Article Review ( Management 338)
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HBR-WhenCultureDoesntTranslate.pdf
Summary.
Globalization
When Culture Doesn’t Translate by Erin Meyer
From the Magazine (October 2015)
Artwork: Shannon Rankin, Peak, Uncharted series, 2009, map, adhesive, paper, 20" x 20"
As companies internationalize, their employees lose shared
assumptions and norms. People in different countries react to inputs differently,
communicate differently, and make decisions differently. Organically grown
corporate cultures begin to break down;...
Until recently most of us worked in organizations that were
largely local. We interacted with colleagues and clients who were
with us and culturally like us. Fellow staff members were often in
the same building and at the very least were in the same country,
which meant that they had similar ways of communicating and
making decisions.
more
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Magazine Article by Erin Meyer
Learn how to work more effectively
with people from other countries.
But as companies internationalize, their employees become
geographically dispersed and lose their shared assumptions and
norms. People in different countries react to inputs differently,
communicate differently, and make decisions differently.
Organically grown corporate cultures that were long taken for
granted begin to break down. Miscommunication becomes more
frequent, and trust erodes, especially between the head office and
the regional units. In their efforts to fix these problems,
companies risk compromising attributes that underlie their
commercial success.
In the following pages I’ll describe the process of cultural
disintegration and illustrate how traditional solutions can
backfire. I’ll conclude with five principles that can help executives
prevent disintegration from setting in. Consciously and wisely
applying them will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the
forces at play, which in itself will increase the chances of success.
Implicit Communication Breaks Down
In companies where everyone is located in the same country,
passing messages implicitly is frequently the norm. The closer the
space we share and the more similar our cultural backgrounds,
the stronger our reliance on unspoken cues. In these settings we
communicate in shorthand, often without realizing it—reading
our counterparts’ tone of voice, picking up on subtext. A manager
at Louis Vuitton told me, “At our company, managers didn’t finish
their sentences. Instead, they would begin to make a point and
then say something like ‘OK, you get it?’ And for us, that said it
all.”
A lot of work is done in this
implicit way without anyone’s
taking note. If I walk by your
office and see you studying
October’s budget with a worried
look, I might send you a
comprehensive breakdown of
my costs for the month. If I see
you shrink in your seat when the
boss asks if you can meet a deadline, I know that your “yes” really
means “I wish I could,” and I might follow you to your office after
the meeting to hear the real deal. In such ways we continually
adjust to one another’s unspoken cues.
But when companies begin to expand internationally, implicit
communication stops working. If you don’t tell me you need a
budget breakdown, I won’t send one. If you say yes even though
you mean no, I’ll think that you agreed. Because we aren’t in the
same place, we can’t read one another’s body language—and
because we’re from different cultures, we probably couldn’t read
it accurately even if we were within arm’s length. The more we
work with people from other cultures in far-flung locations, the
less we pick up on subtle meaning and the more we fall victim to
misunderstanding and inefficiency.
The obvious solution is to put in place multiple processes that
encourage employees to recap key messages and map out in
words and pictograms who works for whom, with what
responsibilities, and who will take which steps and when. For
many organizations, that kind of change is largely positive. One
banking executive told me, “The more we internationalized, the
more we were forced to recap both orally and in writing what was
meant and what was understood. And that was good for
everybody. We realized that even among those of us sitting at
headquarters, the added repetition meant better understanding
and fewer false starts.”
One downside, of course, is that companies become more
bureaucratic and communication slows down. But that isn’t the
only cost. At Louis Vuitton, for example, mystery is part of the
value proposition and infuses the way people work. Employees
are not just comfortable with ambiguity; they embrace it, because
they believe it is central to the company’s success. One manager
told me, “The more we wipe out ambiguity between what was
meant and what was heard, the further we wander from that
essential mysterious ingredient in our corporate culture that has
led to our success.”
For companies in beauty, fashion, and other creative industries,
the advantages of implicit communication may be particularly
strong. But many other types of internationalizing companies
have activities that may benefit from letting people leave
messages open to interpretation, and they, too, need to think
carefully about processes that might erode valuable ambiguity in
an effort to improve communication.
