Team Culture Archives

An Italian sports-event manager, Elisabetta, has just finished a conference call with Japanese clients. She switches off her webcam and thinks about the meeting she just held. Her gut feeling is that she wasn’t very successful but she can’t really place her finger on what went wrong. Why did she have the feeling that her Japanese business associates didn’t really consider her to be competent and reliable?

We often hear that we need to adapt when working with people of different cultural backgrounds. Is that still important with the current pandemic? Travel is close to impossible so we don’t need to learn to use chopsticks in Japan or avoid using our left hand at the table in Qatar. Do we still need to worry about whether we should “bow, kiss or shake hands”?

It is just as important to adapt your style in virtual communication. Actually, it’s perhaps even more important. It is easy to misinterpret a message through email. There is usually little context to help you grasp the real message being sent.

Building Trust

If trust is the key to creating high-performing multicultural teams or earning new clients, then we need to learn to build trust through our virtual communication, be it a conference call with Japanese or an email to a Swiss person. The way we build trust with an Indian is different to how we build trust with a Finn or a Filipino.

Let’s go back to Elisabetta. Nobody had ever told her that firstly she needs to control her emotions in Japanese business meeting and secondly that silence is common. Silence can mean many different things in Japan and should not be interrupted, especially not in virtual meetings.

However, knowing something is not necessarily automatically going to help. Milton Bennet says that intercultural sensitivity is not natural and that ‘Adaptation means we need to consciously shift our perspective and intentionally alter our behaviour[1].

Japanese tend to say,”Only a dead fish has an open mouth”.

Italians tend to wear their heart on their sleeves. If they’re happy they’ll smile and laugh with joy, if they’re angry they’ll grimace with frustration. If they’re confused, their forehead will wrinkle in a puzzled frown. Japanese tend to say, “Only a dead fish has an open mouth”. This means, a true professional controls his/her feelings in business meetings. Loss of control is deemed unprofessional. Therefore, Elisabetta’s gut feeling was probably spot on. Her meeting was likely unsuccessful due to her constant large gestures and the fact that she kept interrupting the silence that she was “hearing” from the Japanese side.

Silence to Elisabetta means there is a lack of communication or misunderstanding and she feels she needs to break the silence. Elisabetta adds more and more information into the silence meanwhile her constant chatter doesn’t allow the Japanese clients to digest what she is saying.

Building trust with your clients, colleagues or service providers of different cultural backgrounds requires “code-switching”. This means adapting your communication and behaviour. Whether we’re writing an email, leading a conference call or meeting face-to-face, we need to deliberately work at certain skills that are not innate. This could be for example, not using too many facial gestures (in Japan) or learning the cultural values of your multicultural team to know what motivates them. It could also require learning to give feedback indirectly to an Indian service provider.

Step 1: An effective conference call with Japanese, Indians or Finns – Know yourself

The first step to becoming interculturally competent is to know yourself. Take a good look at yourself and ask, “What are my preferred ways of communicating? How do I usually behave in meetings and in situations of conflict and how do I problem solve?”

Let’s take a concrete example. You are the project lead of your team. Your preferred way of communicating is through email and you tend to be very task-oriented. You write short messages and get straight to the point in all your messages. In most cases you don’t even add a greeting or a salutation because you find it unnecessary.

The software company you have outsourced in India is not meeting your timeline needs. This frustrates you because you cannot accept any more delays in your project. You need to consider the best way to tell the Indian service provider that you are not happy with their service. Typically you would do that in a short email with bullet points that specify what you are not happy with, expecting this to get them moving faster. (Stop…. don’t click on send…yet).

Step 2: Effective conference-calls: Learn the values of the ‘other’ culture

The second step is to learn the values of the other person. What is the cultural background of this person? How might they perceive me and my communication style according to their values?

Let’s go back to our scene. Indians are generally relationship-based. As a result, they like to exchange personal information with the person they are dealing with. Secondly, they are usually high-context communicators, that is to say, they read into the body language that is being used to interpret the message rather than just listen to the words. Words that are negative, like, “no”, can create disharmony and loss of face. Moreover, they are quite hierarchical, therefore they usually wait for the manager to give them instructions on what needs to be done.

Therefore your short, negative bullet-point message, straight to the operator is unlikely going to get the response you are expecting.

What should you do?

Step 3: Code-switching – adapting your style

The third step is to ‘code-switch’. That is to say, adapt your behaviour and communication to motivate the person you’re dealing with and still get the point across.

Code-switching can be verbal or non-verbal. It’s the way you adapt your emails or even which communication medium you decide to use. It means saving face by giving indirect negative feedback. It also means that your once a fortnight task-related mails may not be the most efficient way of reaching timelines.

Is email the correct medium to use in our above case? Switching on the webcam in a conference call with Japanese or Indians could be more effective as visual aid helps read body language. Consider what words can be used that are not negative (see previous article on building trust remotely.) Especially consider whether your conversation needs to be addressed to the manager of the company or to the operator.

So how do you think Elisabetta needs to code-switch with her Japanese clients? Should she read and cite the Financial Times to improve their perspective of her competency or should she rather sip on a caffè latte in a weekly non work-related virtual, “webcam-ed” exchange with them?

