hi everybody and welcome to our podcast in good company now today we have a special guest with us aren mayor who is one of the world's leading Specialists on crosscultural management and a good thing she's written one of my favorite books called culture map so arene um what inspire you to to write this book

yeah hey so nice to be here with you today um well so I was raised in Minnesota there's a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota you might know which is in the Midwest of the US and as a so it was a very monocultural environment I was really surrounded by people who had only lived in the same culture as me uh and then as a after graduating from University I moved to Botswana to Southern Africa and I was teaching school there and I just saw how all of the techniques that I had learned in the US for how to motivate children and how to create a good classroom environment uh were totally falling flat and the things that they were encouraging me to do in the classroom were so different than anything we would ever do in the US

so I became very interested in that time to just see how in different cultures we um not only that we motivate children differently but that we motivate later on in life our employees differently and that we have a whole different psychology about how to communicate and how to build trust and be effective uh so that was the first step on this journey uh for starting to study how different cultures interact in an international environment which is what I do now yeah great great

so um you um have kind of split culture into eight different dimensions and if you don't mind I'd just love to talk through some of them because I think it's so interesting and me it really it really made me think about how we run you know our fund uh when we are in in several different countries you know we are in in Norway London we in New York Singapore yet we kind of treat it as as as one culture and of course it isn't but you you kick off with communication and you uh have this differential between low and high context communication cultures what does that mean

yeah so maybe I'll just take a moment to explain the framework and then I'll jump into low and high so I have a methodology that breaks culture down into eight behavioral scales so we look at things like how do we build trust differently in different cultures or how do we make decisions differently in different parts of the world and then through about 180,000 interviews that we've conducted in about 62 countries we have these countries that are positioned up and down the scale so you can compare one culture to another in order to think about um both the similarities and differences and how to be more strategic and empathic and of course you've just highlighted one of my favorite Dimensions it's the the one I write and speak about the most which is one that looks at what it means to be a good communicator in different parts of the world and what we have what we call low context cultures

these are cultures where we're really trained to be very explicit in the way that we communicate so the US which is maybe the most uh low context or explicit culture in the world and I was like taught as a child uh to tell them what I'm going to tell them and then tell them and then tell them what I've told them it's the very Focus strong focus on like spelling things out

and what I've learned living in other parts of the world I live in France currently I've lived in France for the last uh 23 years uh is that in many other cultures like France for example there's a lot more like a good communicator is really passing a lot more information between the lines and picking up a lot of unspoken messages so the sophistic uh the sophistication of the of the communication is much higher and I mean an example of that would be just even in the French language like uh we have this word in French means don't listen to what I said listen to what I meant right we don't even have these words in English uh so I think this is a great Dimension to help us start thinking about how effective communication is so different from one part of the world to another

so when I go to uh New York how should I communicate differently

well I think I mean in New York which is of course a place of immigration right like when you go to New York you've got people from all over the world who are now living together Under the Umbrella of the American culture and in that highly diverse culture we've learned that we really have to spell things out so if you don't say it it was uncommunicated and maybe I'll just give like a brand new example that I have just from last a week but um like I had this this person from Italy in my class who said to me you know Erin in Italy like if you make a joke and the other person thinks it's funny they laugh but in the US if you make a joke and the other person thinks it's funny they say that's funny and I like I had never thought about this why do nobody ever say that about my jokes I it's all it's all between the lines right um so in any case I mean at the end of that that situation with the with the uh the Italian was I never thought about this so I said oh yeah you're right we we laugh and we say that's funny and he said no Erin I've been observing this a lot in the US the the laughter is optional

do you think the world is moving towards a more American communication style more punchlines shorter sentences

well I mean I do believe that we have to be that we're we've become perhaps shorter in our communication which happens with being more and more virtual but I want to give you an example so I had an example just a couple of of well maybe 12 months ago where I was giving a presentation in Japan and at the end of the presentation I asked if there were any questions no one raised their hand I went to sit down so one of my colleagues this Japanese guy who was traveling with me he came up to me and he said Erin I think there were some questions uh would you like me to try and I said yes please so he stood up in front of this group of Japanese and he said you know uh Professor Meyer has just spoken with you do you have any questions no one raised their hand uh but he he stopped and he he quietly looked around the room and then after several seconds of Silence he gestured to someone who was sitting there from my perspective motionless and he said you know do you have a question and this Japanese guy sat up straight and he said thank you very much I do he gave a f he asked a fascinating question