Fault Lines Appear
Breakdowns in implicit communication exacerbate the second
problem an internationalizing company faces: Employees
frequently split into separate camps that have an “us versus
them” dynamic.
It’s natural to feel trust and empathy for those we see daily and
those who think like us. We eat lunch together. We laugh together
at the coffee machine. It’s hard to feel the same bond with people
we don’t see regularly, especially when they speak an unfamiliar
language and have experienced the world differently. When one
New York–based financial institution opened offices in Asia, it
struggled to export its highly collaborative culture, in which key
decisions involve a great deal of consultation. Despite
management’s best efforts, the local offices created what one
executive described as “overseas cocoons,” in which employees
shared work and consulted with one another but remained
isolated from their colleagues in the United States.
Often headquarters wants to be inclusive but finds that
employees’ exchanges are hampered by differences in social
customs. One Thai manager in the financial firm explained, “In
Thai culture, there is a strong emphasis on avoiding mistakes, and
we are very group oriented in our decision making. If the
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Despite 30 years of experimentation
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knowledge is universal and some is
specific to a market or a culture.
Americans want to hear from us on a conference call, they need to
send the agenda at least 24 hours in advance so that we can
prepare what we’d like to say and get feedback from our peers.”
Unfortunately, the Thai manager told me, his U.S. colleagues
usually didn’t send the agenda until an hour before the call, so his
team was unable to prepare. And it struggled to understand what
was said during the call, because the U.S. participants spoke too
quickly. He also said that the Americans rarely invited comments
from the Thais, expecting them to jump into the conversation as
they themselves would. But that kind of intervention is not the
norm in Thailand, where it is much less common to speak if not
invited or questioned. The Thai manager summed up his
perspective this way: “They invite us to the meeting, but they
don’t suggest with their actions that they care what we have to
say.” The Thai team members ended up just sitting on the phone
listening—giving the Americans the impression that they had
nothing to contribute or weren’t interested in participating.
Corporate Culture Clashes with Local Culture
As companies institute rules
about communication and
inclusiveness, they often run
into a third problem. Consider
the Dutch shipping company
TNT, which has long put a
premium on task-oriented
efficiency and egalitarian
management. When it moved
into China, it found that neither
of those values fit with local
norms. Its corporate culture
gradually became more
relationship oriented and more
hierarchical, as leaders in Asia
adapted their styles to attract
local clients and motivate the local workforce.
The problem with that kind of adaptation is that a company’s
culture is often a key driver of its success. Let’s look at L’Oréal.
Confrontation and open disagreement are a strong part of its
corporate culture. As one manager put it, “At L’Oréal we believe
the more we debate openly and the more strongly we disagree in
meetings, the closer we get to excellence, the more we generate
creativity, and the more we reduce risk.”
Yet in many important growth areas for L’Oréal, including
Southeast Asia and Latin America, that attitude is in direct
opposition to a cultural preference for group harmony. A Mexican
employee explained, “In Mexican culture, open disagreement is
considered rude, disrespectful, and too aggressive.” An
Indonesian employee said, “To an Indonesian person,
confrontation in a group setting is extremely negative, because it
makes the other person lose face. So it’s something that we try
strongly to avoid in any open manner.”
“The more we wipe out ambiguity between what was meant and what was heard, the further we wander from that essential mysterious ingredient in our corporate culture that has led to our success.” -A MANAGER AT LOUIS VUITTON
If you believe that your corporate culture is what makes your
company great, you might focus on maintaining it in all your
offices, even when it conflicts with local practice. This can work
for companies with a highly innovative product offering and few
or no local competitors. In other words, if your corporate culture
has led to extreme innovation and you don’t need to understand
local consumers, it may be best to ignore local culture in order to
preserve the organizational core.
