I've just recently started reading the book "The Culture Map" by Erin Meyer and even though I've just read the first few pages, the insights gained are already huge!

Cultures have a way to embed and define our relationships with our coworkers, friends, partners and even with ourselves.

According to the author, there is a set of eight key scales that map to areas along which cultures differ from each other and to which managers of international teams, for eg, must pay attention if they want to ensure that the communication and expectations both from and within the team are framed in the right context. These focus areas are the following:

• Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect 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. avoids confrontation

• Scheduling: linear-time vs. flexible-time

• Communicating: low-context vs. high-context

By looking over different cultures and countries, it is possible to establish how different people will perceive each other across each of these axis and this will equip you to make better judgements or even nudge you in the direction of improving your own actions or you frame certain things to other people by knowing what and how to say it.

Relative scale is what matters the most

The final lesson from these first few pages and one that definitely stick with me is the fact that what matters most is not really the absolute values of say, how deciding spanish people are, but, what truly matters is how and who they are interacting with that can share different values for this particular scale: if collaborating with german colleagues they can be seen as more consensual people since we can postulate for the sake of example, that germanic people are more of a top-down style. And germans can be seen as spanish in the eyes of for example japanese or russian people who have a complete opposite set of values on the same axis.

By focusing on these values and looking at the relative scale between cultures you will gain a lot of insights!