Admitting Uncertainty, Vulnerability Can be Key to Intercultural Business Communications

Professor J.D. Schramm of the Stanford GSB specializes in helping future executives upgrade their speaking, writing and other communications ability. One important facet of Stanford’s program is fostering an awareness of the challenges of communicating in the international business environment. To read the first installment about the importance of business communications, please click here.

BNET: What are the main tenets of effective cross-cultural communication?

Schramm: At the heart of it, it’s necessary that an individual first have an understanding of his or her own cultural biases. It requires a very intensive self-analysis. In what ways do I see the world or operate in the world that could be off-putting to the other side? Then, you need to have an understanding of what’s expected in the other culture you are operating in that is different than your own. But I have to be careful that I just not operate under stereotypes. I have to get to know the culture and be sensitive to it, but yet get to know the individuals, so I just don’t think, “Oh, everyone from Asia is going to be a certain way.” It takes a lot more time to navigate cultural differences between myself and a counterpart.

BNET: So on this issue of “know thyself” and one’s own cultural milieu, what do we Americans need to realize we often come to the table with in terms of biases and predispositions?

Schramm: I think it’s easy for us to assume the way we do things is the right way. When we begin interacting with other people on a multicultural basis, we need to set those assumptions aside and listen and understand how things are done differently in another locations. I think a very tactical one is how we operate under time. Do meetings start on time, do they end on time, and are people good following up on what they promised to do? I think it’s easy to take a rigid view that “time is money” and we have to do things quickly, but in other cultures, time is much more fluid. Things operate during an appropriate season or other appropriate juncture for something to happen. People may not be as rigidly wed to the clock as we are here in the west. You have to be open to both ways of doing things. When that occasion arises, you need to think, “How am I going to operate with these people on this particular team on this project?”

At the heart of it all is authenticity. If I acknowledge to my counterpart in another culture that I’m not exactly sure what to do here or I may need their guidance on how to make a certain type of communication appropriate for people in their firm or their culture, that level of authenticity or vulnerability will inevitably carry me further than if I try to act like I know what to do. Without giving up “power”, you can still build bridges with the people you are trying to communicate with.

BNET: What kind of programs do you have to allow students to gain exposure to the challenges of communicating with people who are immersed in a totally different culture?

Schramm: We have an exchange program with a university in India and another in China. Every student had to do a project on a team with two students from America and two from the other universities on what it takes to best communicate with students from India and China. I think with those cultural differences that definitely do exist, it’s necessary to give people inside an MBA program the tools and skills to navigate across the different cultures. The second piece of that course is navigating through the technology. Even if one has done everything right in terms of planning a project or managing the team, if at the end of the day, one doesn’t know how to operate the telepresence unit or the Webex unit to participate fully in the meeting, then that’s a failure. So the technology is a critical component of someone contributing in a global business environment.

We’ll conclude our discussion with Professor Schramm’s views on political communications and the role of communications in career management next week.