The Culture Map - Erin Meyer - Italian Subs
Summary
TLDRIn this insightful talk, Aaron Meyer, a professor at INSEAD and author of 'The Culture Map,' explores the impact of cultural differences on global business communication. He discusses the complexities of navigating low-context and high-context cultures, the varying approaches to giving and receiving negative feedback across cultures, and the significance of silence in different cultural contexts. Meyer emphasizes the need for global teams to adopt low-context processes to bridge communication gaps and shares personal experiences to illustrate cultural misunderstandings, offering practical advice for improving cross-cultural interactions.
Takeaways
- π Understanding cultural differences is crucial for global business success, as what is considered good business and common sense varies across cultures.
- π‘ Global leaders must navigate complexities such as when to speak, the role of leadership, and the most constructive ways to give negative feedback.
- π¨π³ A Chinese employee, Bo, in London faced challenges due to cultural differences in communication, leading to misinterpretations by his British colleagues.
- π«π· A French woman, Sabine, experienced difficulties adapting to the American workplace, leading to a perception of lack of effort from her American boss.
- π Cultural decoding involves recognizing how decisions are made and trust is built differently around the world.
- π Culture mapping is a system developed to help understand and decode cultural differences by analyzing various scales and dimensions.
- π Individual and regional variances exist within every culture, so generalizations should be taken with caution.
- π Low-context cultures value explicit, simple, and clear communication, while high-context cultures rely on more implicit and nuanced communication.
- π Global teams benefit from low-context processes to mitigate communication challenges between diverse cultural backgrounds.
- β° Perceptions of silence and the meaning behind it differ significantly across cultures, affecting communication and understanding in a global context.
- π€ Adapting communication styles and being aware of cultural feedback preferences are essential for effective cross-cultural collaboration.
Q & A
What is the main focus of Aaron Meyer's work?
-Aaron Meyer focuses on how the world's most successful global leaders navigate cultural complexities and differences in the business environment.
What is the significance of cultural differences in a global business context?
-Cultural differences significantly impact how we understand one another and ultimately affect how we get the job done in a global business setting.
What is the term used to describe the ability to understand and navigate cultural nuances?
-The term used is 'cultural mapping,' which involves breaking down culture into different scales and examining how decisions are made and trust is built differently around the world.
How does Aaron Meyer's background influence his perspective on cultural differences?
-Aaron Meyer's background of being raised in a monocultural environment in Minnesota and later living in various countries, including Paris for 15 years, has given him firsthand experience of cultural differences and their impact on business.
What is the main challenge faced by Bo Bo Chen, the Chinese client mentioned in the script?
-Bo Bo Chen's main challenge was adapting to the cultural expectations in a British business environment, where he initially did not speak up in meetings, leading his colleagues to perceive him as having nothing to add.
What was the misunderstanding between Sabine and her American boss, John?
-The misunderstanding was that John expected Sabine to adapt her style to the American context and make changes he suggested, but Sabine felt she was doing well and had received a positive performance review, indicating a cultural difference in feedback and expectations.
What are low-context and high-context cultures?
-Low-context cultures assume a low level of shared reference points and value explicit, simple, and clear communication. High-context cultures assume a larger body of shared reference points and value sophisticated, nuanced, or implicit communication.
How do cultural differences in feedback styles affect international teams?
-Cultural differences in feedback styles can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Direct cultures may use 'upgraders' to strengthen negative messages, while indirect cultures use 'downgraders' to soften the feedback. This can result in team members feeling insulted, untrusted, or mislead, depending on their cultural backgrounds.
What is the significance of silence in different cultures?
-In some cultures, silence is perceived negatively, indicating discomfort or a need to fill the gap with speech. In high-context cultures, silence might be seen as a sign of thoughtful listening or careful consideration before responding. The comfort level with silence varies across cultures and can affect communication in global teams.
How can global teams effectively communicate across cultural differences?
-Global teams need low-context processes, such as clear and written communication, recapping key points, and providing explicit feedback. Team leaders should also be aware of cultural preferences for silence and feedback styles to ensure all members have an opportunity to contribute effectively.
What resources does Aaron Meyer offer for further understanding of cultural differences?
-Aaron Meyer offers tools on his website, aaronmeier.com, including a culture map for various countries and a self-assessment to help individuals understand their personal cultural map and determine if they are living in the right cultural context.