[1] Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity”, Intercultural Press, 1993. 21-71.

Europe is slowly opening up after the COVID-19 lockdown. After weeks of isolation people are finally allowed to go out for a walk, factories are re-starting their production machines and office employees will soon be starting back. Now is the time create a thriving team culture.

Each team member has had their own difficult situations to overcome; some have had to share home office with kids who have been doing home-schooling, others who usually love being active are feeling claustrophobic at not being able to exert themselves in the gym or on a long outdoor bike ride. Maybe over the last few weeks work has not always been foremost on their minds. Now is the ideal time to “re-align” and create or revise your team culture. Many of us have been obliged recently to contemplate what matters to us most. What are our values, whether at home or at work.

What is Culture?

Culture is often overlooked by leaders because it can seem too abstract. Actually, it’s quite concrete once we sit down and discuss it with our team. A thriving team culture creates cohesion, pride, team spirit, accountability, open communication, inclusion, productivity and therefore a high-performing team. Creating a team culture is the way to bring that cohesion and team spirit back to the forefront if it is has slipped a bit during lockdown.

What are we referring to when we say culture? Culture is a set of norms accepted and encouraged by the group; acceptable ways of behaving, communicating and getting things done, for example:

Giving Feedback: What is the acceptable way that our group gives feedback to one another?
Risk-taking: Do we plan and wait until we are more “certain” or jump and “fail fast”.
Disagreeing: Is it acceptable to disagree openly with another teammate in a group meeting and encourage constructive conflict or is that rather frowned upon?
Decision-making: What is a productive way for us as a team to make decisions?
Problem-solving: How do we problem-solve when we have little time on our hands, etc.

The team creates it own culture

There are different methods of creating your thriving team culture. What is essential is that it be created by the team, not a few individuals or leaders. Below is a 4-step activity you can start with, there are obviously other methods. This exercise can be done face-to-face or virtually. If you plan to do it virtually then consider planning 4 short sessions rather than one long session.

If you do the below 4-step activity you need to invest time in the discussion part of the activity (step 2). Give every team member the opportunity to express themselves and allow for possible introverts to have their say about how they also envision the team functioning well.

The important message here is that it is the team that creates the culture it believes in. You’ll need to discuss common values and therefore have every member speak up. This could be difficult on a virtual culturally diverse team, so prepare well for that moderation hurdle.

Step 1 to a thriving team culture: Plot a Culture Map

Each team member plots themselves on a Culture Map along 4 scales related to behaviour or communication. Each scale shows each team member’s preference (see sample culture map below). The four scales can be varied, but those that create strong discussions often are:

Building trust and managing conflict
Problem Solving techniques
Decision making – do you feel the need to be involved or not
Dealing with uncertainty / risk-taking,

Similarities and differences between team members are more obvious once everyone is plotted on the map. Remember, differences can be complementary and can enhance creativity and problem solving solutions, therefore don’t play them down.

Step two: Discussion

This is the most essential part of the exercise. Do not skip it. This is the time for discussion. Let’s zoom in on scale 1 above and use it as an example.

Ask each person to discuss their preferences according to what they plotted. In the above example, which looks at communication and how we give feedback or disagree, Elena might come across to Emmanuel as being domineering or aggressive. She may not realise it. You could probably discuss here what the benefits are of having somebody always play devil’s advocate and on the other hand discuss how important it might be with clients to have colleagues who steer away from conflict, such as Emmanuel.

Expect Disagreements

Consider how team behaviour might differ according to what Elena’s role is. If she is the leader of the team it might come across differently compared to if she is not. You might discuss what conflict actually means to the individuals. For some it could mean saying, “I think your plan is really inefficient and our client will hate it.” This could come across as quite aggressive for some Asian cultures. For others, conflict could be as simple as a gentle disagreement. Another topic to discuss here is when (if ever) do the individuals feel comfortable disagreeing; do they need a relationship of trust before being able to disagree?

Discussing preferences creates inclusion

This discussion is the heart of the workshop and to creating a thriving team culture. Each person openly speaks about what their preference is. Discuss each scale and only then move onto step 3. If you do this as a virtual workshop you may prefer to do one complete scale from step 1 to step 4 during each virtual session.

Step three: Write a Strategy for a thriving team culture

Discuss a strategy to be more efficient (if necessary) thereby creating your ideal team culture. For the above scale, your discussion might start with:

How can we come up with good ideas and exchanges in the future and get everyone involved, including those who don’t like conflict?
Let’s create more open/transparent discussions within the team?
Ensure everyone on the team is listened to, both the risk-takers and the risk-averse even though some of them have stated they don’t like to enter conflict?
Can this knowledge help us run more productive meetings?

Step four: Team Charter

Write your Team Charter. The team follows the “behaviour and norms” of the charter. It is important to write them somewhere the whole team has access to and each member can occasionally go back to them and review them.

The Team Charter should be “Our Culture”: Not yours, not mine, but ours. It is a culture in which each team member thinks: “I feel comfortable working here because my values are appreciated. I feel I can be myself and therefore it brings out the best of me.”