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In almost any business these days, y'all are guaranteed to interact with people whose cultural background is quite different from your own. In a global organization, you lot may have colleagues that come up from a different country. You may partner with organizations whose employees come from another part of the land. There may also exist cultural differences between you and some of the customers and clients you serve.

You may exist tempted to follow the aureate rule — and treat everyone exactly the way you lot would desire to be treated. But that's not the most effective way to navigate cultural differences. You want to accord people the same respect you expect from them, but how y'all interact with them will depend a lot on their expectations about what detail interactions should expect similar. This is why it'south helpful to know what specific cultural differences are.

It can be difficult to spot these cultural differences, though, considering you are often unaware of your ain cultural assumptions. A primary purpose of culture is to provide yous with an orientation for understanding and navigating the world, considering human beings come pre-programmed by evolution with very little specific cognition about how to survive and succeed.  Thus, the assumptions you brand about the earth based on your culture form your ability to evaluate everything you come across.

To identify cultural differences, at that place are a few things y'all can practice.

Learn

If you lot know that you are going to a specific region of the earth, so it is worth doing your inquiry almost that surface area ahead of time. Even niggling things can be helpful. For example, earlier going to Bulgaria for the first time, someone told me that Bulgarians typically milkshake their head to hateful "yes" rather than nodding as they do in the U.S. This information was valuable when having conversations with people so I didn't assume people were disagreeing with me when in fact they were agreeing.

In addition, in that location are general aspects of culture that are useful for anyone to report. For example, the Dutch social psychologist, Geert Hofstede outlined a number of dimensions that highlight ways that cultures differ. For case, American and Western European cultures tend to be individualist, meaning that they tend to value the action and freedom of individuals. Eastward Asian cultures tend to exist collectivist significant that they value the needs of the group over the needs of the individual. American culture tends to exist adequately flat — meaning that there is not a rigid status hierarchy, while Japanese culture is much more hierarchical, and then the relative status of anybody in the room determines the way people interact with each other.

Knowing about these dimensions can assist you to notice behaviors that might otherwise exist invisible to you when working with people from other cultures. They can besides help y'all better empathise whatsoever assumptions yous make virtually what behaviors mean so that you're more likely to interpret your colleagues' actions with an open mind.

Listen

Your brain is a prediction engine, constantly trying to predict a diverseness of aspects about what is going to happen in the hereafter — including the reactions you will get from others. When dealing with people from other cultures, pay conscientious attention to the failures of your predictions.

If the people yous are working with are unremarkably amiable and they treat yous frostily at the start of a meeting, that's a sign that something has gone wrong. Similarly, if you expect that a proposal volition be met with excitement, and the reaction is more tepid, that's something you need to follow up on.

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One thing that gets in the way of listening is that you may not requite people an opportunity to create an expectation failure. That is, you may non let opportunities for people to take deportment that are different from the ones you lot predict, which might give you a sense that their interpretation of a state of affairs is dissimilar from  yours. For example, yous might ask whether anyone has any questions, while the people you lot are dealing with are uncomfortable asking questions in a public setting. In this case, they will continue tranquility out of respect, non considering they don't have any questions. And considering you lot come from a culture where request questions is appropriate, yous may misinterpret their silence. You oasis't given them an opportunity to do something that would surprise you.

Instead, when first getting to know a group from another culture, do non give them an option to say or do cypher. For example, rather than catastrophe an interaction with "Do you have any questions?" you lot can say, "Many people new to projects like this ane have a number of questions, what are some of the bug you lot want to know well-nigh?" Now, you are explicitly giving permission to ask a question and making it clear that request questions is the norm y'all wait.

Finally, recognize that linguistic communication barriers tin can also brand it hard to observe prediction failures. When talking to a native speaker of English, yous can listen for subtle changes in tone of phonation or give-and-take choice that may indicate displeasure. Non-native speakers accept a harder fourth dimension using cues similar this, and then yous are going to accept to piece of work extra hard to detect violations of your expectations. 1 thing that can be useful is to have them write out a quick meeting summary afterward and send it around to brand sure everyone is in understanding. You might too send summaries around occasionally to ensure that everyone agrees with your interpretation of where a project stands.

Ask

It's by and large hard to know what someone else wants — fifty-fifty when you know them well.  This problem is compounded when the people you are working with look at things through a different cultural lens.

Luckily, there is ofttimes a simple solution to agreement how people are reacting to their interactions with you lot — enquire. At the start of a new relationship with individuals or groups from some other culture, allow everyone know that yous want things to go smoothly and that you know that cultural differences can cause some unintended slights. Clinch them that y'all will non be offended if they point out another style to handle a word.

Having established that you are open to learning, follow up past being explicit near the goals of a item interaction. Yous can get-go a meeting or conversation by saying, "My intention here is to gather input from you so that I tin can brand a decision." Effort to find an ally in a group you are working with who tin can let y'all know when yous may accept said something that elicited a different interaction than you lot intended.

You are pretty much guaranteed to make some mistakes when working with people from a new culture. If you ready a routine of communicating well-nigh bug that may ascend, though, you tin can minimize the harm of the mistakes you make.