The Culture Map: How to Work in a Multinational Company

Recently, I changed a job and started working at my first international company. It has been a real challenge for me. Previously, I worked for six years in a mostly Russian company. Even when we expanded into other markets and collaborated with colleagues from other countries, the internal culture remained familiar to me. Once in a new environment, I realized that I knew almost nothing about how people work in other countries.

After a few months in the new place, I realized that the main difficulty arose from my expectations: I assumed that people would behave the way I was used to. But they did not. At first, I didn't understand why people could be late for half a meeting or simply cancel it after it had already started. And what colleagues really meant when they say "very interesting" after a meeting. I work with British, Dutch, Indian, Pakistani and Arab people, and they all have slightly different ways of doing things. Erin Meyer's book "The Culture Map" helped me understand this. I recommend it to anyone starting their journey in the global environment.

Erin outlines the core skills people use in their work and offers a scale for each one, with countries on it. I think it's not as important to find your country on the scale as it is to find your personal place on it. Several times, I discovered that my country is at the opposite end of the scale compared to me. I think this is because the company I worked for for a long time was quite progressive and used many of the practices of the tech industry, where cultural differences are smoothed out.

So, what skills does Erin name:

1. Communicating: low-context and high-context

2. Evaluating: direct or indirect negative feedback

3. Persuading: principles first and application first

4. Leading: egalitarian or hierarchical

5. Deciding: consensual or top-down

6. Trusting: task-based or relationship-based

7. Disagreeing: confrontational or avoid confrontation

8. Scheduling: linear-time or flexible-time

   
   

Here is what my scale looked like:

Situations from my experience

Attitude to time

Initially, I was surprised why meetings were scheduled and cancelled at the last minute, or a key participant might simply not show up without any notice, and the rest would sit for 10-15 minutes waiting for him to show up. At my previous job, meetings were back-to-back, and people, of course, were late, but no more than five minutes.

After reading the book, I learned that in some cultures, rescheduling meetings is not only not bad, but also good, since it shows your flexibility in time and is considered a big plus.

Negative feedback

In Russia, people usually give negative feedback directly: if someone does their job poorly, then people easily can tell each other – it was done poorly, it needs to be redone. When I first joined a new company, I noticed several things for improvement in the office and, without thinking much, wrote about it in the general chat about the office. Not very smart! Only later did I notice how the British give feedback. One of my British colleagues, after a meeting where there were many disagreements and people even argued a bit, wrote in the general chat: "Thanks for the varied feedback, it was certainly an interesting one today." Now I know exactly what he meant. The book has a funny British-Dutch dictionary, as the British and Dutch are on opposite ends of the spectrum. I find myself more on the Dutch side.

Building trust

Another incident happened when our Dutch colleagues came on a business trip. We went out to lunch, and for me it was an ordinary lunch that was supposed to take about an hour. It ended up taking two hours to have lunch and return to the office. But that's not all: the next day, another lunch with colleagues was planned. It took place in a fancy restaurant and firstly I even liked it, but when an hour had already passed since the start of lunch and no one was in a hurry to order food, I was terribly hungry and not so cheerful anymore. In the end, the lunch lasted for three hours, which tired me. I wanted to get back to the office as soon as possible to finish my work, and I did not understand why no one was in a hurry. But if I had read the chapter on trust and how it is formed in different cultures beforehand, I would have known that in some countries such long lunches help to establish a connection between people, and it is easier to do business with them later. Then I would have treated this time in the restaurant differently.

Conclusions

When we live and work in the same environment, we may not even suspect that people do business differently. We are used to perceiving the world around us as something normal and think that everything is arranged the same way for others. But it is only when we start noticing cultural differences, we begin to learn and change. For me, it was a revelation not only to find my own and my colleagues on this scale, but also to realize that people conduct business differently. What seems unacceptable to one person might be a plus to another.

This book taught me a lot. If you find yourself in an international environment, do not rush to make conclusions about other people. Perhaps your colleagues are used to working in a completely different environment, and there's something you can learn from them. Listen and observe more. As one of the quotes in the book says: "You have two eyes, two years, and one mouth and you should use them accordingly — to watch more, listen more, and speak less."

The ability to switch between styles is a necessary skill for a modern global manager.