My teammate Natalia seemed to have endless energy to chit chat on the phone with her colleagues from Spain. The atmosphere in the office seemed rather relaxed, and Natalia seemed to enjoy gossiping and letting the time flow. We were both running projects of organizing large scale learning and networking events, and at that time I was working for Germany. Needless to say, our project in Germany was already half way through with preparations, and we were getting to the point of discussing event details. Natalia was still enjoying herself…
…at least this was what I thought at that time. As the timeline was getting shorter, and the number of activities was increasing, so were the speed and stress levels. When it came to difficult decisions and the moment when you need to push things through to get them running, I need to admit that there was hardly anyone as effective as Natalia was in making things happen. How come? By that time she knew precisely what time which people would come to the office, when someone was unavailable because they collect their child from a kindergarten, and who actually was the crucial person to take a decision. She had got to know the people from the Spanish organization, in and out. She had gathered the social capital – and now in the stressful time she was able to make the best use of this investment.
A bit of cultural knowledge can do wonders
It became apparent that a bit of cross-cultural knowledge can do wonders. In my German project team, I was appreciated for reliability, planning, and attention to detail. Would these skills help me out if I was dropped into the Spanish project? Only if strongly combined with flexibility and the ability to build relationships. Richard Gesteland, a seasoned international executive with thirty years of global management experience, author of a bestseller Cross-Cultural Business Behavior – A Guide for Global Management, highlights the difference between relationship-focused and deal-focused business cultures.
Get an understanding what type of business culture your project stakeholders come from: deal or relationship focused.
Deal- And Relationship-Focused Cultures
Source: TargetMap.comIn deal-focused business cultures, people concentrate on what needs to be done, by when, and meeting what criteria. Who you cooperate with is perhaps a bit less important than whether a task gets done or not. Surely, email communication is popular and satisfactory, tables and charts are the favorite method of tracking project progress, and “reliable” is a word used to describe someone who delivers good quality on time. Direct communication is perceived as the most efficient, and there is little appreciation for small talk becoming long talk on personal matters. People tend to go straight to business. It is not necessary to know the person on a personal level to get things done. Some of deal-focused business cultures would be UK, Germany, Norway, or USA. Watch out: it would be very untrue to say that people from deal-focused cultures would not be interested to get to know you as a person. The trust grows in line with the time spent on working, i.e. completing tasks together. The more you have experienced together, the stronger the bond between you, and the higher the respect and appreciation you would give to another person.
When I joined an international team spread around EMEA, I set a call individually with every team member with the purpose to introduce myself and get to know them a bit. The phone call with my colleague Ansgar was the shortest of all; it might have taken less than 15 minutes. I did most of the talking. The only thing I learned about Ansgar at that time was how long he had been with the company, and what was his area of responsibility in the project. In fact, I learned little else about him afterwards. I don’t even know whether he had any wife or kids – but I know that he always supported me on common deliveries, and that he was fully available for me with any advice or support I needed when I was taking over a large scale event program from another colleague of ours. In other words: the sooner you start working together, the faster you can become a good team because in deal-focused cultures trust is won through experience of mutual reliability. As a project manager, you would want to plan things ahead, get team members into action as soon as the plan is ready, and communicate precisely and directly about what needs to be done. Run your communication by email, is fast and efficient.
In a task-focused business culture, let the team start working together as soon as the plan is ready, the trust is built through common working experience. Use email as a convenient way to communicate. In case of a problem, address it directly – it is fine to describe it in an email. “Reliable” is a word used to describe someone who delivers good quality on time.
Relationship-focused business cultures seem to be governed by a different set of rules. First you need to know the people, only then you actually become able to cooperate. It is common to spend some time on getting to know each other before deciding on next steps. As a project manager, you would want to plan extra time for the get-to-know-each-other phase. It is necessary to create personal bonds among team members. Without developing relationships with other team members it is hardly possible to have any project run in a sustainable way. “Reliable” would be a word to describe someone who knows how to react to the issues I face, and is willing to help me. The personal connection has much more power than any list of tasks to complete.
Needless to say, in relationship-focused business cultures timelines and deadlines would get adjusted to personal circumstances of team members, which does not mean ignoring the timelines but flexibly adjusting them to the circumstances as they appear. You might have already guessed that your relationship-focused teammates would come from places like India and most Asia, Mediterranean, Middle East, South America, and Africa. Isn’t it a bit surprising to see that this would mean the vast majority of the planet?
If you want to be successful in a relationship-focused environment, you might want to make your personal map of project stakeholders, and pick a few who would be crucial to the project success.
Then, you start to invest
Trust gets derived from the time spent together, and the level of closeness created. A Polish colleague of mine collected his new Russian teammate from the airport. On the way to the office, he was told everything about her children, grandparents, her renovated flat, and current health issues of family members.
He was not ready to reciprocate with a similar story, and in fact he told me afterwards that he was shocked to hear some of the things. Why? He considered them far too private. But in relationship-focused business cultures, the more you disclose about yourself both on professional and on the private levels, the more opportunity you give to the other team member to have a feeling, a good understanding of who you are as a person, and the more trust can get created. Therefore, I would advise you to be ready to share some personal stories with your colleague from a relationship-focused country. It’s up to you to decide what you want to share – just have something at hand!
Personalized communication is much more successful if it follows ‘personal’ channels: face to face meetings, phone calls, or at least chat. Email with others cc’d would be the least favorite and the least effective way to get to the next step. Therefore, if you plan a project meeting, it would be useful to plan a buffer for personal small talk in the beginning and to adjust your expectations about what realistically can be covered in the meeting time.
In relationship-focused business cultures, plan enough time for the socializing phase. Use any opportunity for a face to face contact, and be ready to share personal stories with others. Trust gets derived from the time spent together, and the level of closeness created. Identify your key stakeholder and invest in building the relationship.
In a production company where I have recently supported a team development project, Polish and Portuguese members of the leadership team kept convincing each other about “the right way” to approach appearing issues. Portuguese members of the team used every opportunity to highlight that personal face to face exchange is necessary to get a good understanding of any issue and it sometimes even allows solving the issue on the spot. Polish team members considered emails as an efficient way to communicate and could not understand the fuss around constantly “having 5 minutes face to face”.
Address and let the team decide
What would be the right solution for you if this was Your Project Team? My suggestion would be: let the people decide. Run a meeting where they can talk about what advantages they see of meeting face to face / emailing and why they would want to stick to this or the other option. As a result, you can all agree e.g. what types of issues should be best resolved which way, or perhaps which people need to approached in which way (email/face to face) so that you can get what you need from them. There “right way” is right for a specific team and always gets negotiated by team members themselves. They are wise enough to decide what suits them best.
Pomaga menedżerom, zespołom i organizacjom rozwijać swoje kompetencje zarządzania i współpracy tak, by lepiej radzili sobie w międzynarodowym i międzykulturowym środowisku biznesu. W ten sposób osobiście macza palce w ewolucji ludzkości. Chociaż zajmuje się tym od prawie 20 lat, pierwszy raz uświadomiła to sobie jak zaczęła prowadzić firmę ETTA Leadership & Culture. Teraz pracuje nad sposobami, dzięki którym jej działania mogłyby być jeszcze bardziej zaraźliwe.