Paola Pascual 0:03
Welcome to Talaera talks, the business English communication podcast for non native professionals. My name is Paola and I am co hosting the show with Simon.
Simon Kennell 0:11
In this podcast, we're going to be covering communication advice and tips to help express yourself with confidence in English in professional settings. So we hope you enjoy the show.
Simon Kennell 0:24
Welcome back to another Talaera bit. As always, wherever you are, I hope you're having a great day. My name is Simon. And today we're going to be talking about something that I hear a lot of. And it's something that if you work remotely, or even if you work in a global team, you know that this can be a challenge. And that is collaborating across cultures. So first of all, why? Why is this even something that we're talking about? Why is this even a challenge? Well, if you do work across cultures, there may be things that, yeah, take you by surprise, sometimes there may be situations where you think you understand something in one way. And then it turns out that your colleague from a different culture understands it in a different way. And then you only find this out, you know, after a month or two when a project isn't completed on time, or it's completed in a totally different way than you had originally thought. Right. So this can be a real challenge for international teams, and one that we talk about a lot.
Simon Kennell 1:40
Today, we'll be talking a little bit about collaboration, and how do we do that across teams. Now to start, I'm gonna give a really short story about a personal experience that I had. And then this is going to tie in to the main lesson that we have for today. So as some of you may know, I used to be a teacher and a manager in Vietnam. So I lived in Ho Chi Minh City for a little over a year. And part of that time, I was managing a team of Vietnamese employees, and then a team of international trainers, right. So we had teachers and then Vietnamese employees working together in this team that I was managing. And it was one of my first management experiences. And I was so excited. I really enjoyed it. But there was one situation one experience that stood out to me that really shifted how I thought about, yeah, how I thought about collaborating across cultures. And basically what happened is I set up a meeting where I wanted us to start to collaborate and brainstorm on some ideas to provide a better service for some of our students. And so I set up this meeting, we all got together had coffee, and it was really nice. And I put up a big board. And the idea was is we would start to Yes, spitball brainstorm, which is basically throwing out ideas, right? And then we would throw all these ideas out onto the board. And then we would discuss, yeah, we would discuss these ideas and see which ones we could use. Well, we started and some of the teachers there were American and British and Irish and South African, they started throwing out ideas. And I thought this was great. Okay, it's going good. We have some momentum. But the Vietnamese were somewhat quiet. And I felt that this was, you know, I wanted to include them. Right? This was a bit challenging. They're all super smart, great, capable, awesome employees. So I wanted to include them. And basically what I did was I pointed out one of the best employees in the team, who her name was Lindy. And so I said, Okay, Lindy, let's keep this going. Have you thought of any ideas that, you know, maybe you could add to this to this list of ideas that we have? And her face, like went totally pale, and she became very quiet and didn't say a word. And so I stood there very awkwardly. And there was this silence. And then she just put her head down. And I thought, Okay, what just happened there? That was really odd. Let's just keep it going. So then someone else, you know, put their hand up and had an idea and then we kept going and, and it struck me as odd because the Western teachers dominated the discussion, and I didn't really want that to happen. I didn't really. Yeah. I mean, I wanted this to be a group exercise, right? Well, at the end of the day, I was getting ready to leave. And one of the Vietnamese team members came up to me and asked to speak with me in private. And she knew me well enough to where yeah, she could come up and tell me, you know, what was going on? She said, you know, what you did earlier, actually, wasn't all that great, had a pretty bad impact. Yeah, Lindsay, she's, she's very embarrassed, she wasn't prepared, you put her on the spot like that. And you really kind of embarrassed her.
Simon Kennell 5:50
So this is when I learned about what face was and losing face and the role of face in not only Vietnamese culture, but several cultures, we hear about it a lot in different Asian countries, but also in the Middle East. You know, Russia, the role of face the role of your own kind of dignity and respect and how you how you appear and social relationships plays a big role in these cultures. And what I had done was, by putting her on the spot like that in front of the rest of the group, I had, inadvertently, which means without knowing I had basically embarrassed her and made her lose face in front of all of her colleagues, which is just really, really a bad thing to do, right? You never want to be embarrassed in front of your colleagues, but especially not in an Asian culture in a face culture, a culture where we really think about the role of face, right.
