The Culture Map

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.

There is just one easy strategy to remember: Multicultural teams need low-context processes.

You may be considered a top-flight communicator in your home culture, but what works at home may not work so well with people from other cultures.

Most of us have a deep protective instinct for the culture we consider our own, and, though we may criticize it bitterly ourselves, we may become easily incensed if someone from outside the culture dares to do so.

In low-context cultures, effective communication must be simple, clear, and explicit in order to effectively pass the message, and most communicators will obey this requirement, usually without being fully conscious of it. The United States is the lowest-context culture in the world, followed by Canada and Australia, the Netherlands and Germany, an

analogy of marriage to describe the differences between high- and low-context communication. Imagine what happens when two people are married for fifty or sixty years. Having shared the same context for so long, they can gather enormous amounts of information just by looking at each other’s faces or gestures. Newlyweds, however, need to state their

in countries like the United States or Switzerland, “business is business.” In countries like China or Brazil, “business is personal.”

Another valuable step is hiring people who are bicultural or have extensive experience living in more than one culture represented on your team.

emotional expressiveness is not the same thing as comfort in expressing open disagreement.