A large multinational hired me because their teams kept misreading each other. Nobody was doing anything wrong. They were reading the same behaviour against different defaults.
The brief was simple enough. Their teams, their customers and their colleagues span a lot of countries, and it was causing misunderstandings and a fair amount of discomfort. Nobody could quite point at the problem, which is usually the sign that the problem is cultural rather than personal.
At that session there were around twenty people in the room and at least ten nationalities between them. That mix is the whole reason the work lands. You are not describing something abstract. Everyone can feel it.
The framework I use
I build this work on Erin Meyer's The Culture Map. She maps cultures on eight scales, and each one is a spectrum rather than a category.
Communicating. Explicit or implied.
Giving feedback. Direct or softened.
Disagreeing. Feels normal or feels like conflict.
Deciding. Top-down or consensus.
Persuading. Case studies or principles.
Leading. Hierarchical or egalitarian.
Building trust. Evidence and data, or relationships and emotions.
Scheduling. Precise or flexible.
None of these are defined in absolute terms. They only mean anything relative to someone else.
Three of the eight do most of the damage
I focus on the first three, because all three are about communication. Get those wrong and the relationship never really gets going.
1. General communication. At the explicit end, a lot of detail is given and clarity is the speaker's responsibility. At the implicit end, little detail is given and it is the listener's responsibility to understand.
2. Criticism and negative feedback. At the direct end, it is blunt, and saying it in public is acceptable. At the indirect end, it is softened, and in private is strongly preferred.
3. Disagreeing. At one end it feels normal. No hard feelings, and it can even be a sign of engagement. At the other it feels like conflict. It creates real discomfort and can read as disrespect.
Notice that each one is a line with two ends, not a box with two options. Almost everybody sits somewhere in the middle of it.
Position is relative, always
This is the piece people most often miss, and it is the one that changes how they behave on Monday.
None of these scales are absolute. There is no culture that simply is direct. There is only more direct than you, or less direct than you. The same team can look rigid to one partner and hopelessly loose to another, on the very same scale, in the same week.
So the question is never "what are they like." It is "where are they standing, relative to me."
Culture sets the range. The person picks a spot inside it.
The other half of that idea is what stops the map from turning into a stereotype.
Culture prescribes an acceptable range of behaviour. Within that range, every individual still makes their own choice. Personality, upbringing, generation and the particular region someone comes from all move them along the scale. Two people who grew up on the same street can sit further apart from each other than either sits from a colleague on the other side of the world.
"The culture sets a range, and within that range each individual makes a choice. It is not a question of culture or personality, but of culture and personality."Erin Meyer, The Culture Map
That is why I tell teams the map does not tell you who someone is. It tells you what to be curious about.
Feedback is a gift, even when it does not land like one
Here is the example I keep coming back to, from Meyer's own work.
A woman moved from a culture where negative feedback is given bluntly, and where saying it in front of others is perfectly normal, into a company culture where feedback is heavily softened and almost always delivered in private.
Her manager was trying to tell her there were serious problems and that she needed to change.
She came away from those conversations thinking she was doing well.
Nobody was careless here. He softened it because in his world that is what respect looks like. She heard the softening as reassurance because in hers, real criticism arrives unmistakably. The message never had a chance.
Feedback is a gift, given in service of helping you grow. But a gift that cannot be opened does not help anyone, and how it gets wrapped is cultural.
Trust gets built in very different ways
Trust is another of the eight, and it is the one I am developing further for this client, aimed at their sales teams.
In some places you will not get near a real conversation about a deal until you have eaten together, met the family, put in the hours that have nothing to do with business. Skip that and you are not a serious person.
In others, exactly that behaviour reads as stalling. Just show me the numbers. Respect looks like not wasting my afternoon.
Both sides think they are being professional. Both sides are.
Replace judgment with curiosity
This is the practical move, and it is the one thing I would want someone to take away.
Judgment sounds like this:
"I feel he always criticizes me." Or "she's not taking this seriously, she's not even on time."
That is a judgment. It closes the conversation, and it quietly swaps your own cultural default in for objective truth, which is a hard habit to catch in yourself.
Curiosity sounds like this:
"Given this context, I should be curious whether culture is shaping what I am observing."
Curiosity starts the conversation. Ask a clarifying question. Watch for more signals. Check with someone who knows the context better than you do.
The map does not tell you who someone is. It tells you what to be curious about.
Know when to stop typing
Some of this is not about culture at all. It is about the fact that email is a poor medium for anything with tone in it, and it gets worse the further apart two people's defaults sit.
Four signals that it is time to stop emailing:
You are writing the third reply in the same thread and it still is not resolved.
Your draft has an exclamation point you did not mean to add.
You are about to copy someone in as a pressure move.
You have reread their message twice, trying to guess the tone.
If more than one of those is true, pick up the phone or open a video call. You will save yourself a week.
Go deeper
If you want the source, Erin Meyer's The Culture Map is the book behind every scale here. Her talk on it is worth half an hour of your time. Watch it below, or on YouTube.
Want this for your team?
I would love to do more of this kind of work. If your teams are spread across countries and you are seeing the same friction, this is exactly the sort of session I run. Get in touch and tell me what is going on.