so afterwards and then my colleague did that three more times so afterwards I said to him but how did you know that those people had questions he said well um it had to do with how bright Their Eyes Were and I thought wow you know for me coming from Minnesota like I do that's very challenging but then he clarified he said you know Erin in Japan we don't make as much direct eye contact as you do in the west so when you asked if there were any questions most people weren't looking right at you they were kind of looking somewhere else but I noticed that there were a couple of people in the room who really were looking right at you and their eyes were bright you know suggesting they would be happy to have you call on them if you would like to

that was such an important learning experience for me and you might think oh okay well that's Japan Japan is really like different from the rest of the world but I can tell you when I got back to inad right so I'm a professor at inad outside of Paris and I teach these um these like hugely International classrooms and when I got back to inad with this kind of lesson about looking for Bright Eyes in my classes I saw there were all of these people who were giving me this physical indication with their faces that they wanted to speak that I wasn't entirely missing because in the US if you want to speak you always raise your hand right

what's the key to this uh cultural sensitivity the key to observe people in this astute way is it do you have to live in a country and train or do people just have better antennas or what is it

of course if you go and you live in another country um eventually you will really start kind of like absorbing that culture in you you have those experiences you learn to be more humble you learn to be more curious hopefully you learn to be more Curious and more humble but I don't think you have to I mean you don't have to devote your life to developing these skills by moving from country to Country I do believe with a little bit of of systematic understanding thinking about you know how do different cultures relate on this aspect that you can become more effective

can can I give you another example sure

well like let's just think about feedback I mean feedback is of course like something that we do so differently in different cultures and er this kind of ties in with your with your second dimension right evaluation and feedback yeah that's it right

yeah so that I mean that is the second dimension the second dimension looks at how we provide feedback in different countries and I think that that one is the most sensitive and in some ways I mean the communicating Dimension is perhaps the most like kind of interesting one but if you want to know if you want to if you want if if you're going to cause offense or you're going to break a relationship it's because of the feedback Dimension

and maybe I'll just give you an example so um of course as I already said I come from the US and in the US we think of ourselves as being a very direct culture because we're so low context because we're so explicit and we spell things out but we actually have this tendency in the US I I learned as a child to when I give feedback to give three positives with every negative or to catch people doing things right

and like if you're from Norway where maybe you've learned that you know you if you have something that well I think in Norway often you don't give the positive feedback the positive feedback may be just kind of assumed so then you're giving me feedback and you start by telling me you know what you think I I could do differently I may really take that as a sign of of disrespect right

and then in the other way it gets really confusing so so okay you know I live in France and I was working and in France positive feedback is giv a lot less frequently than in the US and negative or corrective feedback is definitely giving more strongly than in an American context

so I'm working with this French woman oh here's someone from the from the book the book this woman Sabine right and she's um she's uh really excited about this move that she's making to Chicago so we spend a little time she's she's all energized then she moves to the US and after she's been in Chicago for four months I do a prescheduled follow-up call and before I call her I call her new boss this this American named John and I just say to John you know how are things going for Sabine and he says you know eron not well it's so frustrating because I've spoken with Sabine a bunch of times about these things she really needs to change if she's going to be successful and she hasn't made any effort to make these changes I I had my performance review with Sabine last week still no effort

so then I call Sabine how are things going in the US and she says you know Erin they're going great you know I just had this fabulous feedback from my boss it was the best performance review I've ever received so of course when her American boss starts his feedback at his performance review by saying you know this was really this was really fantastic and this part was really thought out and I really think you're making a huge impact here she's thinking wow that's the best performance review you know anyone has ever given me and by the time he gets to the real message she isn't even listening anymore

what do you think is the best way of doing it what's the best way to give you back

