as a professor I didn't say on one of the world's leading Business Schools in France Erin 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 Erin 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 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 bochan 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 Beau 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 now 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 going to 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 sabines 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 uh 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 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 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 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 I individual variants so I mean if you were doing research with me in Australia we might find that some Australians are falling you know 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 um 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 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 Erin 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 Erin 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 U.S 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 Erin 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 context culture when we communicate we assume or consider that we have a low level of shared reference points so in a low context culture when we're communicating we feel that we don't 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 that's very simple and very clear in a local next 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 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 yomanai 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 poor Communicator is kuki yeomani right okay so now I'd 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 and 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 cull 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'd just like to get you to think about how this impacts an interaction I had a German who said to me you know Erin 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 [Applause] 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 context cultures we tend to nail things down in writing more frequently than in high context 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 Erin 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 conducts 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 Erin 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 right 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 U.S the lowest context culture in the world and Japan the highest context culture in the world I mean 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 process 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 context 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 the first thing that we got already is global teams need low context processes five uh beyond that if you're working with low condics people go ahead and be as clear as you can but 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 Erin I think there were some questions do you mind if I try fine so then he stood up and he said to the audience Erin 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 mm-hmm 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 Erin 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 were 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 I'm just going to 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 table's 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 think 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 a 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 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 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 U.S 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 and 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 I 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 deep day this 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 Bo Chen okay so you remember Bo right he done all this preparation then 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 U.S 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 bochens 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 and 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 and 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 Bo 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 Erin 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 erinmeyer.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 [Applause]