Outlines
π Navigating Global Cultural Differences
This paragraph introduces Aaron Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, who focuses on how successful global leaders handle cultural complexities. It discusses the importance of understanding cultural variations in business practices and common sense, such as attitudes towards speaking up or staying quiet, leadership roles, and constructive feedback. Meyer shares anecdotes about a Chinese client, Bo, and a French woman, Sabine, who faced challenges in London and Chicago due to cultural misunderstandings.
πΊοΈ Cultural Mapping: Decoding Differences
Aaron Meyer explains his concept of 'cultural mapping,' a system that breaks down cultural differences into scales to understand how decisions are made and trust is built worldwide. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing individual and regional variances within cultures and introduces the idea of dimensions that help in mapping out cultural differences, such as the French and Brazilian business cultures.
π¬ Low vs. High Context Communication
This section delves into the concepts of low and high context communication, defining them and providing examples from various cultures. In low context cultures, communication is explicit, simple, and clear, while high context cultures rely on more nuanced and implicit communication. Meyer discusses the impact of these differences on international interactions and provides examples from German, French, Japanese, and Nigerian cultures to illustrate the point.
π« Giving Negative Feedback Across Cultures
The paragraph discusses the varying ways different cultures give negative feedback or criticism. It contrasts the direct approach of the Dutch with the more indirect approach of the British, highlighting the misunderstandings that can arise from these cultural differences. Meyer also touches on the impact of education systems on feedback styles, drawing from his personal experience with his children's schooling in France and the US.
π Interpreting Silence in Global Teams
This section explores the different meanings and comfort levels with silence across cultures. Meyer explains how cultures with a high comfort with silence, like Japan and China, perceive it differently from those with low comfort, like the US and France. He shares his experience with Bo, who struggled to find his moment to speak in meetings due to cultural differences in dialogue patterns. Meyer emphasizes the importance of understanding and accommodating these differences in global team leadership.
Mindmap
Keywords
π‘Cultural Differences
π‘Global Leadership
π‘Communication Styles
π‘Cultural Decoding
π‘Feedback and Criticism
π‘Silence in Communication
π‘Cultural Mapping
π‘Performance Reviews
π‘Low-Context and High-Context Cultures
π‘Global Teams
π‘Cultural Adaptation
Highlights
Global success requires decoding cultures foreign to our own, even within our local environment.
Cultural differences have a tremendous impact on how we understand one another and how we accomplish tasks.
Aaron Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, has developed a system called 'culture mapping' to help decode cultural differences.
The story of Bo Bo Chen, a Chinese employee in London, illustrates the challenges of cultural communication.
Cultural nuances, such as when to speak or stay quiet, and how to give negative feedback, vary greatly across cultures.
The concept of 'low context' and 'high context' cultures explains the level of shared reference points assumed during communication.
High context cultures rely on more implicit, nuanced communication, while low context cultures prefer explicit and clear communication.
The importance of understanding cultural differences in feedback is highlighted by the contrasting experiences of a British and a Dutch colleague.
Cultural comfort with silence varies, affecting how individuals from different cultures perceive and participate in meetings.
Leading global teams requires an understanding of cultural differences and the implementation of low context processes.
The use of 'upgraders' and 'downgraders' in feedback differs between cultures, influencing how criticism is delivered and received.
Cultural differences start from an early age, as seen in the contrasting educational feedback systems of France and the United States.
Aaron Meyer's book 'The Culture Map' provides tools for understanding and navigating cultural complexities in a globalized business environment.
Cultural awareness is crucial for effective communication and collaboration in diverse teams.
Aaron Meyer's research and tools are available on his website for further exploration of cultural mapping.
Understanding cultural differences is not only about communication but also about building trust and making decisions in a multicultural world.
