Coconuts, peaches, and working across cultures

Japan is like a coconut.

I don’t just mean it’s hard to “crack” the language and Tokyo’s subway map—although both can be pretty tough. I’m talking, of course, about Japanese culture in general.

On a simple level, many national cultures can be categorized as “coconuts” or “peaches”.

Coconut cultures are harder for outsiders to penetrate: there is that hard outer shell which can be very hard to crack, but once you break through, you can get at the goodness within, and be part of the in-group.  Relationship-building takes time, context is king, with Japan being an example of such a culture.

Other cultures are like peaches: soft and squishy on the outside, open and friendly, easy for anyone to get into, but with that hard pit at the center that makes it harder to develop meaningful, deep relationships. American culture is a prime example.

So as you'd guess, in global business interactions, peaches and coconuts can have a hard time talking to each other.

And of course, cross-cultural interactions are far more complex. We all have different understandings of respect for authority, how to give feedback, how to structure a proposal, context versus content, and more.

Think of something as simple as a business e-mail.

Who you send it to, what kind of greeting you open with, what kind of logic you use to explain your points, all matter. In a hierarchical corporate culture—which is common in Japan—who you send the email to and who you cc on the email can be critical issues, especially if there is a significant gap in seniority “level” between the sender and recipient. To those of us from a more egalitarian culture, this can pose a challenge.

Three steps to cross-cultural fluency

What can you do to crack through that coconut? How do you get to the peach pit if you’re living in a peach culture?

What can any of us do to communicate more effectively across cultures?

There are three steps we can take to guide us to cross-cultural fluency:

1.  Self-analyze to figure out our own behaviors
2. Compare our behaviors to the norms in our new culture and identify large gaps
3. Stretch our behaviors to bridge those gaps 

Know yourself

We each come from our own cultures and upbringings, which have given us conscious and unconscious assumptions about how to behave, what is considered common sense, what is considered the “right” behavior.

But while our national culture influences each of us—it does not define us. People are first and foremost individuals.

So if we can’t use national cultures to help define our behaviors what can we do?

We need to get inside our own heads, and do a bit of self-analysis to figure out how we function, and look at specific business behaviors, which can pose challenges for us.

This is the first step in cross-cultural fluency, and luckily there are many tools and online questionnaires can help us to do this self-analysis. 

Know your gaps
Once we have used frameworks to evaluate ourselves, we can then move one to the second step and evaluate the characteristics of new cultures to identify gaps.

An excellent summary of the facets which define national cultures can be found in the book The Culture Map and online tools created by Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD business school. We can use those “culture maps” to identify how far we are from other cultures in specific business situations. We can identify gaps in specific behaviors in business interactions.

This all begins with self-awareness. We can’t identify how to adapt without first knowing where we are starting from. To identify specific challenges we face in our new culture, we need to look at the specific situations we are facing—emails, meetings, negotiations, and more.

Stretch to bridge the gaps

Finally, once you have identified the gaps in behavior between you and the culture you're working with, it’s time for the third step, to stretch your behavior to allow yourself to function more effectively in the new culture. The key word is “stretch”. To adapt and function better in a different culture, you should not change who you are, you should not need to change your core values.

It’s important here to focus on changing specific business behaviors, but not changing yourself. In the book Global Dexterity, Brandeis University professor Andy Molinsky describes how we each have a natural “comfort zone” for a given behavior, and we can stretch that comfort zone to overlap with the norms of a different culture.

We can adapt by using our existing behaviors, without needing to change our core values. Identify the specific cross-cultural business changes we face with our new colleagues,  find ways to stretch our behavior to narrow those gaps, and create a personal action plan to put it all into place.

The GLOBIS Experience

In September, 2015, GLOBIS University welcomed 27 new students into its Full-Time MBA program. Those students are a hugely diverse group, representing 16 countries with quite different national cultures.

Yet they need to spend the next year of their MBA studies working together in class, debating productively but also producing work as teams.

To help give them a head start in becoming a highly functional team, I ran a half-day cross-cultural workshop with them, following the process described above.

Over an afternoon, we worked on looking at behaviors as a group and as individuals so we could identify any cross-cultural gaps, and help develop a strong class culture of their own.

The feedback was great—they got increased awareness of cultural differences. More importantly they got an increased awareness of their own cultural assumptions, potential challenges, and the necessity of stretching their behavior to study together well, and to work and live in Japan more broadly.

The diversity of that group of GLOBIS students highlights the benefits of working cross-culturally.

The diverse viewpoints of such a group will lead to a level of innovation and creativity which would be impossible in a monocultural environment.

To leverage that diversity, we first need to get over the gaps, which separate us and adapt our behaviors to work effectively. Then all of us, coconuts and peaches, can enjoy the fruits of cross-cultural work.

This is an edited version of an article which appeared previously on Japan Today Insights.