International Business Problems Rarely Look Like Cultural Problems

When something goes wrong in international business, very few people describe it as a cultural problem. They say the project is moving too slowly, the customer has stopped responding, the supplier keeps agreeing to things but nothing seems to happen, or head office simply doesn't understand the local market.

The problem gets labelled as poor communication, weak management, lack of urgency, resistance to change or, quite often, simply difficult people. Sometimes that diagnosis is right. But sometimes the behaviour makes perfect sense once you understand the different assumptions people are bringing to the relationship.

I have never been particularly interested in culture for culture's sake. In business, what matters is what happens as a result.

A misunderstanding about hierarchy matters because information doesn't reach the right person. Different attitudes towards risk matter because a decision you expected this week takes another month. Different approaches to relationships matter because you are trying to move straight into business while the other side is still deciding whether they trust you.

Different communication styles matter because one person thinks they have raised a serious concern while the other thinks they have merely made a suggestion.

These aren't abstract cultural differences. They affect deadlines, costs, customer relationships, negotiations and ultimately whether business gets done.

We are usually quite good at reading people

Most experienced businesspeople become pretty good at reading situations. We learn what particular behaviours tend to mean because we have seen them many times before.

We know what silence in a meeting usually means. We know whether an enthusiastic response sounds genuine. We notice when somebody is avoiding a question, when a decision is being delayed or when an issue is becoming serious enough to escalate.

The difficulty comes when we take that experience into another business environment and assume the same signals still mean the same things.

Someone who doesn't challenge you openly may not agree with you. Someone who keeps asking for more information may not be delaying the decision. Someone who wants to involve a senior colleague may not be avoiding responsibility. And someone who tells you enthusiastically that your proposal is "very interesting" may simply be telling you that your proposal is very interesting.

This is one of the reasons experienced international businesspeople can still get things badly wrong. We aren't necessarily failing to notice the signals. We may simply be interpreting them according to the business environment we know best.

The obvious explanation isn't always the right one

Imagine a project involving teams in several countries. The European team believes a decision was made during the last meeting and starts working accordingly. A week later, their colleagues elsewhere are still discussing the issue internally.

From the European perspective, this can look like indecision or unnecessary bureaucracy. From the other side, the meeting may never have been understood as the point at which the final decision would be made. It was part of the process leading towards one.

Neither side necessarily communicated badly. They simply had different assumptions about what the meeting was for and what agreement in the room actually meant.

The same thing happens with deadlines. A manager may believe they have made the urgency of a request perfectly clear, while the person receiving it sees the date as an indication of preference rather than an absolute commitment. Both can be surprised when the deadline arrives.

These situations quickly become personal. One side thinks the other lacks urgency. The other thinks expectations are unreasonable. Once that happens, a relatively small difference in working style can become a much larger business problem.

But culture doesn't explain everything

There is an opposite mistake too. Once people become aware of cultural differences, it becomes tempting to explain almost every unusual behaviour through culture.

That isn't particularly useful either.

Companies have their own cultures and ways of working. Industries develop their own norms. Engineers may approach a situation differently from salespeople. A family-owned business can operate very differently from a multinational headquartered in the same country.

Personality, experience, age, seniority, organisational structure and commercial pressure all influence how people behave. Two companies from the same country can be remarkably different places to do business.

Culture gives us useful context, but it doesn't give us an instruction manual.

This is why I am wary of questions such as, "How do Germans negotiate?" or "How do Japanese companies make decisions?" There are useful patterns worth understanding, but the moment we turn them into rules we risk replacing one set of assumptions with another.

A more useful question is: What might I be missing in this particular situation?

That encourages us to look beyond the behaviour itself. Who actually has the authority to make this decision? What does agreement mean at this stage? How comfortable are people with challenging the person leading the meeting? How much relationship needs to exist before difficult issues are discussed openly? What happens internally after we leave the room?

Those questions are much more useful commercially than trying to decide whether somebody is behaving according to their national culture.

Look underneath the business problem

International business problems are still business problems. The objective isn't to become an expert in somebody else's culture or to analyse every interaction through a cultural lens.

It is to recognise when your normal interpretation of a situation might not be giving you the whole picture.

If a project is stuck, a negotiation is going nowhere, or communication has become difficult, there may be perfectly ordinary commercial reasons. Perhaps the proposal isn't good enough. Perhaps the customer really has lost interest. Perhaps the supplier really is unreliable.

But when the obvious explanations don't quite add up, it can be worth looking underneath them before deciding what the problem is. Because cultural differences rarely announce themselves as cultural differences.

More often, they simply look like someone else is doing business badly.

For more on global business skills, visit our Working Across Borders page

Mark Mortimer is the founder of Timezone Business, with over 30 years of experience working in international business across China, Japan, Germany, India, the UK, and the US.