Culture: The Polite Excuse for Poor Performance
Before booking another cross-cultural workshop, ask which difficult conversations about decisions, ownership and accountability you might be avoiding.
The cross-cultural workshop went well and people enjoyed it, and unfortunately six months later the handovers were still arriving half-finished.
When internationally located teams are not performing at their best, I find that often culture shows up as the most comfortable explanation available, because it avoids addressing other potential elephants in the room. Cross-cultural avoids having to tell people that they are messing up, or that the org chart is poorly designed. There is also a couple of famous frameworks that create great "aha" moments and therefore can feel seductive.
Don't get me wrong, these approaches can be super useful, I'm a practitioner myself. I work as a subcontractor for a world-renowned cross-cultural agency where I think we do great work. And as for the frameworks, I have personally found them extremely useful during my international career, particularly when working in time-fluid, indirect, high-context cultures.
And yet we need to be careful when talking about international teams, because four things get tangled up when a team struggles across borders.
- How the work is set up.
- How decisions really work.
- Who owns what.
- How people read each other.
And only the last one is really linked to culture. The first three regularly get diagnosed as culture because, from the outside, the symptoms can look very similar. So before you book anything, ask the person selling it a single question: