve got to get up early or stay late or whatever it is. 

Exactly. And so, there is a lot to be said for, I, as a volunteer director, managed a team that I think went from West Coast America to Canberra in Australia. Wow. So, getting all of them, 14 on a call as volunteers, fun times. And so, in the end, what we did was we favoured alternatively. So, we’d have one where, you know, half the world could be up at a reasonable hour and then the other half of the world, like, you know.

So, and then we said, “Look, if you want to get up in the middle of the night, come and hang out, that’s awesome, but we don’t expect you to.” If I don’t expect you to do any of this, you’re volunteers. But we flipped it all the time and always recorded it. 

So, if people did want to catch up, they can do that. And with a lot of the groups that I work with, we, you know, try and flex it as much as possible. And having things like, very practical tip, World Time Buddy is your best friend. So, you can literally put in, like, all the time zones and see, like, in a graph where people kind of sit in one handy visual. For a lot of people, that’s really easy. We’ll pop a link to that in the show notes.

So, for someone who works globally, I’m horrible at time zones. Horrible. And so, I’m very reliant on World Time Buddy. So, just practical things like that. And I think also acknowledging it. And, you know, I work with someone who’s very good at saying, you know, it’s late for you, Zara, and thank you for being here and it’s late for you, and thank you for being here and sleep well, rest well, and good morning. You know, how it’s Friday looking. Oh, that’s nice. 

So, just taking a moment to acknowledge that is really significant. I think also taking a moment to acknowledge that we might all be coming from very different places around issues. And also, I mean, we could talk about the language pieces like a whole other episode, but being aware that you are talking across different languages. And people may respond differently and may actually be processing things differently. And so, someone who’s very quiet in a meeting, it may be culture, it may be language. It may be them as an individual. Yeah. So, just being aware of all of those levels in terms of how you think about things. 

And I do think a lot of it is unpacking where you are and where you come from and thinking, you know, what am I bringing into this? What assumptions am I making?

Which is just a constant kind of mental dialogue and awareness that you’re working with people who are all coming with very different cultural views about work, leadership, how they respond to their boss, their expectations of each other, the way that they might express themselves. So there’s a couple of articles that I’ll send you, and one of which is that whole thing about being rude. 

And you’re not, you’re just like, “I can’t come to that meeting, I’m very sorry.” Yeah. But for some people, that’s rude. Yeah. And understanding that, you know, the person who might be frustrating you, it might just be that you expect to be communicated with in a different way.

And so I had a great client, and the first time I started working with her, she’s a New Yorker. And she said, “This is how I’m going to work. This is how I respond. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” But I knew then. And it’s so not how I relate to people. And we’re actually great friends. But it really helped level set the expectations of what she wanted from me. She was like, “I don’t really do chat.” Yeah. And I was like, “I’m Irish, I do a lot of chat.” “I don’t know how to do this.”

But I think that’s so important for, you know, what you’ve talked about there around that sort of cultural intelligence that having those conversations, all of those things are important. I do it with my team. When someone joins, I’m quite clear with this is how I communicate. I’m not being abrupt. It’s just how we do things. When we do workshops with clients, we get them to do their communication preferences. And we talk about all those different nuances to help them talk about it. But there’s definitely something about being curious. 

And you said this in terms of that first thing you talked about to bring that calm to the chaos is you’ve got to want to learn. And I remember working with this global leadership team. And we were talking about some of the challenges by some of the individuals. And they were talking about somebody maybe not speaking up very much. And I got this consistent feedback. And the person they were talking to was the only person of colour on the board. And so I immediately went to, it could be linked to their cultural background and the fact that they are in the minority. But that hadn’t even been a consideration for everybody else, which was quite surprising to me. But it’s so part of our world.

And it just hadn’t crossed their minds that could be a reason at all. And it’s trying to see the world as other people see it. And that curiosity to understand how somebody else works, you know, walks through the day. 

So, whether that’s about, I lived in Norway for a couple of years, which was an amazing experience. But they do think about work, I think, a little bit differently. And, you know, it’s just a different approach. And it takes a while to kind of permeate it. And it was really interesting to listen. My husband was working and listened to him and his colleagues, his expat colleagues, kind of talk about the differences. And that, you know, I think there was one story about someone getting up at the meeting at like half four and saying, “I’m very sorry, I have to go and take my kids to soccer.” That’s completely funny. That would never happen somewhere else, though. But they were all like, what, what, what?

And, you know, it’s just understanding that’s not right or wrong or different. And so we all bring braggage into it. And sometimes the corporate culture, like I said, is set by head office. And there’s an expectation. And so there’s sometimes that little bit of tension between we’re over here, particularly in acquisitions and growth. Where they’re like, well, that’s not how we do things. That’s not going to work. 

So, yeah, it can get really complicated. But a lot of it is just that, asking that why question. And then understanding that there’s things that you just don’t know. And what, asking yourself the question, what, what is it that I don’t know? What am I not seeing? What would be different here?

And that’s when working with someone who’s got a global approach or working with an interculturalist can be really helpful. So if you’re doing business in, you know, Ecuador for the first time, then having someone who can explain and help you understand what you’re dealing with, and I don’t know why I picked Ecuador, but anyway, is really helpful. Yeah, and really, really useful.

Thank you for listening!

It’s been wonderful talking to you today. Thank you so much for coming. If people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

I am on LinkedIn or go to my website and drop me an email. Brilliant. We will pop links into the show notes for your LinkedIn and your websites. People can grab those. And obviously, you’re part of our collective team, so people can find you on our website as well.

So, this takes us to the end of season four. So, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation. So, please do join our community and mailing list from the link in the show notes. And if you have the chance to review or send in any feedback on the new format, then please do. It then gives me a chance to have a think about season five.