The same message sounds different in every country: leading multicultural teams from a distance

Anyone who leads a team spread across several countries in the region, sometimes with a head office on another continent, knows the scene. An email that reads as a normal instruction in one office reads as a reprimand in another. A meeting where some people talk without pause and others never open their mouths. An agreement that seemed closed and that nobody remembers the same way a week later. At a distance, without a shared hallway or coffee break, these frictions pile up without anyone naming them.

Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar and Mary C. Kern studied this problem in "Managing Multicultural Teams" (Harvard Business Review, 2006), an article later included in the collection HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures. Their thesis is uncomfortable for any manager: many of the everyday conflicts in multicultural teams have cultural causes that are not seen in time, and the leader's intervention, when it comes, often makes them worse.

Four barriers that go unseen

The authors identify four recurring sources of friction.

Direct versus indirect communication. In some cultures the message is in the words. In others, the meaning travels in the form: the tone, what is left unsaid, who is present. A "yes" may mean "I hear you" rather than "I agree." When someone from a direct culture raises a problem head on, in writing and with others copied, they may be closing the door on the information they need, because the other side stops telling them what is going on. The authors suggest a simple alternative: pose the problem as a question. What would happen if this part fails, rather than this part is wrong.

Accents and fluency. In regional teams the common language is often Spanish, but once a head office on another continent joins, it becomes English, and fluency is unevenly distributed. The risk the authors point out is confusing fluency with competence. The person who speaks with the most effort may be the one who knows the subject best, and if the team discounts them for their accent, that knowledge is lost.

Attitudes toward hierarchy. Someone shaped by a hierarchical culture may phrase every contribution as a question, out of respect, and be read by colleagues from another culture as insecure. In the opposite direction, skipping levels to complain directly to the other side's boss, routine in some organizations, can offend and damage a relationship that took months to build.

Norms for deciding. Some teams want to close a point and move to the next. Others need to revisit what was already covered and see the full picture before going into detail. The authors recommend asking explicitly for what each side needs and making small process concessions.

What the boss gets wrong

The article describes a project manager who stepped into every conflict on a team made up of people from two countries. He ended up resolving operational details the team should have handled on its own, the project fell behind schedule and, most costly of all, the team never learned to work together.

Another case from the same article runs the other way. A leader noticed that whenever he spoke in meetings, everyone went quiet. He hired an outside facilitator to run them. Participation went up.

The leader's job is to identify the type of barrier and choose the intervention that lets the team solve the problem on its own.

Four strategies, in order

Brett, Behfar and Kern describe four strategies and rank them by preference.

1. Adaptation. Name the differences openly and agree on how to work with them. This is the ideal option because the team learns. 2. Structural intervention. Reorganize: mixed subgroups that rotate, a change in who runs the meetings. 3. Managerial intervention. Set norms at the outset. Most useful in new teams. The article tells of a manager who, at the start, explained to the group that each member had been chosen for their expertise and not for their English. 4. Exit. Remove someone from the team. This is the last resort, reserved for when both sides have already lost too much face and the damage cannot be repaired.

Before choosing, the authors suggest reviewing the conditions: how flexible the deadline is, what resources are available, whether the team is permanent or temporary, and how much autonomy the leader has to move pieces.

A hypothetical example

What follows is an invented case to illustrate the method.

Imagine a regional director with a team in three countries and a head office on another continent. She notices that decisions from headquarters arrive as closed instructions, and that her regional team accepts them in the meeting and then debates them in a private chat. Nobody raises concerns with headquarters.

Diagnosis: a barrier of indirect communication mixed with one of hierarchy. Her team does not contradict headquarters in public, and headquarters reads the silence as agreement.

Intervention: rather than escalating, she tries adaptation first. In the next meeting with headquarters, she asks that every major decision come with an open question about local risks, and agrees with her team that answering it is part of their job. If nothing changes after two cycles, she moves to the structural option: she proposes that someone from the regional team run the meeting instead of headquarters.

Three questions for this week

• In your team's last conflict, which of the four barriers was behind it, and how long did it take you to see it?
• How many problems did you solve in the last month that the team should have solved on its own?
• Who on the team speaks least in meetings, and what do they know that nobody is hearing?