you would ever do in the United States.
You’re from China and are working in the United States. You need to disclose more personal information when making small talk with someone you do not know than you ever would in China.
You are Japanese and are working in France. You need to speak your mind more assertively at a meeting with your boss than you ever would have done in Japan.
To be effective in situations such as these, you need to adapt. You need to learn to act outside of your personal comfort zone. But adapting your behavior across cultures is often easier said than done. You can feel anxious and embarrassed about not knowing exactly how to behave, and inauthentic and disingenuous about how awkward and unnatural it feels. You can feel frustrated and annoyed about having to adapt in the first place. Such feelings can be quite a burden. They can leak into your behavior and cause you to act inappropriately. They can also make you want to avoid situations where you have to adapt in the first place—even situations that are important to your professional success.
So, is there a solution? Can you learn to adapt your behavior without feeling like you are losing yourself in the process? It sounds impossible, and that’s what I initially thought when I first started working on this topic many years ago. However, what I have learned over the past ten years of researching, interviewing, teaching, and working with a wide variety of professionals from a range of different cultural backgrounds is that it’s not. You can learn to have your cake and eat it too when adapting behavior in a foreign setting.
This book is for anyone interested in improving his or her ability to function more effectively in a foreign cultural setting, no matter the culture you come from, the culture you are going to, or the situation you find yourself in. It’s filled with stories and anecdotes of people who have been able to come up with creative ways of adapting their behavior and remaining authentic at the same time—of fitting in without giving in—in situations you would think would be very hard to manage in this way. You will learn how an American-born CEO working in India was able to devise a way of blending his own preference for a bottom-up, participative style of leadership with the reality that Indian subordinates typically expect and respond more positively to a more top-down, authoritarian style. You will see how a Russian-born consultant in the United States was able to be far more assertive with her boss in the United States than she ever would have been in Russia, but in a way that actually felt consistent with her cultural ideals. You will meet people from Germany, Brazil, China, South Korea, Israel, and the United Kingdom—people from all sorts of different cultural backgrounds who were able to devise creative ways of adapting to different cultures.
I wrote this book because I believe that there is a serious gap in what has been written and communicated about cross-cultural management and what people actually struggle with on the ground. Until now, the vast majority of writing about culture in business has focused on educating people about differences across cultures. For example, you might learn that Swedes are more individualistic than Chinese, or that Germans tend to schedule, arrange, and manage time whereas Mexicans and Indians are more apt to treat time more fluidly. The logic is that if people can learn about cultural differences, they can adapt their behaviors successfully. And for some people, that’s true. Some people are so skilled at managing themselves across cultures that you might call them “cultural chameleons.” They are able to seamlessly blend, unconsciously it seems, and at each turn function smoothly and successfully according to the new cultural norms.
For the rest of us, however, especially those of us who are, for lack of a better term, monoculturals—born and raised in a single cultural environment and now trying to function effectively in another culture—cultural adaptation isn’t always so seamless. We might possess knowledge of cultural differences, but we can struggle as we attempt to put this knowledge into practice. That’s where this book comes in. It teaches people who are not bicultural or multicultural by birth how to act effectively in different cultural environments and at the same time to feel authentic, or authentic enough, when doing it.
In this book, you will learn what global dexterity is and why it is a critical skill for you to master, what challenges you will likely encounter when attempting to develop your own global dexterity, and how you can overcome these challenges by learning to customize your own personal approach toward cultural adaptation.
The lessons in this book are applicable to anyone from any culture doing business in any situation—whether on a long-term or short-term assignment overseas, or simply working with people from a different culture in one’s native country. The technique is both universally applicable and customizable. That is, this is not a one-size-fits-all system. The techniques you’ll learn will allow you to adapt your own cultural behavior in a way that works for you. The goal is to help you learn to modify your behavior in a way that does not feel like you are, as one of the people I have worked with memorably put it, “committing a crime against your own personality.”
How I Came to This Book
I first became interested in the subject in the late 1990s, during my PhD studies at Harvard, when I volunteered at a resettlement agency in Boston to help immigrant professionals from the former Soviet Union find jobs in the United States. These were smart people with excellent résumés. The problem most of them had was cultural: they simply could not master the American-style assertive and self-promotional behavior necessary for job interviews and networking with employers. In fact, what was most enlightening to me about this experience was that it wasn’t the knowledge that they lacked: they all could tell me how you had to behave in the United States and how that differed so significantly from Russia. The problem was translating this knowledge into behavior.
For example, I recall one woman—an extremely experienced engineer with many different graduate degrees in Russia; extensive, relevant work experience; and excellent English—who continuously failed at promoting herself in the American interview. She knew what to do, but felt “silly” and “foolish” making small talk (in Russia, interviews were much more professionally focused only), and felt anxious and embarrassed about her inability to successfully adapt. She told me how much these emotions weighed on her as she attempted to switch her behavior and how difficult that psychological experience was for her.
I continued to pursue this interest at my first job as a professor at the University of Southern California, where I encountered a similarly challenging situation of cultural adaptation. We had many bright, talented, and motivated foreign MBA students from East Asian cultures such as China, Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam who were reluctant to contribute their thoughts to classroom discussions and debates, which were an essential part of the MBA program, and which also happened to count for a large percentage of their final grade. These students were motivated, worked extremely hard, and knew how they were supposed to participate in class. But for some reason, they were unwilling—or unable—to actually do it and contribute their ideas. Like the Russians, they struggled to translate what they knew intellectually into effective cross-cultural behavior.
When I turned to the academic literature to solve this puzzle, I came up empty. Instead of offering advice about how people could overcome cultural differences and learn to adapt behavior in light of cultural differences, what people were focusing on was the differences themselves: how Chinese were different from Russians, or how Russians were different from Japanese. There was little about how people could successfully overcome these differences and learn to adapt their behavior.
In the years since these two formative experiences, I have studied and worked with a wide range of people from the United States and abroad learning to adapt their cultural behavior in a variety of different foreign settings. In each case, I have found the essential challenge to be the same: knowledge of cultural differences is certainly necessary to be effective abroad, but it is not sufficient. To be truly effective in foreign cultures, you need to develop the global dexterity necessary for translating your knowledge into effective behavior.
Armed with an understanding of these processes and with a passion to try to make a difference in the lives of the many foreign-born professionals I have met throughout the years, I began crafting a set of tools based on my academic research to give people the courage and the skills to develop their own global dexterity. The book you have in your hands is the result