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Voices from the Front Lines
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Shane Tedjarati
Four leaders on the cross-border
challenges they've faced
For example, Google believes that its success is largely the result
of a strong organizational culture. Part of that culture involves
giving employees lots of positive feedback. The company’s
performance review form begins by instructing managers, “List
the things this employee did really well.” Only then does it say,
“List one thing this person could do to have a bigger impact.”
When Google moved into France, it learned that in that country,
positive words are used sparingly and criticism is provided more
strongly. One French manager told me, “The first time I used the
Google form to give a performance review, I was confused. Where
was the section to talk about problem areas? ‘What did this
employee do really well?’ The positive wording sounded over the
top.” But Google’s corporate culture is so strong that it often
supersedes local preferences; the French manager added, “After
five years at Google France, I can tell you we are now a group of
French people who give negative feedback in a very un-French
way.”
Creating a strong corporate
culture that is pretty much the
same from Beijing to Brasília
makes things easier and more
efficient internally. But it carries
risks. A company with a strong
culture typically hires
employees who can fit into that
culture and trains them to work
and behave in a globally
accepted fashion. But if you hire
the rare Saudi who will challenge authority figures and encourage
him to do so, you may find that his egalitarian directness keeps
him from closing deals with local clients and suppliers.
Planning for Your International Culture
As companies internationalize to exploit new opportunities, how
can they prevent communication breakdowns, fault lines, and
other risks? As with most cultural and organizational
dysfunctions, the cures are often less obvious than the symptoms,
and the specifics will vary from case to case. Nonetheless, my
experience suggests that if companies apply some ground rules
carefully, they are more likely to adapt their culture to new
countries without losing key strengths.
Identify the dimensions of difference.
The first imperative when managing a clash between a corporate
culture and a national one is understanding the relevant
dimensions along which those cultures vary. Are decisions made
by consensus, or does the boss decide? Are timeliness and
structure foremost in everyone’s mind, or is flexibility at the heart
of the company’s success? Only after you’ve figured out where the
pressure points are can you make plans for dealing with them.
It’s important to perform this analysis along multiple dimensions,
because managers tend to boil cultural differences down to one or
two features, often causing unexpected problems. (See my May
2014 HBR article, “Navigating the Cultural Minefield.”) For
instance, French executives expecting straight talk from U.S.
colleagues are routinely tripped up by Americans’ reluctance to
give harsh feedback, while expatriate Americans are often
blindsided by their outwardly polite and socially aware French
bosses’ savage critiques. That said, you can typically reduce the
differences you actually have to manage to just three or four
dimensions.
“The first time I used the company’s form to give a performance review, I was confused. Where was the section to talk about problem areas? The positive wording sounded over the top.” -A MANAGER AT GOOGLE FRANCE
Give everyone a voice.
Although you can vary many rules according to culture and
corporate function, the one you absolutely must adopt is ensuring
that every cultural group is heard. In practical terms, this involves
applying three tenets during meetings and other interactions,
especially when people are participating remotely:
When you invite local offices to phone or video conferences,
send the agenda well in advance (not the same day!) and
designate a time for those in each location to speak. This allows
participants to adequately prepare their comments and double-
check them with colleagues.
Insist that everyone use global English, speaking slowly and
clearly, and assign someone to recap the discussion, especially
when conversations speed up.
Check in with international participants every five or 10
minutes and invite them to speak: “Any input from Thailand?”
or “Budsaree, did you have any feedback?”
If you follow these basics, you’ll go a long way toward preventing
people from thinking that their colleagues in other cultures
“never speak up because they are hiding information,” “have
nothing to contribute,” or “say they want our input, but act like
they don’t care what we think.”
Protect your most creative units.
As your company expands geographically, map out the areas of
the organization (usually functional units) that rely heavily on
creativity and mutual adjustment to achieve their business
objectives. Draw a ring around those areas and let communication
within them remain more ambiguous, with flexible job
descriptions and meetings that are less predefined.
Elsewhere in the company, where there is no clear benefit to
leaving things open to interpretation, go ahead and formalize all
systems, processes, and communications. The areas that lend
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themselves to more-explicit procedures include finance, IT, and
production.
