Tips For Cross Culture Communication (Vol.1)

Thank you everybody who opens this email again. I know I skipped last week's newsletter, and I keep reminding myself that done is better than perfect this week.

And here is this week newsletter on cross-culture communication

I believe most f we had been working with some foreigners before, no matter if it is in your workplace. Did you notice there is some cultural difference in workplace?

I am working with colleagues from different countries across APAC in my current company. While for my team, managers come from America, Canada & Korea. So in short, lot of nationalities and cultures.

While working with them, I thought Western colleagues might be more open-minded and less hierarchical. Sometimes, things do not go the way I anticipated.

It makes me wonder why there should be different ways to view other cultures and their characteristics.

Then one of my friends recommend a book - The Culture Map

The book lists eight scales to evaluate culture and countries

🔥 Scale in a different culture

Communicating: low-context vs high-context

Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs indirect negative feedback

Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first

And More...

😁 Ways to give feedback in different cultures

In the book, the author mentions people in different parts of the world will give feedback in drastically different ways.

“ Americans might be trained to wrap positive messages around negative ones, while the French are trained to criticise passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly.”

💡 Leadership, Hierarchy and Power

Tips for working in Hierarchical Environment

• Communicate with the person at your level. If you are the boss, go through the boss with equivalent status.
• When you call a meeting, give clear instructions a few days beforehand about how you would like the meeting to work and what questions you plan to ask. Tell your team members explicitly that you will call on them for their input.
• If you are the boss, remember that your role is to chair the meeting. Don’t expect people to jump in randomly without an invitation. Instead, invite people to speak up.

Tips for working in egalitarian environment

• Go directly to the source. No need to bother the boss.
• Think twice before copying the boss. Doing so could suggest to the recipient that you don’t trust them and try to get them in trouble.
• Introduce management by objectives, starting by speaking with each employee about the department’s vision for the coming year and then asking them to propose their best personal annual objectives subject to negotiation and final agreement with you. In this way, you become a facilitator rather than a supervisor while still handling what is being accomplished.

There are a lot of tips on how to work with people in a different culture, and I highly recommend you to read this book.

Hope you find this interesting and helpful.

Have a great week!

Tim

❤️ My Favourite Things

🛠 Productivity - Tab grouping In Google Chrome. This feature had launched a while now, and it is straightforward enough with the name. You group different tabs. I found out this feature helps me to organise my un-read article and is extremely useful at work when opening multiple taps at once.

🥘 Restaurant - Hjem - A cafe in Sheung Wan serving nordic food. Their open sandwich is good with a slice of bread and other food items like beef, potato salad, and pickled cucumber on top. It is the best way to start my weekend

💻 Gadget - Kobo Libra 2. I bought my second reader, and now, I own both a Kindle Paperwhite and a Kobo reader. While Kindle is good for its English book collection, they are missing most Chinese books in its book store. Kobo, on the other hand, owns most of the Chinese books I will read.

📷 Photos - Our team has a tradition; whenever people leave, we will take a group photo in the corner of the office. One of our designers is leaving so we decide to do it again. It is always good to get formal photos with our friends and family from time to time to remember what has happened to us.

✍🏻 Quote of the week

“ If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. “

From From The 4-Hour Workweek By Timothy Ferris.

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