Simon Kennell 6:58
So what is face? Well, when we think about face, it's it's a class of behaviors and customs associated with honor authority of an individual and its image in kind of social groups. Right? So how you're standing in a social group, and a lot of it is around respect, right? And this is linked with dignity that this person holds in these social relationships. Right. So a lot of times, Westerners in an Asian context don't really understand this. And will, yeah, I think that we can just ask direct questions to people and throw this out without considering the role of face in the social dynamic, right? So we want to be careful here when we're collaborating across cultures, because we don't want to put anybody on the spot. What did I get wrong in this context? Well, number one, I didn't understand my position, and the weight that it carries across cultures. So my position as a manager of this team, I didn't understand that in Vietnamese culture, this is more hierarchical than in American culture, right? So I didn't understand that. You know, this wasn't a quote on quote, psychological safe, egalitarian space where I could just, you know, I could just ask people what their ideas were, and then everybody would feel comfortable to share their ideas. Even if they were bad ideas, right? I projected my own cultural idea of what collaboration means on this meeting, right. So I considered collaboration from my idea is the same across cultures, which is not the case. And then the last thing that I got wrong is I directed to one individual, right. So what should I have done in this situation?
Simon Kennell 9:03
Well, when we collaborate across cultures, we can do three things. Number one, we can allow some pre meeting work, right, so we can create a shared document where people can add in ideas before the meeting. And this gives opportunity for people to prepare their thoughts and their ideas before the meeting. So if they don't feel so safe, to just throw out random ideas in the meeting, to spit ball to use that term, again, we can create a pre meeting document so that people can either prepare their or prepare on their own right. And that way, when you come into the meeting, people feel ready to give their ideas.
Simon Kennell 9:45
The second thing is to think about it as if you're driving in a new city. You want to have that a little bit of hyper awareness when you're collaborating across cultures because you need to be actively tuning into what's happening both ways. With what people are saying, but with what people are not saying, right, who is not joining in on the conversation, so I could see I was intuitive enough, I guess to see that the Vietnamese employees weren't joining in, right. And I thought, okay, let's fix that. I'll just ask them, that was the wrong thing to do. What I should have done in this situation was ask open ended questions, right? ask open ended questions. And wait, allow silence. So I could have asked, all right, so what are your thoughts on this point? And wait, and wait. And now you may see someone meet your eye, or give a slight signal that they would be open to talk. Now, this doesn't mean you should point and call on them. But open your body receptively to them. And someone might come with something right. Now, once someone brings up an idea, then we want to use the rasa technique which we've talked about previously. Receive, appreciate, summarize, and ask. Hmm. Okay, so you think that we should be providing a little bit more feedback for students after their sessions? Is that what you mean? And so what we're doing is we're appreciating, we're summarizing, to make sure we're all on the same level, and we're asking, we're bringing it back. And that's going to be a little bit like playing tennis back and forth and bringing it up.
Simon Kennell 11:49
Okay, so when we're collaborating across cultures, as a team, the best thing you can do is create a collaboration code or a user manual for how you want to collaborate as a team. And this will help you so that everybody is on the same point, when you are going to collaborate when you're going to brainstorm, create some pre meeting work. So people have a shared document that they're working in together. Use your awareness during the meeting to see what's being said, what's not being said. And remember, active listening, open ended questions allow silence and the Rossett technique. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed this to layer a bit. It was a little bit longer today. But as well, you know, there's a lot in this topic, we talk about the cross cultural challenges all the time, check some of the previous episodes, and you'll be able to hear a little bit more about that, or, yeah, show up for one of our webinar webinars where we always talk about this. But yeah, take these points, practice them a little bit. And, as always, keep learning.
Paola Pascual 13:06
And that's all we have for you today. We hope you enjoyed it. And remember to subscribe to Talaera Talks. We'll be back soon with more.
Simon Kennell 13:14
And visit our website at Talaera.com for more valuable content on business English. You can also request a free consultation on the best ways for you and your team to improve your communication skills. So have a great day and keep learning!
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