Getting Cross-Cultural Teamwork Right

People struggle with global teamwork, even though it’s essential to success in multinational firms. Despite their efforts to nimbly manage differences in time zones, cultures, and languages, cross-border collaborators often fail to reach shared understanding or common ground. They face conflicting group norms, practices, and expectations — all of which can cause severe fracturing along cultural lines.

So how do you negotiate those differences and discover common ground? Through extensive research on global organizations and teams, I’ve found that learning, understanding, and teaching are three critical factors — on both sides.

Mutual learning. Global teammates who learn from one another — and expect to do so — level the collaborative playing field by sharing the risks and vulnerabilities associated with having to adapt to established norms. They absorb cultural knowledge and behaviors through careful listening and observation, ask questions to fill in contextual blanks, and are able to relate to one another on a personal level.

Of course, trust is a key element, cultivated largely through common interests. When you establish trust, you begin to feel a shared sense of responsibility for bridging cultural gaps and faith in your teammates to do their part. You start to care about one another. Your day-to-day interactions become more comfortable. In short, you set the stage for working together more effectively.

The three learning tactics — absorbing, asking, and relating — are interconnected. Not only does relating to others provide additional opportunities for asking and absorbing, but absorbing gives you more experiences to ask about and more ways to connect with those who have different backgrounds and perspectives. You and your teammates may even begin to adopt some of the new behaviors you are learning about as you work together more closely, making it easier to relate and collaborate.

Mutual understanding. If learning is about discovering what others do, understanding is about grasping why they do it. You try to get a handle on the underlying logic that holds a set of cultural behaviors together. At the same time, you and your teammates reflect on how your own behaviors and competencies fit into the cultural frameworks you have identified.

This requires suspending judgment. For many global collaborators, moments of confusion and frustration are common, especially when both sides are operating under very different cultural expectations about work practices. Before you draw conclusions about others’ intentions or motivations, you need to gather more information about their behaviors, using the same tools (absorbing, asking, and relating) that helped you identify them in the first place. As your cross-cultural relationships evolve, accepting ambiguity will be equally important. You will need to let go of many assumptions from your own culture. That’s often what people mean when they talk about “embracing differences.”

Mutual teaching. In addition to learning and understanding how others do things, you can help familiarize collaborators with your culture’s norms — and they can do the same for you. As you would expect, this process involves instructing, which often takes the form of mentoring, coaching, or teaching. But it also entails facilitating — essentially, serving as a cultural broker or intermediary. If you are a native of one country but have experience working in another, you can bridge the gap between those two worlds by noticing when teammates interpret things differently (or anticipating when they might) and helping each see where the other is coming from in order to resolve or avoid misunderstandings.

In a facilitator’s role, you’ll certainly act as a go-between, promoting collaboration in a particular situation — but you will also, more broadly, enable both sides to expand their cultural understanding. For example, you might explain to colleagues in the United States how they can better hear and understand Chinese teammates while also showing the Chinese teammates how to “make themselves heard.”

Finding common ground with global teammates is an iterative process. When you move out of your comfort zone and into a different cultural context, you will actively watch and listen, in “take it all in” mode. And as you gain a deeper understanding of teammates’ actions, and help them grasp behaviors they aren’t familiar with, you will continue to watch and listen for cues — because no one is a mind reader, even on home turf.