Transcripts
no matter your church or organization
success in our world requires the skills
to decode cultures foreign to our own
and maneuver cultural differences even
in our own backyard
as a professor at insaan one of the
world's leading business schools in
france
aaron meyer has spent years focusing on
how the world's most successful global
leaders navigate these kinds of
complexities
whether we are aware of it or not there
are complex variations in what is
considered good business and common
sense from one culture to another
whether it is attitudes concerning when
best to speak or stay quiet
the role of the leader in the room or
what kind of negative feedback is most
constructive
these differences have a tremendous
impact on how we understand one another
and ultimately on how we get the job
done winner of the 2015
thinkers 50 radar award frequent
contributor to harvard business review
and author of the culture map let's
welcome
aaron meyer to the summit
so we are here to talk about how
cultural differences
impact our effectiveness when we're
working internationally
and i'm going to start by giving you two
examples about my
own clients and how they struggled with
this topic
so the first one is about a chinese
client that i worked with
his name was bo bo chen and bo was
living in beijing and for the first time
he was hired by a company outside of
china he was hired by a company
in london he was really excited he was
hired because he had
excellent english he was very
extroverted
and when he got the first opportunity to
come to a meeting in london
he prepared he prepared the entire
trip from beijing to london then he
arrived he greeted all of his
british colleagues he said thank you
very much for having invited me
but then during the actual meeting bo
said nothing at all at the end of the
meeting he got up again he shook hands
again with his colleagues
and then as he was leaving the room he
accidentally overheard
one of his british colleagues saying to
another colleague well
certainly seems like bo has nothing to
add
right okay that's your first situation
we'll come back to it later
the second situation about is about a
french woman i worked with her name was
sabine
when i worked with sabine she was living
in paris
but she was just about to be expatriated
here she was moving to chicago so i
spent some time with her before she
moved
helping her think about how she might
adapt her style to this american context
and then after she'd been in chicago for
four months
i did a pre-scheduled follow-up call
first with her new american boss
john and i asked john how are things
going for sabine
he said to me erin it's not going well
he said the problem is that i've spoken
with sabine
about these things she needs to change
several times i've seen
zero effort on her part to make these
changes
he said you know if she doesn't start
working on this soon
i don't think this expatriation is gonna
work out i did he told me
have my first performance review with
sabine last week and i was again
very clear with her so i'm hoping to see
some effort soon so i got off the phone
with john
with john and i called sabine and i said
how are things going in the u.s
and sabine said to me they are going
great
she said you know erin for the first
time i found a job
that takes advantage of all of my
talents she said you know erin i have to
tell you
i had my first performance review with
my new boss last week
the best performance review i've had in
my career
right okay now these two individuals
both had cultural differences
impact their effectiveness without even
knowing it so we're going to come back
to these guys a little bit later all
right
now let me just introduce myself a
little bit before we get into this topic
some more so
my situation is a little bit the
opposite of sabine's
i think you could tell that i'm american
i was raised in minnesota in a very
monocultural place
but now as an adult i've been living in
many other countries
in southeast asia and in southern africa
and i've lived now in paris for 15 years
so
my husband is french and this is
actually true my two boys
logan and ethan uh just told me last
weekend that they are french
which is quite unsettling for a mother
right when you hear that your children
are a different culture than you are
so i have been studying how cultural
differences are impacting business
and what i've been doing is working on a
system for helping people
kind of decode these cultural
differences and i call this culture
mapping so i have this system that
breaks culture
down into these different scales and we
look at how decisions are made
differently in different parts of the
world
we look at how we build trust
differently in different world regions
and then through lots of research we
have countries that are positioned
up and down these scales so those uh
little uh those little balls there just
represent countries
and what's interesting is that as you
start to put the dimensions together
you can start to do this kind of culture
mapping so here for example i just
mapped out french business culture for
you and brazilian business culture
what i wanted to do with you today is to
focus on
three dimensions that really look at
what it means to be
a good communicator in different
countries
and then afterwards i'll give you some
opportunities to learn more about the
other dimensions if you like
okay um so in order to get started with
this i need to mention
two things the first is that of course
when you look at the country positions
i know they look to be very precise
but please keep in mind that of course
in every culture we have
quite a bit of variance a individual
variant so i mean if you were doing
research with me
in australia we might find that some
australians are falling
out to the left of this uh this curve
uh sorry i'm getting a little lost here
um to the left of this to the left of
