What If I Had Talked Less, And Listened More?
This article explores the key to resolving conflicts in cross-cultural communication and how it can be applied to cross-cultural business communication.
When I was sixteen, I developed a friendship with one of the exchange students at my high school. His name was Ma, and he was from a rural town located in the Southeast region of China. I’ve always considered myself a very curious person, so naturally I wanted to bombard Ma with a series of questions about where he was from and his culture. I asked him what the weather was usually like in China, what he did for fun, and if he noticed any drastic differences between his school and our small-town high school in North Carolina. I wondered how — out of the 50 states and countless of cities — he was placed in our secluded town. Did his experience in our small town meet any of his expectations or preconceived ideas of what America was like? Was he disappointed? I guess I will never know, because as much as I tried to poke and prod, I never got the detailed answers I sought.
After reading and researching the way that cross-cultural misunderstandings play a role in intercultural communication, I now look back and wonder if my American-taught way of communication had prevented me from successful communication with Ma. Had the communication practices engrained in the way I communicate prevent me from learning Ma’s communication practices? Since reading Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map, I’ve had one ‘what if’ question that has played in a continuous loop and that I know from now on will be the first thing to come to mind when communicating with anyone from a culture outside of my own: What if I had talked less, and listened more?
A Story of Cross-Cultural Communication
My interaction with Ma was the first time I recall first-handedly experiencing the misunderstandings that can arise when communicating with any person from a culture outside of your own. This concept reminds me of what my Mom tells me about her experience living in Japan as a child. When she was in the sixth grade, my U.S.-Air-Force-pilot Grandfather was stationed in Okinawa, and my Mom relocated to live with him for his three-year-long deployment. Although my Mom was a child at that time, her feelings of isolation didn’t primarily stem from her inability to communicate with the same-aged local children.
“I never felt out of place because of the language barrier, but because of the differences in our cultures.”
While she lived there, my Mom became friends with an Okinawan girl who was around her same age, and she was once invited over to the girl’s house for dinner, where she quickly noticed several distinctions in the way they ate dinner: For one, they ate on the floor; secondly, they were silent. For Okinawa’s culture, there’s a time and a place for talking, and it’s not at the dinner table. This is different from American culture, where many families use dinner time as the delegated space for catching up with one another and sharing the events of their day. My mom said that she later returned the invitation to her Okinawan friend and had her over for dinner with her family. Apparently, my Grandma, who I would describe as a quiet and sweet woman, kept asking the Okinawan girl questions about her family and her culture over dinner. My Mom said her friend left the dinner with a single remark about my Grandmother: She talked too much.
Written & Intercultural Communication in a Business Setting
In the United States, our culture is defined by its fast-paced lifestyle where time is valuable. For this reason, we are taught to communicate, and write, explicitly and literally. From a young age, we are taught a simple model to follow to convey a powerful message to an audience: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them” (The Culture Map, p. 35). This has been the model that I’ve been taught to follow since writing my first paper, which emphasizes the fact that America communicates as a low-context culture. Americans — like my Grandmother — tend to talk constantly, fill up silence, and not place significance on “reading the air.”
The Japanese saying kuuki yomenai, or “one who cannot read the air,” means that a person is unable to listen between the lines when others are speaking (The Culture Map, p. 33). Japan is considered a high-context culture, and they tend to communicate messages without saying them directly. If you are unable to follow along with other cultures and their unique communication practices, then your writing will not be able to effectively convey their intended message. If my Mom and her friend had explained to one another how their family dinners typically went, then they could have avoided any misunderstanding. In turn, their cross-cultural communication would have been successful.
Now consider this scenario:
Your company hires a moderator for your business meetings to allow two-way discussion rather than having one speaker talk all the time. From an outside perspective, the Americans tend to be leading conversation and the Japanese employees are relatively silent. The Americans are constantly adding input, and they make it explicitly known that they did their research prior to the meeting. If this is the communication standard that the moderator is following, then the moderator might translate the silence of the Japanese employees as them not having anything to add or contribute to the conversation. If only the verbal communication was documented during the meeting, then it would appear as though the Japanese employees came unprepared. However, if the moderator had analyzed the unspoken communication cues, then they would have seen that this couldn’t be further from the truth, and that the Japanese employees actually had a lot of insightful information to add to the discussion. However, they weren’t given the opportunity because they weren’t allotted the silence that they needed to speak up. This is why it’s important to have someone who is trained as an intercultural communicator to sit in on meetings and catch the communication cues that are not direct or present in one another’s cultures.
Solution to Conflict & Intercultural Communication
As mentioned before, it’s important to know that there are low-context and high-context cultures, and that by learning how to identify them you can prevent miscommunication from happening. With that being said, we have different ideas of “accepted & familiar” across cultures. For example, the way that Americans (low-context culture) write might come off as insulting to other cultures. The fact that we are so detail-oriented might be perceived as us trying to over-explain, and it might come across as if we doubt the other culture’s ability to interpret the meaning of our writing.
If we listen more than we speak, we can work towards understanding the differences in nonverbal and verbal communication and thus achieve successful communication with cultures outside our own.
Referenced:
Meyer, E. (n.d.). The Culture Map. New York: PublicAffairs.
