Viva Consulting

Challenge

You’re from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and you have relocated to Toronto, Canada. You’re part of a team brought together to resolve a critical issue. You have a great idea and you present it to the group, composed mainly of Canadians and a few Americans. You are very enthusiastic.

In delivering your idea, you start by saying:

“We’re going to have to work really hard, possibly many extra hours, and will need to dedicate much more time to this. By accomplishing this goal, we are going to be “number one—” the very first ones to reach this goal.”

After your presentation, the members of your new team, in sharp contrast to your enthusiasm, politely thank you for your contribution and make a note to think about your idea and discuss it further. You leave feeling frustrated and call your Brazilian colleague in Sao Paulo to complain about how Canadians and Americans are “unenthusiastic and slow to move, way too cautious, and seem to express no feelings.”

Explanation

If you were to study the Canadian and American hidden values, you would find that much like the northern European countries, Canada is a culture where people have a tendency to give strong value to work/life balance.  Americans see their time as already being quite tight and limited. If anything, they would like to delegate work so they can save more time. So when you said “dedicate more time,”  it wasn’t the right choice of words for either culture. In order to motivate your Canadian and American colleagues, you could have said: “By doing this we’ll save more time later.”

Cross Cultural competence is about having awareness of your counterpart’s values and devising proper communication strategies based on these values. These leadership skills will allow your message to get through and your goals to be reached in a quicker and more effective way.