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Hey friends,

Thank you everybody who opens this email again. I know I skipped last week newsletter and this week I keep reminding myself done is better than perfect.

And here is this week newsletter on cross-culture communication

I believe most f we had been working with some foreigners before, no matter it is in your workplace. Did you notice there is some cultural difference in workplace ?

I am working with colleagues from different countries across APAC in my current company. While for my team, managers are coming from America, Canada & Korea. So in short, lot of nationalities and cultures.

While working with them, I used to think western colleagues might be more open-minded and less hierarchical. Sometimes, things do not go the way I anticipated.

It makes me wonder, there should have different ways to view different culture and their characteristic.

Then one of my friends recommend a book - The Culture Map

The book lists out 8 scales to evaluate culture and countries

🔥 Scale in a different culture

• Communicating: low-context vs. high-context

• Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback

• Persuading: principles-first vs. applications-first

• And More...

😁 Ways to give feedback in different culture

From the book, the author mention. People in different parts of the world are conditioned to give feedback in drastically different ways.

“ Americans might be trained to wrap positive messages around negative ones, while the French are trained to criticize passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly.”

💡 Leadership, Hierarchy and Power

Tips to work in Hierarchical Environment

• Communicate with the person at your level. If you are the boss, go through the boss with equivalent status

• When you call a meeting, give clear instructions a few days beforehand about how you would like the meeting to work and what questions you plan to ask. Tell your team members explicitly that you will call on them for their input.

• If you are the boss, remember that your role is to chair the meeting. Don’t expect people to jump in randomly without an invitation. Instead, invite people to speak up.

Tips to work in egalitarian environment

• Go directly to the source. No need to bother the boss.

• Think twice before copying the boss. Doing so could suggest to the recipient that you don’t trust them or are trying to get them in trouble.

• Introduce management by objectives, starting by speaking with each employee about the department’s vision for the coming year and then asking them to propose their best personal annual objectives subject to negotiation and final agreement with you. In this way, you become a facilitator rather than a supervisor while still keeping a handle on what is being accomplished.

There is a lot of tips on how to work with people in a different culture, and I highly recommend you to read this book.

Hope you find this interesting and helpful.

Have a great week !

Tim

❤️ My Favourite Things

🛠 Productivity - Tab grouping In Google Chrome. This feature had launched for a while now and t is simple and clear enough with the name. You just group different tabs together. I found out this feature helps me to organize my un-read article and is extremely useful at work when opening multiple taps at once.

🥘 Restaurant - Hjem - A cafe in Sheung Wan serving nordic food. Their open sandwich is really good with a slice of bread and other food items like beef, potato salad, pickled cucumber on top. It is the best way to start my weekend

💻 Gadget - Kobo Libra 2. I bought my second ereader, now I own both a Kindle Paperwhite and a Kobo reader. While Kindle is good for its English book’s collection, they are missing the majority of Chinese books in their book store. Kobo, on the other hand, owns most of the Chinese books I will read.

📷 Photos - Our team has a tradition, whenever people left we will take a group photo in the corner of the office. One of our designers is leaving so we decide to do it again. It is always good to get formal photos with our friends and family from time to time so that we will remember what had happened to us.

✍🏻 Quote of the week

“ If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. “

From From The 4-Hour Workweek By Timothy Ferris.

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