The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures

by Erin Meyer

Is Spain task-based or relationship-based? If you are like most people, you would answer that Spain is relationship-based. But this answer is subtly, yet crucially, wrong. The correct answer is that, if you come from France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, or any other culture that falls to the left of Spain on the scale, then Spain is relationship-based in comparison to your own culture. However, if you come from India, Saudi Arabia, Angola, or China, then Spain is very task-based indeed—again, in comparison to your own culture. The point here is that, when examining how people from different cultures relate to one another, what matters is not the absolute position of either culture on the scale but rather the relative position of the two cultures. It is this relative positioning that determines how people view one another.

Relative factor of cultures

When interacting with someone from another culture, try to watch more, listen more, and speak less. Listen before you speak and learn before you act.

"You have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. Use them accordingly"

High-context cultures tend to have a long shared history. Usually they are relationship-oriented societies where networks of connections are passed on from generation to generation, generating more shared context among community members. Japan is an island society with a homogeneous population and thousands of years of shared history, during a significant portion of which Japan was closed off from the rest of the world. Over these thousands of years, people became particularly skilled at picking up each other’s messages—reading the air, as Takaki said. By contrast, the United States, a country with a mere few hundred years of shared history, has been shaped by enormous inflows of immigrants from various countries around the world, all with different histories, different languages, and different backgrounds. Because they had little shared context, Americans learned quickly that if they wanted to pass a message, they had to make it as explicit and clear as possible, with little room for ambiguity and misunderstanding.

How history length determines the level of la nguage context.

The first clue is one I recall from my tenth-grade teacher, Mr. Duncan, who told our class about how the Roman Empire swept across southern Europe. He recounted in hushed tones how the Romans built hierarchical social and political structures and heavily centralized systems for managing their vast empire. The boundaries between the different classes were strict and legally enforced. Members of different classes even dressed differently. Only the emperor was allowed to wear a purple toga, while senators could wear a white toga with a broad purple stripe along the edge, and equestrians, who ranked just below the senators, wore togas with a narrow purple stripe. The class of the person was therefore noticeable at first glimpse. So a first historical point is that the countries that fell under the influence of the Roman Empire (including Spain, Italy, and, to a lesser degree, France) tend to be more hierarchical than the rest of Western Europe. Although your Italian boss is unlikely to wear a purple toga, invisible and subtle remnants of these attitudes still remain today. The second clue relates to a much later European empire, one that dominated the northern part of the continent to almost as great an extent as the Roman Empire dominated the south. When you think of the Vikings, you may think of hulking muscular men with long walrus mustaches and hats with horns, riding big ships and waging bloody wars. What you may not know is that the Vikings were surprisingly egalitarian....

Reasons for different power distance within Europe itself: 1) Egalitarian -> Viking 2) Hierarchical -> Romans (France, Italy, Spain) 3) Protestant -> Egalitarian, Catholic -> Hierarchical

Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills, and reliability. This is trust that comes from the head. It is often built through business interactions: We work together, you do your work well, and you demonstrate through the work that you are reliable, pleasant, consistent, intelligent, and transparent. Result: I trust you. Affective trust, on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy, or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart. We laugh together, relax together, and see each other at a personal level, so that I feel affection or empathy for you and sense that you feel the same for me. Result: I trust you. Throughout the world, friendships and personal relationships are built on affective trust. If you were to consider why you trust your mother or your spouse, you would likely use descriptive explanations linked to affective trust. But the source of trust in business relationships is a little more complicated.

Cognitive trust vs affective trust.

In peach cultures like the United States or Brazil, to name a couple, people tend to be friendly (“soft”) with others they have just met. They smile frequently at strangers, move quickly to first-name usage, share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know. But after a little friendly interaction with a peach person, you may suddenly get to the hard shell of the pit where the peach protects his real self. In these cultures, friendliness does not equal friendship. When conducting a workshop in Brazil, one of the German participants who had been living in Rio de Janeiro for a year explained, People are so friendly here. It is unbelievable. You might be buying groceries or simply crossing the street. People ask you questions, speak about their families, and they are constantly inviting you over for a cup of coffee or suggesting that they’ll see you tomorrow on the beach. At the beginning I felt so happy to receive so many invitations of friendship. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that all those people who invite me over for coffee keep forgetting to tell me where they live and those constant suggestions that we’ll meet on the beach the next day simply never materialize. Because the beach is, of course, many miles long. In Minnesota, where I was raised, we learn at a very young age to smile generously at people we’ve just met. That’s one characteristic of a peach culture. A Frenchwoman who visited with my family was taken aback...

