Effective Cross-Cultural Communication in Business

In business, effective communication is a vital skill. But, when considering that our culture is what influences how we communicate, what happens when different people, each with their own culture, work in the same space, office, or global company? That’s why it’s important to find ways to cut through the cross-cultural communication challenges and work together to get things done.

Transcript

We define culture as, “values and perspectives shared by people who were conditioned by similar experiences and education.” And so this is a definition that we’ll be operating under. And, importantly, the definition can refer to many different types of culture.

We can think about geographic culture, but we certainly know within geography there are regional cultures that are distinct. In addition, we have organizational cultures that influence how we communicate. And, even at the team or unit level, there are particular cultures at those areas that influence how people operate.

You think about an organization, you may have one team that sits in one area of the office, and on the other part of the floor another team, and they both could have very different cultures.

They could sit in different cities.

Yes.

They can sit in different countries, right? And so we not only have different cultures within people sharing the same space, but broadly dispersed over the globe.

We have this challenge of many different cultures. How can you work together in order to get things done? And when we look at that question here, sometimes cross-cultural communication can be challenging.

I think one of the most challenging parts of cross-cultural communication is awareness. And first that starts with ourselves. So how does our culture, whether that’s geographic culture, regional culture, organizational culture, inform how we speak and how we behave? And some of us are very clear about what the influences are and others are less so, and so it’s important to reflect, take some time and say, “How has the way that I’ve been raised, the education that I’ve had, the norms of my, of where I grew up, how does that influence how I speak and how I engage with others?”

And for those of us who are aware of how our culture, many cultures that we operate in, influence us, it doesn’t have to be just one culture. Then we can have a better lens to think about how culture may be influencing the people we engage with.

The single best tactic to learn about others’ culture is to ask questions, right?

So inquiry is a very, very helpful way to cut through some of these cross-cultural communication challenges. And what does that look like? It’s saying, “What are your styles and preferences? What about your culture should I know? What’s important for me to learn?”

And those are questions that you can ask people, and then there’s also the research you can do on your own to find out what are the norms of a particular culture. Now we understand that not any single person is representative of a whole culture or should be asked to speak for a whole culture, because there are specific individual differences, of course.

But you can get some information, broadly speaking, what are some of the cultural norms and styles held by a particular place? Whether that’s a geographic place or organizational place.