well I do believe you asked me earlier whether you should adapt your style to the culture that you're working with I mean I do think when it comes to feedback of course it's important to to get the message out there but if you give the message in a way that's too direct for the culture that you're working with you may break the relationship and that's not going to be good for your future and if you give if you give the feedback in a way that's too indirect for the culture that you're working with then they won't pick up the message and you may find that you need to come back and be clearer the next time it's just so difficult to give to give and receive feedback right and it's so easy to defend people to offend people and it's so easy to be offended

and I've um uh you know of course uh read your book and one of the things you recommend is to give uh you know positive and a negative uh straight after the the action so I tried this today I gave a presentation together with two of my colleagues straight after the presentation I said hey you know what let's give each other one one positive and one thing we need to improve and it was just great you know really low stress felt really natural and easy to take aboard

yeah thank you so that's actually you're now pulling from my other book right from my no rules rules book where we have a chapter on giving feedback in an organization and how to create an organizational culture around this

so I think the message is that if you're working with people outside of your own company or your own team I mean really we want to just try to watch how other people are doing it um try to be a little bit less Direct in general because we don't want to risk uh um we don't want to risk breaking the Rel relationship um and then gradually kind of ease in to being a little bit more direct but you made you made a framework of um of four uh rules what what are they they all happen to start with an A

okay okay yeah those are my Four A's I do believe it's really a really good strategy to say okay in this company this is how we will give feedback which is of course gives us a common platform for how we work with one another

and the four a of feedback which you may Implement throughout your organiz ation are number one when you give feedback you need to aim to uh aim let me freaking remember you need need to aim to help aim to assist right so that's of course the first one meaning that I don't give feedback just because I'm frustrated or I'm angry or I need to get get get something off my chest if that's how you're feeling don't give the feedback at all but if I see oh gosh you know I think that Nikolai could be a better interviewer or if he did X Y or Z and I have an idea for how that could help help you well in that case I have feedback that I could give you with the aim to to help you with the aim to assist that's your first a

the second a is the feedback must be actionable and that's of course critical because if I have feedback for you but there isn't anything you could do about it I mean keep it to yourself then he kind of a personal attack you know yeah I mean then again I think we come back to like what's even the point What's even the point of giving the feedback if the person can't act on it so those are the two ways of giving feedback

and then the two ways of receiving feedback are number one show appreciation so even if you doesn't feel good to receive that even if you disagree with the person don't defend yourself just say you know what I thank you very much thank you for having given me that feedback I'm going to think about it

but if you really get a feedback a culture of feedback going in your organization if you manage to get your employees giving a lot of feedback to one another which can be hugely beneficial for the organization you're going to need a fourth a also and that fourth a is that each person can accept or decline whatever feedback is given to them I don't mean that I say explicitly thank you but I decline your feedback I mean that I um I think about the feedback you give me and then I decide what I'm going to take and what I'm not going to take and we all know that that's part of a principle of culture of of uh developing a culture of feedback

so then that brings me to what you've said earlier and I think that in that case if you get that culture of feedback going we can really do what you suggested uh Nikolai which is that at the end of a meeting we can say hey let's just sit down and give one another a little bit of feedback so that we can be more successful the next time one one thing I think you're doing you did well one thing I think that you could do to up your performance next time you give me one thing you think I did well one thing you think that I could do to up my performance next time and in doing so all that feedback starts to get out there

I guess the advantage of doing it straight after a meeting is that you can be pretty quick and it works it's a bit like when you respond to an email if you're really quick it can be one sentence if you take a little time it needs to be much longer so I guess you save some time time as well

but just moving on here um so another dimension you talk about is trust what's the how do you build trust in different cultures what's the what's the key here

yeah so I think that that's actually the the the most foundational of all of the dimensions so of course in every country in the world we have to have trust in order to get work done I mean that's culturally Universal but when it comes to how we feel trust for someone that's quite different from one country to another and we can just keep it simple there's two kinds of trust so there's cognitive trust that's like trust from my brain that's like I see you you are on time you do good work you're reliable I trust you

and then we have what we call effective trust that's like trust from my heart right that's like I feel an emotional connection or a personal bond with you I feel like I've seen who you are at a at a beyond your professional Persona and because I've seen who you are inside I trust you

now if I ask you why you trust your mother it doesn't matter where you come from we'll talk in every country we'll talk about effective Trust but if I ask you why you trust a business partner we'll see a lot more difference from one part of the world to another

