Communication For International Business. Rus Slater
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away from you.
▪ Monosyllabic answers to questions that would normally elicit more response.
Don’t try to replicate the other party’s cultural style; this may come over as patronizing and mimicry. Simply be aware of the differences and avoid causing embarrassment.
Over the years numerous comedy sketches and real-life anecdotes have produced belly laughs or awkward situations based upon a simple lack of understanding of cross-cultural communication. The problem is sometimes simply that one party clearly doesn’t understand the other and sometimes it is due to both parties having a clear understanding but the understandings being different.
Here are some DOs and DON’Ts to help you ensure that you avoid the situation that I (and countless others) fell into:
DOs
▪ Allow extra time to brief people who are not native speakers of your own language.
▪ Issue your input in short chunks.
▪ Get them to explain back to you their understanding of the task, situation, standard or resources after each ‘chunk’.
▪ Allow them time to make notes – the bluntest of pencils is better than the sharpest of minds when trying to remember something you heard in a foreign language.
▪ Once you have finished, get them to summarize to you their understanding.
DON’Ts
▪ Assume that you can brief a non-native speaker in the same time that you can brief native speakers. Be aware that this may create tensions if you are briefing the two ‘types’ of people together.
▪ Ask ‘closed’ qualifying questions: ‘OK, does everyone understand/agree with that?’ You are almost bound to get a resounding ‘Yes.’
▪ Don’t take silence to equal consent/acceptance.
▪ Leave it too long before you check that instructions are being carried out.
case study In the 1980s I was a young officer in the British Army. Attached to my unit was a unit of Gurkha specialists. At the end of a briefing the team, including the Gurkha in charge, went off to join their men and get on with the tasks they had been given. Several hours later I visited the Gurkha team and found that nothing had been done at all. I asked the senior chap if he had understood his instructions, ‘Yes, Sir,’ he replied. So I asked if he was now able to get on with the job in hand, ‘Yes, Sir,’ he replied. But he didn’t move to start. So I asked what the problem was. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he replied again. It dawned on me that he was too proud to admit that he hadn’t understood the instructions and I had been too dozy to realise that I wasn’t being a very good communicator.
Leave nothing to chance; check that everyone has a common understanding.
When you are in the same office, talking to a person face to face, it is easier to understand their situation. When you are communicating with someone in a different country, it is easy to forget that their situation may be completely different to yours. This will probably have an effect on their perception of you and your message.
You may be sitting in your office in Europe or North America in the late morning. You are surrounded by colleagues sitting at their workstations in a large open-plan office. Everyone is wearing a suit and tie. The air conditioning is humming quietly in the background. You have your screen on your desk in front of you showing the latest figures. Outside the window you can see snow on the ground. You are on the phone talking to a colleague in another country. What is their environment like? Do you know?
Your colleague could be talking to you as she walks around the production facility. There could be manufacturing machinery working as she walks past. It could be 97?F and 78% humidity. She could be wearing a pair of shorts and tee shirt. It could be dark outside and 11 o’clock at night where she is; the night shift started 30 minutes ago. The local accounts office is closed for the night and most of the management are at home in bed.
A question you may innocently ask may be impossible for her to answer for another eight hours. But her environment is so different to yours that you have no idea how much pressure that innocent question may put her under.
Take a bit of time to investigate the situation in which your international partners work, whether they are colleagues, suppliers or customers. Even people who seem to have the same type of job as you may be in a very different situation; local politics, the climate or weather, the season, the time zone and local working practices can all make for very different circumstances.
Then try to remember this each time you speak with them or send them an email or text message.
You dialled their number and they answered but it is easy to forget that they may be in a completely different environment to you.
OK, that is ironic; to start a section warning of the danger of generalizations with a generalization. This book contains plenty of generalizations; it talks about people from specific countries as if they were stereotypes. It talks about media of communication as if everyone used them in exactly the same way. Clearly that is dangerous … so beware these generalizations.
When we accept any generalization as a ‘rule’ we are bound to make a massive mistake somewhere down the line. This relates to generalizations about people:
▪ Not all people of a particular race behave in exactly the same way; they will have been exposed to a greater or lesser degree to people from different cultures. They will base their opinions on different life experiences. They will have read and followed different ‘thought-leaders’.
▪ No one person from any particular race or culture can be deemed to speak for their entire nation, regardless of their position in their national hierarchy. Neither will they know what everyone else in their native country thinks about any given topic.
▪ It can be deeply insulting to make assumptions based on national stereotyping; so don’t.
▪ Beware also generalizations regarding generations; not everyone under the age of 25 is on Facebook. And some people over 50 are.
Beware generalizations about methods of communicating:
▪ Not all international phone carriers charge the same rates.
▪ Calls from Country A to Country B may be charged at a different rate to calls from Country B to Country A.
▪ VOIP may work brilliantly between two specific areas, but may be appallingly ineffective between two other specific areas.
▪ Some people are brilliant at running virtual meetings using conference call or VOIP, other people are absolutely useless (trust me, I’ve ‘attended’ some fantastic international remote meetings and some complete wastes of time!).
▪ Sometimes a phone conversation is the best way to communicate and sometimes an email is actually much, much better.
▪ International call routing now means that a call