I’ve been going through Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done and I’ve found extremely helpful for me in my context. If you’re just stopping by, I’m working on an international campus in Asia with people from over 25 countries. I’ve been doing cross-cultural work really all my life, but professionally the last 15-20 years. The last ten have been in predominantly Asian contexts.
I’ve gone through a lot of the intercultural resources out there domestically and globally so I’m familiar with many of the typical categories of cultural difference. Meyer distills a lot of this work and research into 8 scales that relate to core functions of cross-cultural work . Her scales are organized around communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, and scheduling.
There’s a lot of intercultural lessons out there, especially for international work. But I’ve still found it challenging at times to tackle questions like,
How do I give feedback in an Asian context?
Why does project management feel so difficult in terms of decision making?
When do I need someone’s permission and when am I supposed to act empowered?
Why are there so many events and meetings that feel like they waste so much time?
These are just a few of the questions and over time they become DEEP questions because they rub against my own cultural preferences and values. I just found this book to be one of the first to really get into some of the practicals of working together with people from different cultural contexts. At the end of the day, multicultural work also requires teams communicating and figuring out how they are going to choose to work together. But it’s hard to do that without some conceptual hooks to hang your efforts on. I think this provides a lot of those hooks. I found myself re-evaluating a lot of the areas in which I’m really frustrated and re-considering areas in which I may be more complicit in the situation that I thought because of my cultural defaults.
This is the best resource I’ve read so far that takes intercultural insight and moves it into the practicals of business and different areas of negotiation. It doesn’t try to get into other elements like colonization or power or privilege, so that’s not the type of resource this is. This is a resource focused on navigating global difference that also has value for back home.
