I first heard about the book The Culture Map on the Worklife with Adam Grant, and I immediately got interested in it as I work in a multi-cultural team.

In the company that I work for, we have people from all around the world. I work directly with people from Canada, but also those who came from India, China, Ukraine, etc. And sometimes I wondered if some of the communication barriers were due to personal differences or cultural ones. I got this book in the hope it would help me better understand this.

Let’s explore The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business.

Learnings from the book The Culture Map

This book is really interesting, and it confirmed some things I felt about myself and my country of origin, and also gave me a lot of insights about how to work with people from other cultures. Being an immigrant here, everyone is not part of the culture I grew up and the things that worked there do not always work here.

The book presents eight scales and ranks some of the countries in each scale, making it easy to compare the position of one country relative to the other in the scale.

I learned a lot from the book and would like to share the top 5 learnings from the book, The Culture Map.

multicultural team needs low-context communication

The book explains the concept of high and low context communication. In a high-context culture, communication is more implicit; you don’t spell out everything, and usually there is some meaning that is caught by context. As in low-context cultures, the communication is simple, clear, and explicit, sometimes stating the obvious.

But when you are in a team with people from high-context cultures and low-context cultures, the best approach, according to the author, is to use the low-context communication.

Even though you run the risk of stating the obvious for people of high-context, you will have fewer problems of miscommunication when you leave things more explicit.

This is very useful for me, as Canada is very low-context relative to Brazil.

a long marriage is a high-context communication

Not related to the culture, but just a fun fact, is that a long marriage has a bunch of high-context communications. When you are with your partner for a while, they don’t need to say much (sometimes don’t need to say anything), just for the other person to get the message.

In my case, when my wife does a different “hmm” I understand if she agrees, disagrees, likes it, does not like it, etc.

direct communication does not mean direct feedback

I was surprised to learn that direct communication does not mean direct feedback. Like the US and Canada, they are famous for being a place where people are direct with each other in life, but when it comes to giving negative feedback, they are very indirect, usually trying to place the negative feedback between positives so the person does not feel bad.

But in other places, like Spain, where the communication is more indirect, they give negative feedback more directly.

Just because the communication is direct in a culture, does not mean they are direct in negative feedback. The book has two scales for it, one for communication and the other for evaluation.

invest in relationships

I knew before that Brazilians value the relationship a lot. In all the places that I worked, I saw that visibly. It was nice to see that the book also noted that. Brazil is at the far end of the scale between task-based trust and relationship trust.

If you work in a multi-cultural team, according to the author, it is a safer bet to err on the side of the relationship, even though you come from places like the US, which is task-based. As the author mentions, “As a general rule of thumb, investing extra time developing a relationship-based approach will pay dividends when working with people from around the world.”

being punctual sometimes is being early

One thing I didn’t like in the workplace in Brazil was that being late was common. I was an exception there (and probably that’s why I like working in Canada), and I was (almost) always punctual.

If that’s true for work, for social events, is even worse. People get to places 30 to 60 minutes late. And if you are on time, sometimes you are too early, and even the host is not ready.

While that was nothing new for me, the reason why some countries, like Brazil, are like that is a good learning experience for me. Countries with a more linear-time (more punctual) tend to be places more developed, where they were heavily industrialized for many years. Things are more reliable (like trains, government), so you can schedule things, and the environment is going to be less likely to interfere with it.

Now, in countries with a more flexible-time, there are many aspects that can interfere with daily life, like nature, unstable governments, etc. So they need flexibility.

While it is not an excuse for it nowadays, it is a good explanation for why it is the way it is.

Favorite quotes

These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book:

  • “Knowing the level of indirection of the assumptions of certain cultures help us better adapt to the situation“
  • “Culture has impacted your communication, yet in the absence of the visual and contextual cues that physical presence provides, you didn’t even recognize that something cultural was going on.”
  • “High-context cultures tend to have a long shared history.”
  • “After all, in countries like the United States or Switzerland, “business is business.” In countries like China or Brazil, “business is personal."”
  • “Trust is like insurance – it’s an investment you need to make up front, before the need arises.”

Other resources

This section adds extra insights, incorporating content from other sources that align with the themes of the book. Worklife with Adam Grant podcast episode Decoding cross-cultural communication with Erin Meyer

These are my learnings from the book The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, written by Erin Meyer. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing free access to the book.

Cheers.

This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.