I mean some cultures like like my actually both of our cultures right both the US and and Norway which are both quite task oriented cultures so in these cultures we really try to separate like cognitive trust for work and effective trust for home

and then in many other world cultures for example every Emerging Market country in the world just to get us started we can really see that kind of cognitive and effective trust all woven together in a work environment so the importance of whining and dining is is bigger uh yeah I mean yes clearly but I think that we could take it to a a different level by saying the the the goal in a task oriented Society is to be friendly and enjoy working together but to really minimize well minimize distractions in order to stay focused on getting as much done as we can in a short period of Time Versus in a relationship oriented culture we really want our initial goal to be to do whatever we can virtually if necessary or if we can go there yeah I mean whining and dining definitely but really exposing who we are inside laughing together um spending time developing some kind of a friendship together and then if we start like that we'll find that the rest of the work will kind of all fall into place at a later you know as after we get that in place

now um what are the implications for uh leadership so uh in particular the difference between an egalitarian society and a and a country with more hierarchy so you know Norway totally flat uh you know uh Society uh very little hierarchy things are anchored left right and Center uh so that everybody participates in the decision- making uh versus other countries where that's different so you know how do you how do you look at these different things

yeah so I think that leading scale is quite an interesting one because it's true like you come from one of the most egalitarian cultures in the world right so in your culture in Norway there's this very like I think strong belief that the best boss is almost like a facilitator among equals so we like our boss to like look like everybody else and we want our boss um instead of telling us what to do we want our boss to be their kind of like facilitating discussion

and then of course in more well we'll call it hierarchical but I hesitate with hierarchical the word I call it low power distance versus high power distance because I know like in in your and my country Norway and the us we we think of the word hierarchy as something negative but if you think about this idea of power distance so Norway a very low power distance culture um very low um low respect shown to the the status of the person that we're working with

versus in a higher power distance culture maybe we're in India or maybe we're in China um well you work in Singapore clearly uh higher power distance culture where people really learn from a young age to show a lot more respect for the position of the person that they're working for and then this gets I think really complicated as a boss because it means we have to really know how to kind of adapt our leadership style to the position that to the the culture that we're working with

but how do how do these differences actually happen so you if you just move from Denmark across the border to Germany right very very different and France very different just how does it how do this it happen

yeah well that specific one I think is very interesting because if we look at okay let's talk about you well I mean in Denmark you Denmark you Denmark on you are on your first name with your boss right in Germany you are you are on on on the surname and you put a doctor in front right

yeah well that's actually it's interesting because if you look at a culture map like if we look at a culture map of Denmark up to Germany in many ways those cultures are quite similar right on my on my on my culture map right so like both of them are pretty direct with with with negative feedback Germans a little bit more direct but both of them pretty direct um both of those are rather task oriented societies not very different on that scale but when it comes both of them rather low context although Denmark a little bit more High context than than Germany

but when it comes to hierarchy that's where you've got a big difference so Denmark actually on my mapping in my research is the the most egalitarian country in the world and I know in Scandinavia you talk a lot about Sweden I think maybe you say swedes are more egalitarian but swedes are more consensual right swedes are clearly like a lot more consensual than other Scandinavian cultures but um Dan's the most egalitarian the the least deference to Authority and of course in Germany that deference to Authority is in comparison to Denmark quite a bit stronger

and if you just like you asked me why I don't so I'll get just do my professorial thing for a moment but if we think about um What's led to these differences across Europe you can see like in Scandinavia the cultures well across Europe the cultures that fell under the influence of the Vikings tend to be some of the most egalitarian and consensual cultures in the world and the Vikings of course they led by by consensus so there are all all of these stories about southern Europeans historically coming to Scandinavia to negotiate and having to come home early because they couldn't figure out who was in charge

uh and then of course the cultures that fell under the influence of the Roman Empire tend to be a little bit more hierarchical so you go to Italy you go to Spain definitely of a a stronger hierarchical structure in comparison to Scandinavia

and then I think the most interesting one is actually religion because the cultures that well when the when the Protestant religion came to Europe in a way in the 1600s in a way it removed the hierarchy from the church so now I talk directly to God instead of talking to the priest the bishop the pope before speaking to God and actually like even in the Netherlands if you move from the Protestant part of the Netherlands to the Catholic part of the Netherlands you can see a movement from a little bit well from a super egalitarian to like slightly less egalitarian As you move to the the Catholic part so I mean I don't talk too much about like history but I do think it is interesting to think about me I imagine Nikolai when you come to work in the morning that you're not thinking about the Vikings or the Roman Empire maybe you maybe you should be though

