What does it take to work cross-cultures?

There are people who feel that working cross-cultures is easy, and people who feel working cross-cultures is hard. The difference is often not in having worked out a good way to do whatever it is they are doing or failing to do so, but which perception they hold to be correct.

Naturally, this doesn't mean either group is automatically wrong or right; perception is, after all, generally not based on facts, but beliefs, not what is but what should be. This can and does lead to faux pas and negative experiences, which in turn can shift an opinion that was previously positive - working cross-cultures is easy - into a negative one - working cross-cultures is hard, demanding and emotionally draining.

Of course, in reality, working cross-cultures is still just working with people, and, as such, it's just another, more complex, version of having good people skills. (More complex because it requires you to know how to express those skills across various social and cultural expectations.) Microaggressions, attentiveness, politeness and so many more behaviours can look different from one culture to another, and, like with any other skill, one must master understanding of cultural and social workings involved to make things easy. This is also a continuous process - something that I impress over and over onto my clients. Learning cross-cultural skills is both learning how to work with a specific culture of interest and, more importantly, learning to "see" culture, and decipher it. Unlike taking a course in, say, emotional intelligence, you can't walk away with fool proof knowledge of every culture, everywhere, a sort of human pocket dictionary of cultures. (On the other hand, basics of emotional intelligence remain the same once you took the course...that said, I'd say that their expression, again, may be more diverse across cultures...but that's not what most of us expect from such a course, and it is important to remember that.) What you will get is understanding of how cultures work plus relevant examples. After this, the basics will help you understand what to look for and how to be curious about other cultures you will possibly encounter later on. But while certain factors remain the same (think rigid and fluid behaviours, the first demanding a very uniform society while the latter being open to diversity, or the most basic human responses to certain kinds of stress), learning about eg the overarching Japanese culture will not suddenly make you versatile in understanding the multitude of African or South American cultures. One cannot, and I can't overstate that, learn about a culture, and think all cultures are alike. There are similarities - we are all human after all - but the detail lies in how we express even those similarities, and for any cross-cultural work, the devil is, as the saying goes, in the detail...that detail to be precise.

Why is understanding what it takes to work cross-culturally important? Well, for a start, almost everyone nowadays probably works in a multicultural space of some sort. We all know people across the globe, have clients across the globe, attend conferences held across the globe. Even when those encounters are brief, they do bear a stamp of cross-cultural interaction - they can be pleasant or unpleasant, surprising or bewildering, and above all bad or good for business. Pestering a culture that is famously laid back when our own culture tends to be stressed out about exactly the right time and date will not have good results - you're likely to sour the relationship with your clients or suppliers, while also damaging your own office culture, because when human beings get stressed about something outside their control, their stress turns inwards, and they end up pestering each other about why things that should have happened haven't happened yet. Developing good working relationships requires more than a superficial approach too - showing some genuine human interest while not making a mess of them by saying or doing the wrong thing is how we turn brief contacts into real people we can converse and work long term with. (Human interest means that you are showing the people involved you are interested in them past a very perfunctory contact that involves whatever you intend to work on together.) Especially projects that involve the community in some way, that will have a clear and present existence outside the business world (eg architecture, archaeological projects, etc) need to have this human connection. Without them, our presence can become or be made out to be intrusive and noxious instead of helpful.

But it's also knowing how to talk to each other that counts. Different notions of politeness and hierarchies in humility, for instance, can impact who speaks and how. Say you are working on a project with someone whose culture values hierarchy. You are used to discussing things with everyone...but in the culture in question, it is the elder, either chronological elder or someone whose experience is valued more, who will speak, even if they themselves were arguably less involved with a project than their colleague. Turning to the colleague and bluntly asking for their opinion fails to take note of this cultural behaviour, and can cause problems. Instead, it's better to know that you will need to adjust your communications. This doesn't mean you don't get to be nice, and appreciate work done by everyone involved. But it does mean you understand how to make the conversation - and work resulting from it - flow in the best way possible.

Is there a downside to cross-cultural work? Absolutely, and it, too, requires knowledge and understanding. Where human rights are poorly respected, where women and minorities are poorly treated, you may encounter challenges, either for being a member of any of those groups, or for being willing and happy to work with members of those groups. Diversity advocates, too, may need to pause and reflect on what is more important to them - promotion of their business, their worldview and their willingness to work with diverse people, or the actual safety of the people in question. Sometimes, quite disappointingly so, the best thing you can do for diversity is keep quiet about diverse identities you may discover in cross-cultural work. Especially the lgbt+ people, but also those who live in spaces where tribal, ethnic, religious and other allegiances are under a microscope from a majority that isn't above abusing its power, often profit from covering. This isn't ideal, and they may feel comfortable disclosing their identity to a Western colleague...but that doesn't mean that they would be safe to disclose it to others, or that you should. Cross-cultural work is as much knowing when to say what as it is when not to say anything. This isn't a popular opinion - especially the young, zealous people often bristle at the notion of essentially being complicit of helping keep a status quo, but, bluntly speaking, this is down to having all the energy but no understanding. Even if we can make matters better for someone for a few days, maybe weeks, what will happen to them when we leave? Openly declaring our support for a cause in general is one thing. But using local people as props for it, while knowing very well that we will leave and abandon them in a world that will be less than kindly to them afterwards, is not a good step to take.

At the end of the day, cross-cultural work is only as hard as we make it. It may be emotionally draining, for instance in situations where you see someone having to live with a cloud of their identity overhead and dreading what might happen were that cloud to burst into a storm. It may be occasionally frustrating if we come from a very differently paced culture, one that values speed over taking time. But above all, cross-cultural work is a form of an under-explored soft skill that can benefit us all immensely : it can turn all people interactions and projects and whathaveyou into adventures rather than moments of dread when we either feel that we have done something bad but can't guess what, or when we fear what we might do or say that will have negative bearing on all our work and interactions.