this gray curve some to the right and
then we would get to the
the australian positioning if we were
doing research in kenya
we might find that some kenyans are
falling to the left of the yellow curve
some to the right of the yellow curve
and then we would have the kenyan
positioning
so just keep in mind that of course
although the country looks very specific
that there's always individual regional
or generational variants within a
country right
okay the other thing i need to point out
before we start looking at the research
is that when you look at the countries
don't think about the absolute positions
of them
only consider the relative difference so
to give you an example of this
i was working a while ago with a team
and at the beginning i had just
americans and french on the team and i
asked the americans
what's it like to work with the french
and the americans said to me well aaron
you know the french they said they're
very chaotic
they're very disorganized they're always
late
they're always changing the topic it's
very difficult to follow them
a little bit later i had a group from
india that joined the same team
and i asked the indians you know how's
it going working on this french team
and the indians said to me well aaron
you know
the french they're very rigid they're
very
inadaptable they're so focused on the
structure and punctuality of things
that they're not able you know to adapt
as things
change around them and that's linked to
what i call this time orientation scale
where you can see on the scheduling
scale that france falls between
the us and india which then leads to
these opposite perceptions
i gave the same example in germany a
little while ago
and one of the germans said you know
aaron this is a funny example for
us because we the germans in this room
we work frequently with americans and we
are always
complaining that the americans are
exactly the same way
that you've just described that the
americans complain about the french
right
so that's how these dimensions work it's
not about what is that culture
like it's about how do cultures respond
to or
understand one another okay so with that
i would love to get started
with our first dimension and i want to
talk with you
about these terms low versus high
context communication
and uh just start by saying that in a
low condex culture
when we communicate we assume
or consider that we have a low
level of shared reference points
so in a low condex culture when we're
communicating we feel
that we don't have the same relationship
or information or
context and because we assume a low
level of shared context
in these cultures we believe that good
effective
professional communication is a
communication that's very
explicit it's very simple and very clear
in a low context culture i believe if i
want you to understand blue
i have to say blue in a low context
culture i'm taught
that if i give a presentation i should
tell you what i'm going to tell you
and then i tell you and then i tell you
what i've told you right
why do i tell you the same thing three
times because everything is about the
simplicity and the clarity
of the message now in a high context
culture while we're communicating
we assume that we have a much larger
body
of shared reference points and because
we have all of the shared context
in these cultures we believe that good
effective professional communication
is much more sophisticated is more
nuanced or implicit or layered i teach
in two languages
english and in french and there are
these words in the french language
that mean high context we don't even
have these words in english
there's this word suzonton do and
means when i speak don't listen to my
words
listen to the meaning behind my words
so it's not what i said that matters
it's what i
meant that matters in uh
in japanese so
the japanese culture is the highest
context culture in the world
in japanese there is an expression which
is kooky
yomenai and the expression means someone
who is
unable to read the atmosphere
or someone who is unable to pick up
the subtle messages in the air so in
japan a good communicator
can really pick up all of those subtle
unspoken messages
and a good uh poor communicator is kooky
yeomani right
okay so now i just like to start by
looking at some of these countries with
you
and you can just see as you look up here
first of all the
colors don't mean anything i just have
for example different regions and
different colors but
you can see when you look up here that
all of the anglo-saxon countries
fall to the left-hand side of this scale
the u.s
the lowest context country in the world
right
um then if we move over you could see
that we have many latin countries and
mediterranean countries
that fall kind of mid-right on the scale
and then further over you would find
many african countries and even further
many
asian countries and partially this is
linked to language so
many asian languages are very high
context in themselves
for example in hindi the word
kul means both tomorrow
and yesterday so you see that in the
language you have to
constantly be reading the air to
understand what the word
means right then i just like to get you
to think about
how this impacts an interaction i had a
german who said to me you know aaron
in germany at the end of a meeting we
almost
always do a recap right first we do a
verbal recap
and then we do a written recap and then
we send that out
right he said now that i've been working
in france
often at the end of a meeting i'll get
ready to do that recap
and my french colleagues will just stand
up
and someone will say a voila
and i'll think to myself but voila what
and i'll be so surprised to see
that it just seems that people know
what's been decided
they understand who's supposed to do
what without going through all of those
levels of clarity that i'm so used to so
one thing you can take away from this
is that in low condex cultures we tend