You might want to put
everything in writing to avoid
misperceptions later on. If you
don’t have an employee
handbook, or if your handbook
is sometimes vague, you’ll need
to create a detailed one. But
before you start crafting precise
job descriptions, make sure you
have protected the parts of your
company that rely on implicit communication and fluid processes
for business success.
Train everyone in key norms.
When entering a new market, you’ll inevitably have to adapt to
some of the local norms. But you should also train local
employees to adapt to some of your corporate norms. For
example, L’Oréal offers a program called Managing Confrontation,
which teaches a methodical approach to expressing disagreement
in meetings. Employees around the world hear about the
importance of debate for success in the company. A Chinese
employee told me, “We don’t do this type of debate traditionally
in China, but these trainings have taught us a method of
expressing diverging opinions which we have all come to practice
and appreciate, even in meetings made up of only Chinese.”
Exxon Mobil, which prides itself on task-oriented efficiency but
has large operations in strongly relationship-oriented societies
such as Qatar and Nigeria, reaps tangible benefits from getting
employees to adapt to its culture, rather than the other way
around. One Qatari employee told me, “The task-oriented
mentality gives us a common work platform within the company,
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture
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so when Texas-based employees are collaborating with Arabs or
Brazilians or Nigerians, we all have a similar approach. Cultural
differences don’t hit us as hard as some companies.”
Be heterogeneous everywhere.
If 99% of your engineers in Shanghai are Chinese and 99% of your
HR experts in London are British, you run a high risk of having
fault lines appear. If all the Shanghai employees are in their
thirties and all those in London are in their fifties, the rifts may
widen. And if almost all the Shanghai employees are men while
most of the London employees are women, things may get even
worse. Take steps at the start to ensure diversity in each location.
Mix the tasks and functions among locations. Instruct staff
members to build bridges of cultural understanding.
“The task-oriented mentality gives us a common work platform within the company, so when Texas-based employees are collaborating with Arabs and Brazilians or Nigerians, we all have a similar approach.” -AN EMPLOYEE OF EXXON MOBIL
When BusinessObjects, a company based in France and the
United States, expanded into India, cultural differences quickly
arose regarding communication up and down the hierarchy. One
U.S. manager, Sarah, told me, “I often need information from
individuals on Sanjay’s staff. I e-mail them asking for input but
get no response. The lack of communication is astounding.” When
I spoke with Sanjay, he said, “Sarah sends e-mails directly to my
staff without getting my OK or even copying me. Those e-mails
should go to me directly, but she seems to purposefully leave me
out of the process. Of course, when my staff receives those e-
mails, they are paralyzed.”
This relatively minor cultural misunderstanding created tensions
aggravated by the fact that all the local employees in Bangalore
had spent their entire lives in India; none were in a position to see
things from the other perspective. The majority were software
engineers in their twenties. And the California office was made up
entirely of American mid-career marketing experts, none of
whom had ever been to India. A small issue threatened to sink the
enterprise.
After holding face-to-face meetings with Sarah’s team and
Sanjay’s, during which the misunderstanding was explained and
worked through, BusinessObjects took further steps to get the
collaboration back on track. Five engineers from the Indian office
were sent to California for six months, and three Americans
moved to Bangalore. Some Americans already based in Bangalore
were hired for Sanjay’s team, and Sarah hired several Indians
living in California. Bit by bit the divisiveness decreased and a
sense of unity emerged.
Getting culture right should never be an afterthought. Companies
that don’t plan for how individual employees and the
organization as a whole will adapt to the realities of a global
marketplace will sooner or later find themselves stumbling
because of unnoticed cultural potholes. And by the time they
regain their balance, their economic opportunity may have
passed.
A version of this article appeared in the October 2015 issue (pp.66–72) of Harvard Business Review.
Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, where she directs the executive education program Leading Across Borders and Cultures. She is the author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (PublicAffairs, 2014). Twitter: @ErinMeyerINSEAD
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