Peach vs cocont cultures.

Why do people in cultures like Nigeria, India, or Argentina invest so much time in relationship building? Is it simply that they are inefficient or prefer socializing to working? There is, in fact, a very clear, practical benefit to investing in affective relationship building—especially when working in emerging markets. This brings us back to the business value of trust. Suppose you are the Danish owner of a business that designs women’s purses. You sell two hundred purses wholesale to a shop that has just opened on the other side of Copenhagen. You give the retailer the purses, and he promises to pay you next week. How do you know you are going to get your money? The answer, of course, is that the shop owner signed a contract promising to pay you. If he doesn’t pay, you can take him to court. Having a signed agreement in a culture with a consistently reliable legal system makes it possible to do business easily with people you don’t trust or even know. Now imagine the same situation—only this time you are Nigerian and designing women’s purses in Lagos. The legal system in Nigeria is less reliable than the one found in countries such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States. You can sign a contract, but there is no way of enforcing it if the payment doesn’t come through. The only way you feel assured that you’ll be paid in countries like Nigeria is the trust you have in the other person. Perhaps he has done business with your brother for years and your brothe...

Why do relationship based trust exist in emerging markets?

When in doubt, the best strategy may be to simply let the other person lead. Relax, put your feet up, and start the call with the idea that you might spend several long minutes just catching up before the business talk starts. And then let the other person decide when enough is enough. Initiate the social, ignore your gut reaction, and listen for their cues.

When you're not sure how long to spend in small talk.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall was one of the first researchers to explore differences in societal approaches to time. In The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, Hall referred to monochronic (M-time) cultures and polychronic (P-time) cultures. M-time cultures view time as tangible and concrete: “We speak of time as being saved, spent, wasted, lost, made up, crawling, killing and running out. These metaphors must be taken seriously. M-time scheduling is used as a classification system that orders life. These rules apply to everything except death.”1 By contrast, P-time cultures take a flexible approach to time, involvement of people, and completion of transactions: “Appointments are not taken seriously and, as a consequence, are frequently broken as it is more likely to be considered a point rather than a ribbon in the road. . . . An Arab will say ‘I will see you before one hour’ or ‘I will see you after two days.’” In other words, a person who lives in P-time will suggest a general approximate meeting slot in the coming future without nailing down the exact moment that meeting will take place. When I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana (a P-time culture), I used to feel puzzled that a local teacher at my school would tell me “I am coming now,” but twenty minutes later I would still be waiting with no sign of that person’s arrival. Later, I learned that if someone was actually coming right away, they would say “I am coming now, now.” That second “now” made ...

M-time vs P-time cultures.

If you live in Germany, you probably find that things pretty much go according to plan. Trains are reliable; traffic is manageable; systems are dependable; government rules are clear and enforced more or less consistently. You can probably schedule your entire year on the assumption that your environment is not likely to interfere greatly with your plans. There’s a clear link between this cultural pattern and Germany’s place in history as one of the first countries in the world to become heavily industrialized. Imagine being a factory worker in the German automotive industry. If you arrive at work four minutes late, the machine for which you are responsible gets started late, which exacts a real, measurable financial cost. To this day, the perception of time in Germany is partially rooted in the early impact of the industrial revolution, where factory work required the labor force to be on hand and in place at a precisely appointed moment. In other societies—particularly in the developing world—life centers around the fact of constant change. As political systems shift and financial systems alter, as traffic surges and wanes, as monsoons or water shortages raise unforeseeable challenges, the successful managers are those who have developed the ability to ride out the changes with ease and flexibility. Scheduling things in advance is fine—but only if the time horizon is forty-eight hours or less. For example, if you are a farmer in the Nigerian countryside, most of the farm...

Why relationship based cultures are more flexible in scbeduling.

In Chinese culture, punctuality is a virtue, and if you arrive late for a meeting you should definitely apologize for your tardiness. But any similarity in approach to time between the Chinese and Japanese stops there. The Japanese are highly organized planners. They are definitely more organized than they are flexible. In China, everything happens immediately, without preplanning. The Chinese are the kings of flexibility. This is a culture where people don’t think about tomorrow or next week; they think about right now. For example, I had to call an electrician because my TV was broken. Within five minutes of my hanging up the phone, he was knocking at my door. When I had a clogged drain, I called the plumber and he showed up a few minutes later. Now I know that, when there is a problem with something, I’d better be ready for someone to come in and fix it as soon as I pick up the phone. Reactivity is key here, but that also means that plans that are made in advance are considered flexible.

Chiness punctuality for short term meetings.