by Erin Meyer
“This happened to me!” Bethari Syamsudin, an Indonesian manager working for the multinational automotive supplier Valeo, told me. “My boss is German, but my team is all Indonesian. In my culture, if we have a strong relationship and come to a spoken agreement, that is enough for me. So if you get off the phone and send me an e-mail recapping in writing everything we have just decided, that would be a clear sign to me that you don’t trust me.”
Bethari was willing to adapt her style in deference to the wishes of her German superior. She recalls:
My boss asked me to do what I could to make the communication more transparent in our office. He complained that he often didn’t know what decisions had been made and wanted a higher level of clarity. So he asked me to send a written recap of our weekly Bangkok team meeting to him and all participants in order to boost the clarity.
I will never forget the reaction of my Indonesian team when I sent out the first recap putting all of them on copy. My good friend and colleague called two minutes after the recap was sent out and said, “Don’t you trust me, Bethari? I told you I would do it in the meeting. You know I am good on my word.” She thought I was being “political”—which is what we often say about the Europeans. I was caught between the culture of my boss and the culture of my staff.
At the next team meeting, Bethari explained carefully to the team why she was putting everything in writing and asked for their indulgence. “It was that easy,” she says. “Once people understood I was asking for a written recap because the big boss requested it, they were fine with that. And, as I explained that this was a very natural way to work in Germany, they were doubly fine with it. If I ever need my staff to behave in a non-Indonesian way, I now start by explaining the cultural difference. If I don’t, the negative reactions fly.”
If you work with a team that has both low-context and high-context members, follow Bethari’s lead. Putting it in writing reduces confusion and saves time for multi-cultural teams. But make sure to explain up front why you are doing it.
* * *
Now, let’s return to my adventures in New Delhi, from the beginning of the chapter. After a delicious lunch of palak paneer I left the Swagat restaurant and returned to the hotel. The same friendly concierge smiled warmly as I approached. After telling him how much I enjoyed my lunch I explained that I hoped to visit the Qutab Minar ancient ruins that afternoon. He looked a little nervous, perhaps weary after my difficulty finding the restaurant just down the street. “Could you please map out for me step-by-step exactly what I need to do at every moment in order to find the ruins? As you have witnessed I’m not used to such a busy city.” Perhaps now certain of my inability to maneuver anywhere, let alone to the busy ruins in the middle of town, he said to me, “Don’t worry Madam. I will organize everything. We have a driver who will take you right to the entrance and pick you up in the same spot. In the meantime I will provide you with a map with the address of the hotel clearly marked and every landmark between here and the ruins. And please take this card with my phone number on it. If you get lost and can’t find the driver I will come and find you myself.” And thus began a marvelous afternoon in New Delhi.
2
The Many Faces of Polite
Evaluating Performance and Providing Negative Feedback
Sabine Dulac, the finance director we met in the introduction, leaned back in her chair and let out a frustrated sigh. Managing Americans was proving much more difficult than she could have ever imagined. Her new American boss, Jake Webber, had reported to Dulac that several of her team members had complained bitterly following their first round of performance reviews with Dulac. They felt she’d been brutal and unfair in her feedback, focusing heavily on the negative points and hardly mentioning all their hard work and accomplishments.
Dulac was dumbfounded. The way she had provided feedback was the same style she’d used successfully with dozens of French employees with great success. Where were these complaints coming from?
Dulac was particularly confused because she’d expected American culture to be very direct. “In France, we frequently talk about how direct and explicit Americans are. Subtle? Hardly. Sophisticated? Not at all. But transparent and direct—we all know this to be true.”
In this chapter, we’ll build on the Communicating scale from the last chapter while adding an important twist. Some cultures that are low-context and explicit may be cryptically indirect with negative criticism, while other cultures that speak between the lines may be explicit, straight talkers when telling you what you did wrong. As we will see, the French and the Americans are not the only cultures that swap places on the Communicating and Evaluating scales.
The Evaluating scale will provide you with important insights into how to give effective performance appraisals and negative feedback in different parts of the world. People from all cultures believe in “constructive criticism.” Yet what is considered constructive in one culture may be viewed as destructive in another. Getting negative feedback right can motivate your employees and strengthen your reputation as a fair and professional colleague. Getting it wrong can demoralize an entire team and earn you an undeserved reputation as an unfeeling tyrant or a hopelessly incompetent manager.
SPEAKING FRANKLY: A GIFT OR A SLAP IN THE FACE?
One Thursday in mid-January, I had been holed up for six hours in a dark conference room with twelve people participating in my executive education program. It was a group coaching day, and each executive had thirty minutes to describe in detail a cross-cultural challenge she was experiencing at work and to get feedback and suggestions from the others at the table. The details of each person’s situation were steeped in context, and I was beginning to get a headache from concentrating on the ins and outs of each challenge. We had made it through nine people and were just beginning with Willem, number ten.