I clearly should be but it's uh it's really really interesting

is there a trend um you know there was a time um a little while back where where there seemed to be a trend towards more Scandinavian leadership styles across Europe certainly right so very important companies in Switzerland uh in the UK and so on had either CEOs or chair uh people from chairpersons from uh you know from scandy was is the still a trend towards the Scandinavian leadership style or not

yeah so I do believe in the world I mean we not we can see with research that every country in the world is generationally becoming a little bit more egalitarian so in India the younger generation is more egalitarian than the older generation in Korea the younger generation a little more egalitarian than the older generation and even in Norway the younger generation a little more egalitarian than the older generation and I think that's happened actually because of the internet right I mean like when I was a child okay I'm 52 when I was a child clearly there was no internet which means that the people who had more expertise and more experience were the source of knowledge so what my teacher tells me or my father tells me I mean I have to put Faith in what in in that in that experience

but of course with the internet we started uh let's say an a galarian ISM of information so now the young person can look something up on the internet and whether I'm in India or Korea or Norway I can say to the teacher hey but I that's not what I read on the internet yesterday um or doctor hey I looked it up I don't think you're right so I do believe that that's um that created this kind of notion of wow it's great that we can all have the power

but I want I think it's important when you ask about this um about this kind of leaning towards Scandinavian leadership because we talked about egalitarianism but one of the other big aspects that you have in Scandinavia is this consensual decision making and that's where I would say um I mean people generally lump those two things together like egalitarian means consensual decision-making I have two separate dimensions for those um because like in the us where we are well okay we're rather egalitarian although much more hierarchical than you are in Norway but the boss but the boss decides but the boss decides right or at least the individual decides and usually that's the boss we don't really like this thing that you tend to do in Scandinavia which is like take a long time to make decisions by groups right

um so I mean I like okay in Norway and even more so in Sweden but clearly the the tendency is that over a period of time we we share our ideas we come to some kind of group agreement and then once we Implement that that um that idea we don't go back easily because it took us a long time to get to it so and what I what I refer to as consensual cultures decisions tend to be slow to make to be made but then they're definitely as much as possible fixed right

and interestingly like okay in Norway you are egalitarian and consensual but we talked about Japan earlier I mean Japan is I think your listeners will know a very hierarchical Society okay a lot of deference to the position of the person that you're working with but it's also the most consensual culture in the world which more so than Sweden which means decisions are made Slowly by the group um and then once they are made they are fixed um so so I think it's just uh like what's the let's say what's the most modern approach I mean it depends on what kind of work you're trying to do

so like Japanese people they're really good at automobiles right okay well if you are developing a product where you want very little risk of um of a mistake then a consensual decision- making is great it's good to take a really long time to make the decision and in those those like let's say like a more manufacturing environment uh hierarchical um hierarchical leadership methods also can be very fast uh but if we're in an agile environment we need creativity egalitarianism generally leads to a lot of creativity throughout the organization

so you've seen all these different companies and all these different Copa culture so now we're going to make a company here aren and Nikolai Inc you know yeah what um what do we want the culture to look like what is the perfect culture if you can take a little bit of each yeah what is what is a great company

okay so I mean as I said it has to start with what you are going to do are your listeners mostly entrepreneurs is that right Nikolai

they're all over the place

oh okay all right so let's say but they're all but they're all very very clever otherwise they wouldn't have listened to the program they're the smartest people totally totally

okay but let's say let's say that you and I are doing an IT startup okay right I mean if if we're doing an IT startup then we want the egalitarianism of Scandinavia right okay so we want very low levels of hierarchy throughout the organization but we want super fast and flexible decisions like in India okay we want decisions to be made quickly and we want them to be able to be changed quickly and that's because of course in a startup environment I mean everything's changing around us like in India right everything changing around and around us we may need to change our product quickly we might need to reinvent ourselves again and again so often a more top down a decision-making approach would be more effective

