The Culture Map |
|
11 December 2023 - Schweiz
Erin Meyer's The Culture Map is a book that's been on my reading list for a number of years. Having worked with 7 different cultures now, I felt it was high time to put a more theoretical approach behind that experience. Meyer's book fortunately covers the European cultures I will likely work with in the near future extensively, however, the upsell is that on her website you can purchase a culture map from your own culture to many others. Here in Switzerland four distinct cultures have managed to co-exist peacefully for centuries. While other European countries spent much of the twentieth century in failed bids by their dominant cultures to exterminate the others, Switzerland thrived. And fully a quarter of the population today are foreign born like me. Unsurprisingly Meyer doesn't write much about a Swiss culture, but plenty about the French and German ones.
Meyer organizes her book around eight attributes which define how people from a culture act in a business setting:
- Communicating: low-context vs. high-context
- Evaluating: direct vs. inderect negative feedback
- Persuading: principles first vs. applications first
- Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical
- Deciding: consensual vs. top-down
- Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based
- Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoiding confrontation
- Scheduling: linear time vs. flexible time
And where the cultures I interact with sit relative to eachother...
- Communicating: US, German, UK, Polish, Italian, French
- Evaluating: German, French, Italian, US, UK
- Persuading: French, Italian, German, UK, US
- Leading: US, UK, German, French, Italian, Polish
- Deciding: German, UK, US, French, Italian
- Trusting: US, German, UK, Polish, French, Italian
- Disagreeing: French, German, Italian, US, UK
- Scheduling: German, US, UK, Polish, French, Italian
...sadly Poland was not included in most examples. Knowing where your culture sits relative to the person's culture your interacting with is what Meyer says is most important to avoiding pitfalls.