Willem was a rather shy manager from the Netherlands, and, given his quiet persona, it struck me as unusual that he was a sales director. He had grey, slightly disheveled hair and a very friendly smile that made me think of a lovable St. Bernard. Willem’s situation involved an American woman on his team who would call into team meetings while driving her children to school, a necessity given the six-hour time difference between her home in the eastern United States and Rotterdam. When Willem spoke to her about the distraction of screaming kids in the background and asked her to find a better solution, she took offense. “How can I fix this relationship?” Willem asked the group.
Maarten, the other Dutch member from the same company who knew Willem well, quickly jumped in with his perspective. “You are inflexible and can be socially ill-at-ease. That makes it difficult for you to communicate with your team,” he reflected. As Willem listened, I could see his ears turning red (with embarrassment or anger? I wasn’t sure), but that didn’t seem to bother Maarten, who calmly continued to assess Willem’s weaknesses in front of the entire group. Meanwhile, the other participants—all Americans—awkwardly stared at their feet. Afterward, several of them came up to me to say how inappropriate they’d found Maarten’s comments.
For that evening, we’d planned a group dinner at a cozy restaurant in the French countryside. Entering a little after the others, I was startled to see Willem and Maarten sitting together, eating peanuts, drinking champagne, and laughing like old friends. They waved me over, and it seemed appropriate to comment, “I’m glad to see you together. I was afraid you might not be speaking to each other after the feedback session this afternoon.” Willem stared at me in genuine surprise. So I clarified, “You looked upset when Maarten was giving his feedback. But maybe I misread the situation?”
Willem reflected, “Of course, I didn’t enjoy hearing those things about myself. It doesn’t feel good to hear what I have done poorly. But I so much appreciated that Maarten would be transparent enough to give me that feedback honestly. Feedback like that is a gift. Thanks for that, Maarten,” he added with an appreciative smile.
I thought to myself, “This D
utch culture is . . . well . . . different from my own.”
There has surely been a time when you were on the receiving end of criticism that was just too direct. You finished an important project and after asking a colleague for feedback, she told you it was “totally unprofessional.” Or maybe a member of your team critiqued a grant proposal you wrote by calling it “ridiculously ineffective.” You probably found this incident extremely painful; you may have felt this colleague was arrogant, and it’s likely you rejected the advice offered. You may have developed a strong sense of distaste for this person that lingers to this day.
You may have also experienced the opposite—feedback that was far too indirect at a time when an honest assessment of your work would have been very valuable. Perhaps you asked a colleague for her thoughts about a project and were told, “Overall it’s good. Some parts are great, and I particularly liked certain sections.” Maybe she then noted that there were just a few very minor details that you might consider adjusting a bit, using phrases like “no big deal” and “just a very small thought,” that left you thinking your work was nearly perfect.
If you later learned through the office grapevine that this same colleague had ridiculed your project behind your back as “the worst she’d seen in years,” you probably were not very pleased. You likely felt a deep sense of betrayal leading to a lasting feeling of mistrust toward your colleague, now exposed in your eyes as a liar or a hypocrite.
Arrogance and dishonesty do exist, of course. There are even times when people give offense deliberately in pursuit of political objectives or in response to personal emotional problems. But in some cases, painful incidents like the ones just described are the result of cross-cultural misunderstandings. Managers in different parts of the world are conditioned to give feedback in drastically different ways. The Chinese manager learns never to criticize a colleague openly or in front of others, while the Dutch manager learns always to be honest and to give the message straight. Americans are trained to wrap positive messages around negative ones, while the French are trained to criticize passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly.
Having a clear understanding of these differences and strategies for navigating them is crucial for leaders of cross-cultural teams.
UPGRADERS, DOWNGRADERS, AND THE ART OF TRANSLATION
One way to begin gauging how a culture handles negative feedback is by listening carefully to the types of words people use. More direct cultures tend to use what linguists call upgraders, words preceding or following negative feedback that make it feel stronger, such as absolutely, totally, or strongly: “This is absolutely inappropriate,” or “This is totally unprofessional.”
By contrast, more indirect cultures use more downgraders, words that soften the criticism, such as kind of, sort of, a little, a bit, maybe, and slightly. Another type of downgrader is a deliberate understatement, a sentence that describes a feeling the speaker experiences strongly in terms that moderate the emotion—for example, saying “We are not quite there yet” when you really mean “This is nowhere close to complete,” or “This is just my opinion” when you really mean “Anyone who considers this issue will immediately agree.”
For many years I worked with Amihan Castillo, a lawyer and business professor from the Philippines who’d come to work in Europe following a highly successful career in Manila. Unfortunately, her opinions went unnoticed when working with our European team because she was so careful to downgrade any criticisms she made of proposals and projects. For example, if we were preparing a descriptive brochure for a new executive program, Castillo might comment on the cover design by saying, “Hmm, I thought we might possibly consider giving a bolder look to the brochure cover . . . maybe? What do you think?” A European or an American would probably convey the same feeling by saying, “The look of the cover isn’t working. I suggest we try this.” Only after years of working with Castillo had I learned to interpret her messages correctly.