to nail things down
in writing more frequently than in high
condex cultures
where we leave everything open for
verbal interpretation
right a second example i was in china
last year
working with a multinational american
company and before i worked with them
the chairman of the company who was from
new york city
gave a presentation afterwards he left
i was talking about this with his
employees
the human resource director from
shanghai
raised his hand and he said you know
aaron this is really
interesting for me because the whole
time the chairman was talking
i was trying to make sure that i was
listening with
all of my senses that i was picking up
all of the levels of
meaning that the chairman was trying to
pass
and now that i'm looking at this i'm
asking myself
is it possible that there was no
meaning
and i thought to myself that that
chairman
would have been very surprised to know
that anybody
was trying to read the air
beyond his literal words right
now my third example is about parenting
i had this nigerian woman who said to me
a few weeks ago she said in nigeria
we raise our children to be high context
she said
you know if i have people over for
dinner and my daughter says to me
mom can i have another sweet i will say
to her
of course you can but she knows
by the look in my eye that i bet she
better not touch that sweet
and you know i just
thought about how i raise my children
and you know i learned this system from
an american parenting book
i have sat down with logan who's seven
years old right
and we made a list of all of the rules
we typed them out
and we posted them on the refrigerator
and i'll say to logan you know no you
can't do that
and he'll say well mom that's not fair
it's not written on the refrigerator
so you can see already at age seven
that one child is learning to read the
messages
in the air and the other child is
learning the most important message
is the one that's written down right and
put on the refrigerator
okay so um what i'd like to do now
is just get you to think about how
people complain about one another
when they're working internationally low
context people they say that high
context people are lacking transparency
that they're hiding information they're
secretive
high context people say that low context
people are condescending
they talk to us like we're children
either they're not very smart or they
think we're not very smart
i had someone from indonesia in my class
who said you know aaron
in my culture if we have a discussion
and we
on the phone and we make some decisions
verbally
that would be enough for me and then if
you get off of the phone and you put
into writing
everything we've decided and you send
that to me
that would be a clear sign to me that
you don't
trust me so a lot of people are having
these reactions going back and forth
without really knowing what's behind it
and if you think about what is behind it
i mean just think about the history of
the us
the lowest context culture in the world
and japan the highest context culture in
the world
in japan an island society
a homogeneous population people living
in
very close proximity for thousands of
years
the japanese just got to the point that
they could read the atmosphere
in the u.s 250 years ago
people moving from all over the place
having different histories different
backgrounds
americans learned if you want to pass a
message
you really have to simplify that message
to the lowest common denominator
right so that brings me to my first
conclusion
which is global teams need
low context processes and that's because
when you're communicating across
cultures the most difficulty happens
not between one low context culture and
another low context culture
like americans working with japanese
sorry americans working with germans
not between one low condex culture and a
high context culture
like americans working with japanese but
between one
high context culture and another high
context culture
like the french working with the chinese
because we're
all speaking between the lines we're all
reading the air
but the context that we use for that
communication is very different
okay we finished our just about finished
our first dimension
but i need to do something very
important for me as an american before i
move on
which is tell you what i've told you so
let me just start by doing that now
could you go back please so
the first thing that we got already is
global teams need low context processes
fine uh beyond that if you're working
with low context people go ahead and be
as clear as you can put it in writing
recap
three times now that's fine but what if
you're working with a higher context
culture
in that case you might repeat yourself
less
you might ask a lot of clarifying
questions and you might
focus on increasing your ability to read
the atmosphere and i'm going to give you
one last example
so this is a humiliating example for me
but i will share it with you for the
good of the group
so the situation was that i finished
writing my book
in the culture map in may 2014 and i was
feeling
really proud of myself like i'd really
accomplished something
and i then took a trip to japan
and i gave a presentation to a small
group of japanese
and at the end i asked if there were any
questions
and no one raised their hand so i went
to sit down
my japanese colleague then said to me
aaron i think there were some questions
do you mind if i try fine so then he
stood up and he said to the audience
aaron meyer has just spoken with you
do you have any questions no one raised
their hand
but this time he looked very carefully
at the group
yes do you have a question and the
person said yes
thank you i do and he asked a very
important question and then he did it
again
then he did it again he said are there
any other questions
and the person asked a very important
question so afterwards i said to him but
how did you
