I have spent the last 16 years studying how cultural differences are changing global organizations but I have not always been working in a cross-cultural space I was raised in a very monocultural place I was raised in Minnesota in the Midwest of the US and was only later as an adult that I started living in other countries and kind of learning about these things but I had a situation early in my career that got this all started for me where I was on a trip to Japan with a Japanese colleague and I gave a short presentation
to a group of Japanese participants and at the end of the presentation I asked them if they had any questions when I looked at the group that no one raised their hands so I went to sit down my Japanese colleague then said to me Aaron I think actually there were some questions do you mind if I try and I said okay fine so he then stood up and again he said any any questions and again no one raised their hand but this time he looked very carefully at the group oh do you have a question
and the woman said well thank you I do and she asked a fascinating question and then he did it again oh do you have something you'd like to say yes thank you I do so afterwards I said to him you know how do you how did you know that these people had questions and he said to me well it had to do with how bright their eyes were and I thought wow you know they don't teach us that in Minnesota so then I said well how do you know how bright their eyes are and he
said well you know in Japan we don't make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West so when you ask people if they have any questions most people are not looking at you directly but a few people in the audience are looking directly at you and their eyes are bright and that indicates that they would be comfortable with you calling on them so the next day I gave another presentation and again I asked if there were any questions and again no one raised their hand but this time I okay I'll just try
so I did as he'd instructed and I looked carefully at the group and I saw just as he said but only a couple of people in the room were looking directly at me and if I really thought about it well yes okay their eyes were bright so you know I gestured to one of them and he kind of went like that and then I said would you like to say something and he said yes thank you so um this was a very important experience for me because well there's a an expression in Japanese Japanese which
is kooky yo man die they shortened it to KY and it means someone who is unable to read the atmosphere or someone who is unable to read the air we need to pick up the communication that's in the air and here we could see that he clearly could read the air and I was clearly KY but I also saw that with a little bit of assistance and direction that I also could become better at picking up those signals that were in the air so then as I was thinking about this I became very interested in
trying to figure out if there was a method that we could use to help people to better read the atmosphere when they were working with cultures that they didn't know intimately and we then started to develop this this framework that came from lots and lots of research where we divided culture up into different types of behaviors and we started looking at you know how is Trust built in different parts of the world and how do we make decisions differently in different parts of the world and we saw that we were able to come up with
patterns for how countries or cultures fell differently on those scales and though it was very interesting was that we could also then start to map cultures up to one another so for example here you could we map I map Brazil next to France for you Brazilian culture to French culture and you can see on some scales the cultures are very similar and on other scales they're very different I also mapped out here for example Germany German culture two Singaporean culture and you can look again at where the similarities and where the difference is on those
two scales now as we were going through this we also I also started to see that there were a few key lessons for people who were trying to use this type of mapping and the first was that when you looked at these scales people humans seem to have a tendency to want to look at them like there was a center of the world with a right hand side in a left hand side yet in our multicultural economy that doesn't make any sense I saw instead that we had to think relatively about the scale so I
was amused with the first presentation where Denis gave this example of what the French are like and I actually did some work a while ago where I was working with a global team and at one point I asked the British on the team what it was like to work with the French on their team and the British said a little bit like what you heard from me they said well you know the French they're very disorganized and they're always late and they're always changing the topic in the middle of the meeting so it's very difficult
to follow them but then when I interview the Indians who were on the same team and I asked the Indians what it was like to work with the French they'd say well you know Aaron the the French they're so rigid they're so in adaptable they're so focused on the structure and organization and punctuality that they're not able to adapt as things change around them and I saw that you know yes we could see that type of difference that was reflected on one of the scales a scheduling scale which looks at time rate agent and I
will just say that I gave the same example in Germany a little while ago and one of the Germans in the room said well you know Aaron this is a really funny example for us because we work with the British all the time and we are always complaining that the British are exactly the same way that you've just described that the British complain about the friction right so when you look at the scales the absolute positions of the scales don't mean anything and trying to even describe what a culture is like is not really useful
in this type of global organization that you're working and instead we need to start being able to tease out these differences and how different cultures see one another so that was the first the second point was that what it means to be an effective leader has changed so completely as we've gone through this globalization process because of these cultural differences and that usually what it means to be an effective leader in one culture in one society is deeply linked to how children learn to think about Authority in their schooling systems for example so I mean
just to give you an example I think a few people are from Sweden in this room well Sweden is one of the most egalitarian societies in the world and if you go into a Swedish classroom or you start looking at the way that Swedish children are learn you'll see that there's this strong emphasis on the fact that the adult is like a facilitator the teacher can be challenged and contradicted and is just there to facilitate learning and then if you wanted to look for example at let's say Mexico you might find that the way that
children are raised has a much stronger emphasis on the fact that the child should defer to or respect the authority figure and the teacher for example in the classroom isn't giving the knowledge to the children who don't confront the teacher back and then this has all sorts of links for you in a global leadership role I worked with a Swedish company seco tools and they bought a big organization in Monterrey Mexico and now I had all of these Mexicans who were managing Swedish people and one of them said to me well Erin you cannot believe
what it's like to manage and Sweden because they do not care at all that I'm the boss you know I go into these meetings I'm trying to roll out my strategy I'm trying to get everybody aligned and they're challenging me they're contradicting me they're taking their ideas off in other directions now sometimes I want to just get down on my knees and I want to plead with them you know please don't forget that I'm in charge here so this is really complicated in today's world because it means that it's no longer an tough to know
how to lead the Swedish way or the Mexican way or the French way or the Chinese way we have to know how to do all of those things and what would I see with the most effective global leaders is that they may have one foot that's very deeply rooted in their own culture but then with their own other foot they're really working on learning how to motivate their teams in different types of ways I call this authentic flexibility and this of course for those of you who have done this if you've moved to another country
for example and you're doing this all day long you might find this is exhausting it takes a lot of energy and once you're stressed out you're snapping back to your normal tendency but we also see that this is like a muscle so the more that you work on it the easier it gets till finally you can get to a point that you move back and forth easily from one type of style to another that's the future of leadership in this global economy the third point that we recognized as we were going through this mapping process
was that a lot of people were saying okay fine today is a world is all interconnected we're working over Skype we're working over telephone so aren't cultural differences impacting us less but in fact cultural differences were impacting us in so many more ways than they were before yet we're totally unaware of them so to give an example of this I worked a while ago well let me just get you thinking about this so in Germany at the end of a phone call it's very comfortable and appropriate to get off of the phone and put in
to writing what's been decided right and you would then send the recap to the person that you've been working with I was doing some work a while ago and with a Saudi Arabian team and one of his Saudi Arabian participants said well you know Erin in my culture if we have a discussion on the telephone and we make some decisions verbally that would be enough for me especially if we have a little bit of a relationship and then if you get off of the phone and you put everything that we've sided into writing and you
send that to me that's a clear sign to me that you don't trust me