Of course, downgraders are used in every world culture, but some cultures use them more than others. The British are masters of the art, with the result that their communications often leave the rest of us quite bewildered. Take the announcement made by British Airways pilot Eric Moody in 1982, after flying through a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia: “Good evening again, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Eric Moody here. We have a small problem in that all four engines have failed. We’re doing our utmost to get them going and I trust you’re not in too much distress, and would the chief steward please come to the flight deck?”
Fortunately, the plane was able to glide far enough to exit the ash cloud and the engines were restarted, allowing the aircraft to land safely at the Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Jakarta with no casualties. Moody’s recorded announcement has since been widely hailed as a classic example of understatement.
The “Anglo-Dutch Translation Guide” (Figure 2.1), which has been anonymously circulating in various versions on the Internet, amusingly illustrates how the British use downgraders and the resulting confusion this can create among listeners from another culture (in this case, the Dutch).1
FIGURE 2.1. ANGLO-DUTCH TRANSLATION GUIDE
For Marcus Klopfer, a German finance director at the management consulting firm KPMG, such cross-cultural misunderstandings are no laughing matter. A soft-spoken manager in his forties, Klopfer described how his failure to decode a message from his British boss almost cost him his job:
In Germany, we typically use strong words when complaining or criticizing in order to make sure the message registers clearly and honestly. Of course, we assume others will do the same. My British boss during a one-on-one “suggested that I think about” doing something differently. So I took his suggestion: I thought about it and decided not to do it. Little did I know that his phrase was supposed to be interpreted as “change your behavior right away or else.” And I can tell you I was pretty surprised when my boss called me into his office to chew me out for insubordination!
I learned then and there that I needed to ignore all of the soft words surrounding the message when listening to my British teammates and just analyze the message as if it were given to me raw. Of course, the other lesson was to consider how my British staff might interpret my messages, which I had been delivering as “purely” as possible with no softeners whatsoever. I realize now that when I give feedback in my German way, I may actually use words that make the message sound as strong as possible without thinking much about it. I’ve been surrounded by this “pure” negative feedback since I was a child.
Now Klopfer makes a concerted effort to soften the message when giving negative feedback to his British counterparts:
I try to start by sprinkling the ground with a few light positive comments and words of appreciation. Then I ease into the feedback with “a few small suggestions.” As I’m giving the feedback, I add words like “minor” or “possibly.” Then I wrap up by stating that “This is just my opinion, for whatever it is worth,” and “You can take it or leave it.”
The elaborate dance is quite humorous from a German’s point of view. We’d be much more comfortable just stating Das war absolut unverschämt (“that was absolutely shameless”). But it certainly gets my desired results!
The Evaluating scale (Figure 2.2) provides a bird’s-eye view of just how direct people in different cultures are with negative criticism. You can see that most European countries fall to the direct side of the scale, with the Russians, Dutch, and Germans as particularly prone to offering frank criticism.
FIGURE 2.2. EVALUATING
American culture is in the middle of the scale; nearby are the British, who are slightly less direct with negative feedback than Americans. Latin Americans and South Americans fall to the middle right, with Argentina as one of the most direct of this cluster. Further right on the scale fall most Asian countries, with the Indians as the most direct with their criticism and the Thai, Cambodians, Indonesians, and Japanese as the least direct.
; Don’t forget cultural relativity when you look at the scale. For example, the Chinese are to the right of the world scale, but they are much more direct than the Japanese, who may take offense at their forthright feedback. The continental European cultures to the left or middle often experience Americans as strikingly indirect, while Latin Americans perceive the same Americans as blunt and brutally frank in their criticism style.
Note, too, that several countries have different positions on the Evaluating scale from those they occupy on the Communicating scale. For this reason, you may be surprised by the gap between our stereotyped assumptions about certain countries and their placement on the Evaluating scale. The explanation lies in the fact that stereotypes about how directly people speak generally reflect their cultures’ position on the Communicating scale, not the Evaluating scale. Thus, the French, Spanish, and Russians are generally stereotyped as being indirect communicators because of their high-context, implicit communication style, despite the fact that they give negative feedback more directly. Americans are stereotyped as direct by most of the world, yet when they give negative feedback they are less direct than many European cultures.
One high-context country on the direct side of the Evaluating scale is Israel, where people may speak with copious subtext, yet give some of the most direct negative feedback in the world. Once I was running a class for the World Medical Association that included a large number of Israeli doctors and a group of doctors from Singapore. One of the Singaporean doctors, a small woman in her fifties, protested vociferously when she saw the far left-hand positioning of Israel on the Evaluating scale. “I don’t see how Israel can be positioned as so direct! We have been with our Israeli friends here all week and they are good, kind people!” From her Singaporean perspective being good was correlated with being diplomatic and being very direct was correlated with not being kind.
