Understanding the obvious ways culture influences divergent business work styles is, of course, critical. You won’t get very far without knowing where to sit at a business meeting in a hierarchal society like Japan, for example. But making a real cross-cultural connection demands that you go deeper when interacting with colleagues from other cultures, to understand not only the “surface” – the behaviors you can see and hear – but also the culturally-born thought processes that cause those different behaviors.
These subtle – but often profound – impacts of culturally divergent work styles can be seen in the different ways cultures pursue business presentations. Whether live in front of an audience, via phone, or pitching a quick idea over email, business people are always “presenting.” But all cultures do it differently – and their differences are products of deeply engrained and culturally informed work styles.
That’s why it sometimes happens that even when presenters feel like they’re giving it their best, a foreign audience can end up feeling confused, frustrated, or bored to tears. It often doesn’t matter how much time is devoted to overcoming language barriers or understanding surface-level cultural norms. “Do’s” and “don’ts” on a country-by-country basis are helpful, but it takes practice and experience to understand how to effectively communicate across cultures by evaluating your presentation from the perspective of another culture.
High-Context can Bore Workers from Low-Context Cultures
My colleague Amanda tells a story about a female Chinese manager temporarily assigned as a project leader for an American company. When presenting about the project’s process to an American audience, her American manager unexpectedly took over.
She was confused, and unable to figure out what she did wrong. Her manager’s subsequent explanation amounted to the idea that the presentation was geared too much for a Chinese audience. The project leader began with a wealth of detailed, factual background information – context – before teeing up the main point: project progress so far. These are key characteristics of a typical Chinese communication style, often referred to as “high-context.”
But the presentation was accurate and detailed, so why didn’t it resonate for an American audience? It comes down to the way different cultures tend to think, and how those differences shape the structure of workplace communications. American presentation style focuses immediately on the main idea – an aspect of the country’s ubiquitous “low-context” work communication style. Americans, unlike the Chinese, often lose interest if the main idea, or the “big picture,” isn’t succinctly atomized into 3-to-5 key takeaway points right at the start, with follow-up explanations only as necessary along the way.
Carefully Consider Your Audience – and Adapt
Amanda likes to compare the Chinese project leader story with one about a cross-culturally trained American senior manager presenting in Germany. The American manager had experience with culturally divergent work styles, so would read CultureWizard’s Country Profiles for each location she planned to visit. This due diligence helped her meet “surface” expectations by anticipating cultural norms like how to present a business card or whether to address German colleagues with a title or honorific.
On top of those surface-level insights, the manager researched how to customize her presentation for a German audience without changing her company’s core message.
The German style, centered around “inductive reasoning,” tends to walk an audience gradually to the main idea, presenting it as the conclusion of a logical argument. If she had followed the American style – often characterized as “deductive reasoning,” and a common trait of low-context cultures – she would have presented the conclusion first, and then explained how she got there.
Because she logically built her argument in an inductive manner with an abundance of details, a German executive complimented her after the presentation, noting that he had never before seen an American present in the German style. He confirmed her presentation had enabled the audience to understand the information easily and, consequently, they’d support the project!
The ROI of Real Intercultural Communication
An experience of my own shows how the Relationship dimension (of the CultureWizard Intercultural Model®) can influence culturally divergent work styles. I once worked with a top U.S.-based pharmaceutical company to develop the intercultural communication skills necessary to successfully present products to an audience of foreign-born and first-generation Asian-American healthcare providers.
The pharmaceutical company was having difficulty getting vaccines administered in certain pockets of California where Asian-Americans from China and Vietnam were the predominant owners of small healthcare providers. The company’s sales reps and marketing team for these areas, however, were mostly Caucasian and Hispanic. They presented the vaccine in a very straightforward, direct, and transactional way that, as it turned out, did not resonate well with the Chinese or Vietnamese value systems.
We created a customized CultureWizard learning platform and tailored a series of instructor-led workshops to help the sales and marketing team develop intercultural skills to successfully adapt their approach and engage their territories. We focused in large part on the Relationship dimension, the spectrum for which extends from highly Transactional on one end to highly Interpersonal [SD2] on the other. The course explained how East Asian cultures often must establish trusting interpersonal relationships before making a business transaction. The Asian-American physicians likely considered the highly Transactional style of the pharmaceutical reps as indicative of wanting to make a quick profit instead of establishing a long-lasting partnership. The approach did not signal the level of care the medical professionals were accustomed to sharing with their own patients, so we taught the client how to emulate a more Asian business style.
It worked!
This newfound understanding and applied skills boosted the reps’ confidence and effectiveness. They scaled back their direct, to-the-point demeanor in favor of expressing personal and cultural interest to the practitioners and their offices. Subsequently, the American and Hispanic sales teams were able to reach and engage the doctors – increasing the administration of their vaccines to be closer to par with the rest of California. In addition to helping secure the future health of newborns and senior citizens, the company calculated their ROI to be $7.50 for every $1 spent on the solution we customized for them!
What we observe on the surface can be confounding, but it’s a signal to learn more about what’s happening underneath the surface. Do you have the tools to do so? If you and your organization are willing to put in the time and effort to dig a little deeper into the ways other people and other cultures think, it always pays off.
Learn more about working with different cultures. 