know that those people had questions and
he said to me well he thought about it
and then he said well it had to do with
how bright
their eyes were
and i thought to myself wow you know for
me
coming from minnesota like i do that's
really difficult
but then he clarified he said you know
aaron in japan we don't make as much
direct eye contact
as you do in the west so when you ask
the group if there are any questions
most people are not looking right at you
they're looking somewhere else
but there are these two people in the
group who were really looking right at
you
and their eyes were bright which
signifies they would be happy to have
you call on them if you would like to
okay so the next day i gave another
presentation
again i asked if there were any
questions again no one raised their hand
but this time i thought i would just try
so i did what he suggested you know i
looked carefully at the audience
and i saw immediately that he was right
that most people were not looking
directly at me and as i looked at them
carefully
i saw that there was this one woman in
the room who was really looking right in
my
eyes and when i looked at her she held
my gaze
now were her eyes bright
i don't know
but i wanted to try so i made a little
bit of a gesture to her
and she nodded her head and i said do
you have a question
and she said thank you and she asked a
very important question
it was such an important learning
experience for me
because imagine at the school i teach
i have people from all over the world in
my classes
every single day can you imagine i had
all of these bright eyes
that i was entirely missing so we need
to constantly be working on these things
right okay now i want to move on to our
second dimension
which is one that looks at how we give
negative
feedback or criticism in different parts
of the world and
um i'm just gonna start by giving you an
example about a client that i worked
with i had this british guy
who was working on a team with this guy
from the netherlands
and the british guy wrote a report and
he sent it to the dutch guy for feedback
and when the dutch person received the
report he thought it was horrible
he thought there's no way that we can
send this to the client like this
so when the dutch person called up the
british person he had the value system
of the importance of
honesty that drove the way he gave the
feedback and he said you know
i read through your report and there's
no way that we can send this to the
client like this
he said the introduction is weak but
here are some things we could do
in order to improve the introduction he
said there's a lack of logic flow in the
middle of the report
but here are some things we could do in
order to improve that logic flow
a number of grammatical errors that i've
circled here
for you and as he went through that
feedback the british person was taking
this feedback really emotionally
he was thinking this person is an
arrogant jerk
and he doesn't seem to like me very much
he thought this is the last time
that i'm going to ask that person for
feedback now if you imagine the tables
turn and in the second situation it's
exactly the opposite
this time the dutch guy writes the
report he sends it to the british person
who thinks it's horrible
who thinks about how to improve it but
when the british person
calls up the dutch person he gives the
feedback in a different way
so he starts by saying you know i read
through your report and there were a
number of things about the report that i
thought were good
so this section i thought was very well
written this is what i liked about it
this section here i thought was very
well researched this is what i liked
now if you wanted to make some changes i
have just a few small suggestions for
you
so i was thinking that the introduction
to this report could be even
stronger with just some small
modifications
in the middle of the report could have a
very powerful
impact with some minor adaptations
there's some very small grammatical
errors no problem at all
i just cleaned those right up right
overall fine
now when the dutch person got this
report this feedback
he took it at face value he thought the
report's pretty good
i'll spend three minutes making a few
small changes and then he sent it out to
the client
and then he found out a week later from
someone else that that british person
didn't like the report and now he
thought this guy
is a hypocrite right you can't trust him
he lied to me
he thought this is the last time that
i'm going to ask this person for
feedback
so when you think about what it means to
be to give constructive feedback please
recognize that that's different from one
part of the world
to another now when you look at the
country positions here
you'll see that some countries have
shifted
from being to the right hand side on the
last
scale to the so they're high context
cultures
to the left-hand side of this scale so
these are cultures so these are
high context direct cultures those are
cultures
where we speak between the lines a lot
we read
the air a lot but if it comes
to giving a negative message we're much
more likely to use what i call
upgraders which are words that make the
negative message
feel stronger such as this is absolutely
inappropriate
or this is totally unacceptable in more
indirect cultures we use more
downgraders like you might possibly
think about doing this a little bit
differently maybe right
now another thing you might notice is
that some of the countries have shifted
from being low context
to more middle on this scale so the us
the lowest context culture in the world
very focused on recapping key points
putting things in writing
clear as possible in all situations
except when it comes to giving negative
feedback
and at that moment americans have been
taught to give three positives with
every negative
to catch people doing things right now
to do positive anchoring
which means if i have to tell you your