and I actually think in a startup environment we want to be as direct as possible when we're giving communication the most direct cultures in the world the Netherlands and Israel so let's be Dutch or Israeli in the way that we give feedback um but let's also invest time in getting to know one another and I actually think that's true across industry and across work that you're doing if you have any International component in your work you want to spend a lot more time in building personal relationships because once we have that fundamental trust then if you speak too directly to me I will forgive you if we don't have that trust and you speak too directly to me that's really going to be the the last time that I want to work with you

um so I think you can really think about what's my goal uh what industry am I working in what do I want to accomplish and then you can kind of map out like even which type of culture uh which type of uh country would be best for you for your organization

I can already see that this is going to be a huge success this company of ours we're on our way absolutely

how much time should this how much time uh should a CEO spend on Copa culture I want to just transition for a moment so we were talking a lot about my culture mapping book right but I wrote this this second book is you know with uh with Reed Hastings who's the the founder and chairman of Netflix

so what I saw with with re with when I was doing this work with Reed because he leads his team um I mean he's really trying to move away from this pyramid model where the the leader is at the top of the at the top of the pyramid and instead kind of put the leader like a tree down at the roots of the tree um and with a very egalitarian carian structure so um what I think we can think about that and is an a traditional company uh the decision-making model has the the chairman at the top and the lower level employees at the bottom of the pyramid right and the lower level employees can make small unimportant decisions but for anything important or expensive we have to push the decision- making up in the organization and of course in a um in a traditional like manufacturing environment that's a great method

but in these like newer companies and to today's agile world where we have to be faster and more flexible and more creative I do believe that the best decision-making method is a lot more like a tree and with that tree we've got the leader okay who's down there in the dirt at the roots of the tree not making the big decisions but instead leading with context not control or something they say at Netflix that I love don't seek to please your boss seek to do what's best for the company

well I think for sure I'm Norwegian enough Erin we have um um tens of thousands of young people listening to the bcast and I'd love to ask you what is your advice to young people

yeah so of course young people today they wake up in the morning they open up their computers they have people from all over the world who are joining them maybe you've got I don't know a team you're working with in Brazil someone else uh in uh uh uh Nigeria um and it's very easy to underestimate the impact of uh of culture on your communication so I think an example a great example of that would be that maybe you notice that like uh these guys from the US on your team they're talking all the time and maybe you've got this guy from China and he doesn't seem to speak very much but you just think oh well that guy from China he doesn't have much to say and those guys from the US they clearly have a lot that they'd like to contribute

um but so it's easy to slip into this kind of assumption that culture isn't impacting us so the advice to young people is don't underestimate how much culture impacts our communication even when we are working in Virtual environments and even when the people that we are communicating with seem to be just like us

and then take some time to learn so you know what I do with my culture mapping methodology is I give people an opportunity to kind of look at one culture and say oh I see that culture is a little bit more direct than mine so maybe that guy wasn't angry with me maybe he was just showing me respect and in that culture they build trust in a little bit more relationship oriented way than they do in my culture so maybe the reason that that guy didn't respond to my email is because I dived right into the material and I didn't really give him I didn't really share anything about myself or even share show interest and getting to know him personally so when I get him on the phone the next time I'm going to take a different approach

and of course the mapping it it doesn't give you a recipe we're all individuals but it does help you to kind of tease out like what's cultural and what's personal so that we can be more strategic and more empathic

really great advice I perhaps want to add one thing spend all your savings on traveling and backpacking and see the world

that's right and of course the more we see the world the more we recognize how strange our own culture is and I think that that own self that self-reflection is one of the most important types of of cultural learning because otherwise we just think that everyone else is strange and doing it wrong when we act when we realize actually huh seems that I'm just as strange as everyone else absolutely

I'm definitely going to think more about um how to adapt to to the various countries where we have offices uh when it comes to feedback and getting people on board and so on it's been um just uh tremendously uh uh interesting uh would recommend everybody to read your book the culture map it's been uh really changing the way I look at culture so a big thanks for being on here and good luck with your work

thank you such a pleasure to be here with you