Ever since I read the excellent book “The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business,” by Erin Meyer, I have been wondering about one fundamental thing. Are we, tech professionals, really aware of the variety of cultural dimensions that drive our behaviours and of the extent to which they impact how we assess if our colleagues demonstrate our company’s values? Why pick on the techies? Well, after all we are the ones supposed to see things in binary terms, either #000000 or #FFFFFF only.
To illustrate my question with an example, if my company advocates building trust as one of the key leadership principles, how do I feel about my “confrontational” colleague whose behaviour is so much at odds with my “non-confrontational” communication style? Are they contributing to building trust in the team? Do I see them as breaking the company rules? And would understanding that the preferred way of dealing with disagreement and debate may vary across cultures impact my perception?
To find out, I ran a survey with some of my fellow techies. I used their input to correlate the awareness of the existence of selected cultural dimensions with how open people are to accepting that leadership values typical for tech companies can be manifested through a variety of seemingly contradictory behaviours.
To say I was surprised with some of the results is an understatement. One striking example is related to the hypothetical “disagreement & debate style impacts trust building” question I have asked above. The respondents felt that whether or not their colleagues knew about the culture-driven differences in dealing with disagreement and debate, that would probably NOT help them demonstrate the expected trust building-related principles advocated by their company. Counterintuitive, right? It should have been a resounding “Definitely yes!”
Is it because, subconsciously or not, we all feel there is one best (our) way of dealing with disagreement and debate? For example: I feel deeply uncomfortable with confrontation so the only right way to build trust is to avoid confrontation. Or is it simply because we don’t believe that knowing that equally valid ways of dealing with disagreement exist across different cultures changes anything in how people deal with their confrontation-related bias? Or is there more to it – what are your thoughts? Join the discussion here.