messages your work is not okay
i should start by telling you what i
like about your work which shows respect
before i tell you what to do differently
and i think now you can understand what
happened
to poor sabine i mean sabine who comes
from a country
france where positive feedback is given
less frequently
and less strongly negative feedback is
given
more strongly so when she went into that
performance review with john
and john started by giving her those
three positives
she thought to herself wow this is the
best performance review i've ever
received when he got to the real message
she wasn't even listening anymore
now i also wanted to make a quick
comment here as you're looking at the us
and france
about our education systems which is of
course where this all starts and
i told you i have these two little boys
uh ethan and logan and
i brought them this so they were born in
france they've always lived in france
i brought them this summer to minnesota
they're there right now
to minnesota so that they could learn
how to read and write in
english and i just see the way they're
bathed
differently so in the u.s
when ethan comes home from school he
shows me his paper
and his american teachers have written
things like
excellent work exclamation mark they put
stars and smiley faces
fantastic right and like when he doesn't
do well they write things like you're
almost there
a little more effort you're on your way
and i can tell you
it is not like this in france so in
france when ethan takes this
davis dictation test on monday all week
long he prepares
it gets to be monday he takes the test
he comes home he shows me the paper
there's always red marks all over it and
the teacher will have written things
like
applique exclamation mark which means
apply yourself
or she will have written n a which means
skills not
acquired and when i see this research it
hurts me
i think oh he's going to lose his
self-esteem he's not going to want to go
to school anymore
but i'm the one having culture shock you
know
ethan he understands the feedback in the
context it's received
mom what's the big deal i had the fifth
best paper in the class
right so i know you're not managing
nine-year-olds
but i do believe that this uh this
feedback teaches us to have a
tougher skin or a more sensitive skin
later on
in life okay i'd like to we went through
these first two scales already
i'd like to wrap up now quickly with our
third scale
by going back to the first situation we
started with
which was beauche okay so you remember
beau right he'd done all this
preparation and he didn't say
anything in this meeting and when i
worked with bo
he was suffering at least partially
from this dimension that looks at what
silence
means in different parts of the world
and i'll just
imagine that you ask me a question
and i'm silent for a few seconds what
does that silence
indicate in your tribe if you come from
a country
like the us france the uk
brazil you might think that silence
means something
very negative like maybe you'll think
that i'm angry
or i hadn't understood you i'm
uncomfortable
you'll respond by filling up that
silence by asking another question
or answering the question yourself right
if we come from a high comfort with
silence
culture like japan indonesia
vocen's china you might perceive that
same silence
as something very positive like that i'm
a good listener
or i'm thinking carefully before i give
a response or it might suggest
nothing at all there was i've seen in my
own work that americans become
uncomfortable with silence
around the two to two and a half second
mark in a dialogue
and this same research shows that the
chinese can easily go up
to seven or eight seconds of silence
without feeling that anything unusual
is happening and if you just think about
what that means for a discussion
in some cultures one person talks and
another person talks at the same time
right in these cultures if we talk
simultaneously
it shows i'm very passionate we have a
great relationship
everything's going well in i'll put in
that first category i would put latin
cultures mediterranean cultures
arabic cultures some african cultures
the second pattern
these are what we call perfect timing
cultures in these cultures we talk like
we play ping pong
that we don't like overlap and we don't
like
silence and i would put anglo-saxon
countries including the us
as well as germanic cultures into this
pattern
and the third pattern is one that looks
more like this where one person might
speak and then there's a pause before
the next person responds and
i think you could i would put all east
asian countries
into this third pattern so you can see
now what happened
to poor beau chen right if you have
people from all three of these cultures
working together
the third group loses because they're
waiting for that
moment to speak that never comes
right when i worked with bo he said you
know i'm so
frustrated aaron i go to these meetings
i'm all prepared
no one ever gives me a moment to speak
right
we can work on that when we're leading a
global team by inviting people to speak
giving them a clear moment recognizing
that
we are responsible for giving everyone
the opportunity
okay i am going to wrap up now i know we
only got to go through three dimensions
today but if you're interested in this
topic you can go to my website
and i actually have a couple of
aaronmeier.com and i have
have a couple of little tools you can
play with they're just free tools
but one of them you can click on up to
55 countries
and you can get the culture maps of
whatever countries you might be working
or living with
and the second one is a short
self-assessment where you can
fill out some questions and get your own
personal map
and then you can find out if you are
living in the right country
okay it was a pleasure to work with you
thank you
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