The Culture Map is an eight-scale model that evaluates countries in eight different areas based on their aspects on cultural interactions. In today’s world, it’s normal to work in a multicultural work community, and because of that, it’s important to understand the reasons behind your work mates’ behaviour. During the last year I’ve been in contact with teampreneurs from all over the world on weekly basis, and during those interactions I’ve seen many differences between the way of communication.

1. Communicating (Low-context – High-context)

A few weeks ago, me and a group of our teampreneurs from Tiimiakatemia were attending B Global Talent Hackathon competition in Bilbao. The event brought together teampreneurs from all over the world and we were innovating solutions for six global businesses in multicultural teams. A while after starting with our group, we faced some difficulties with our assignment. Turned out that we were talking about different things and didn’t have one common goal. We took a step back and went through our assignment together to make sure we have a common goal that everyone understands. Besides having a language barrier (since English was none of us’ native language), we perceived the assignment slightly differently.

2. Evaluating (Direct negative feedback – Indirect negative feedback)

When combining both communication and evaluating, Finland stands on low-context and direct negative feedback. Being low-context, Finns detail their thoughts and provide background information and you can expect them to give also negative feedback directly and in front of other people. We’ve talked a lot about giving feedback in our team. We have training sessions based on giving feedback every half a year but giving feedback should be more regular. Giving feedback in front of the whole team works for us and I think it teaches us a lot about each other, but in some cultures, it might be resented.

3. Persuading (Principles first / specific – Holistic / applications first)

Different ways of persuasion are also something I experienced while being in Bilbao. Without the common goal and plan in the beginning, we had different ways of approaching the problem. Some people from our group started solving the problem from focusing on the background information and how it links to our assignment. Some on the other hand started on forming an opinion and after that started to gather information to support their statement. In order to avoid any conflicts, communication and explaining your actions is important.

4. Leading (Egalitarian – Hierarchical)

Finland is an egalitarian country. We don’t perceive people with authority as God-like figures but rather work mates. In a healthy work community, there’s mutual respect between an employee and employer and questioning the authorities is perceived as normal. Here in Tiimiakatemia, we’re using peer management instead of authorities. Everyone’s on the same level, but with some roles, such as project manager or team leader, people in charge just have more responsibility than the others. This kind of work environment requires self-directed workers. Leadership in, for example, Asian countries is a lot more hierarchical than in Finland so the same methods of leading (such as peer management), wouldn’t work there.

In that trip to Bilbao, I had an incident with our group’s facilitator whose task was making sure that our group reaches all the required steps on time. They had some ideas on how our group should proceed with our tasks and I disagreed, so I started questioning their thinking. They weren’t our direct leader but questioning an older, more educated person made them lose their temper. Questioning our coaches here is perceived developing, as long as there’s mutual respect.

5. Deciding (Consensual – Top-down)

Our team makes decisions mostly consensually. For that to work, everyone must put an input into the decision-making process. That takes longer but allows everyone to speak their mind and it also can bring up some new thoughts about the topic. Also, it allows decisions to be implemented quicky, since everyone is already familiar with it.

I’m in my team’s executive team, and sometimes we make decisions top-down, without hearing the rest of the team. Those decisions mostly have to do with organizing, and usually no one has anything bad to say about the decisions made. In a community that runs with peer management, it’s important to be on the same page on what decisions the executive team or team leader can make without hearing everyone else first.

6. Trusting (Task-based – Relationship-based)

Meyer talks about two types of trust – cognitive (task-based), and affective (relationship-based). To work in a team, for me it’s important to have a mix of both types, and I feel like it’s how most of the people here perceive it. Building affective trust is not the same with all cultures and in some cases, it might make people feel uncomfortable. And the same in cognitive trust. When talking to teampreneurs from other countries, I’ve noticed that many team members’ respect to each other comes from the person’s work accomplishes and they might not have any affective trust. On our everyday life, I see bot of them equally important.

7. Disagreeing (Confrontational – Avoids confrontation)

In my team, I feel like we unconsciously avoid confrontations. I wouldn’t say that we get uncomfortable when our ideas get challenged, but sometimes we stick with the first idea just because it didn’t get challenged. Whenever we have disagreements, we can respectfully discuss about them and usually come up with a result that everyone is fine with. Our team should have more debates and harder discussions, we should challenge each other’s ideas more to get broader perspectives.

In multicultural communities, disagreements might be an issue since cultures have different ways to deal with them. It’s good to remember to separate the person and the issue – confrontations shouldn’t be personal but rather tools to help the team grow.

8. Scheduling (Linear time – Flexible time)

When visiting a team academy in Bilbao, I joined some team’s meeting to gain insight on possible ways to develop our team’s performance. Fifteen minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, the people started slowly making their way to the meeting room – in a culture with flexible scheduling, that was normal and a big difference on how the time is perceived here. Finnish people are known for being punctual and for my team, it’s important to be on time to our joint meetings. Being late is perceived indifferent and disrespectful. If you’re late for a joint meeting, you have to let everyone know and when being late for a training session, you can’t get in after it has started. That’s a way to show respect to the ones holding the meeting and it’s also lets everyone focus on the topic and not people coming in the room every now and then. When mixing cultures with different perceptions of time, adapting is the key.