Tag Archives: communication style

5 Things Mexicans Say to Avoid the Word “No”

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Excellent article by Susannah Rigg

MEXICANS ARE VERY POLITE and can seem downright formal compared to residents of other Spanish-speaking countries. People greet each other in elevators, on buses, and shared taxis almost always with “con permiso,” — “with your permission,” — and “propio” — “you may grant your own permission, as you don’t need mine.”

I love all this about Mexican culture. However, it took me a long time to realize that, because of all the politeness, Mexicans really struggle to say “no” and will find any number of ways to avoid the accursed word. Here are just a few examples.

1. Yes

It’s very common in Mexico that yes means no….

Read more here

So Proud of Our Customer!

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MSFT_logo_rgb_C-Gray_DMicrosoft India has been a Cultural Detective customer for six years, and both Heather Robinson and I are so very proud of the abilities their staff members have developed to in turn coach and develop their support engineers’ customer service skills. The entire project has been amazing—truly a privilege to be a part of it! I’d like to take this opportunity to share a bit of their “Cultural Effective” story with you.

Microsoft uses Cultural Detective to coach their large enterprise customer support representatives. In the first six months using the tool, they told us they attributed a 30% increase in customer satisfaction to Cultural Detective! Now, five years later, they know Cultural Detective inside and out, and use the CD Method when interacting with both international and domestic customers.

In March of this year Heather again traveled to Bangalore to work with the trainers, to help improve their abilities to coach using Cultural Detective. The approach she used is what we call EPIC: Essential Practice for Intercultural Competence. It is a combination of Cultural Detective, with which Microsoft has been working for five years, and Personal Leadership, which their staff have been working with for the past year or so.

The design was an inspired one. Because Microsoft has experienced facilitators who are also well-versed in Cultural Detective, Heather used these facilitators to get team newcomers up to speed, as well as to facilitate small group breakout sessions. This internal group of facilitators put together the readings, sample interviews and assignments for the three-day training. As is so wonderful when training in India, there were plenty of games, activities and laughter.

As you might imagine, one of the main challenges for the support engineers is knowing how to respond to customers’ emotions. Large enterprises rely on Microsoft products to function in highly customized ways, which often means long days of problem-solving discussions, heightened emotions and frayed nerves. The March training included the learners acting out skits of engineer-customer interactions, videotaping them, and then using the Cultural Detective Worksheet to debrief the contrasting values, and the EPIC approach to discern how to respond most appropriately. We would love to share one or two of those videos with you here, but, of course, they are proprietary.

Instead, let me leave you with a few of the notes scribed in small groups. In case you’re wondering why “Kit Kats” and “Milky Ways,” the participants chose a candy bar and then broke into groups, one of ten techniques you can find in this blog post.

If you or your organization would like to be profiled in an upcoming blog post, we would be happy to talk with you about making that happen. Just let us know. Congratulations to all the Microsoft staff, who are so committed to building intercultural competence in their organization, and to you, the Cultural Detective community, for your efforts on this same journey.

Are You Nice???

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This is a guest blog post by Carrie Cameron, co-author of Cultural Detective Russia.

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Take the following quiz:

  1. Someone surprises you with a beautifully wrapped gift. You’re so appreciative! You…
    1. Tear it open enthusiastically and express great admiration for the object, whatever it is, and thank the giver.
    2. Accept the gift, warmly thank the giver for his or her thoughtfulness, and put the unwrapped gift, whatever it is, on the table behind you.
  2. You’re seated on the airplane next to someone of the same gender who looks nice. You…
    1. Strike up a friendly conversation.
    2. Quietly mind your own business.
  3. You’re at a reception where few people know one another. You…
    1. Approach someone, extend your hand, and introduce yourself.
    2. Find the host who will then make an introduction for you.
  4. A member of your office staff comes in one day looking upset, maybe they’ve even been crying. You…
    1. Approach them in the break room and say, “Are you okay?? Did something happen to you?”
    2. Pretend you don’t notice so they won’t feel embarrassed.

If you tended towards the “A” answers above, your cultural style might be one of “expressive” politeness. If you had more “B” answers, your cultural style may be one of “reserved” politeness. This dimension of culture was introduced by social scientists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, who termed these differences “positive” and “negative” politeness. (To avoid any confusion about the original terms, we use here the terms “expressive” and “reserved,” respectively.)

“Politeness strategies” are the customs, often unnoticed or unconscious, by which we express favorable attitudes toward others. But it is important to remember that not every culture uses the same strategies to do this.

Expressive-politeness cultures generally show good intentions by reaching out actively to others. They have a tendency to reveal emotions before knowing whether the approach is acceptable or not to the other person. Reserved-politeness cultures tend to show good intentions by never imposing themselves on another without first knowing the other person’s attitude.

Both of these cultural styles are polite, but they are different ways of demonstrating it. The same behavior that may be considered polite in one culture could be considered rude in another culture. Remember those examples in the quiz above?

Some cultures traditionally thought of as reserved are British, German, and Japanese, while characteristics of expressive cultures are found in US American culture (especially Southern and African American cultures), Australian, Mexican, and Italian. Which style resonates with you most?

It’s important to remember that not all expressive cultures are alike, and not all reserved cultures are alike. While each culture is unique in how it shows politeness, knowing something about this dynamic can help people be more accepting of unfamiliar styles. It may also help individuals become more aware of how their own behaviors and actions may appear to others. This additional cultural self-awareness allows the opportunity to adjust one’s behavior to actually be polite—from the viewpoint of someone culturally different from oneself.

Check out some of the critical incidents in Cultural Detective Online to see the cultural variations of politeness in action, and learn to navigate them more effectively. Use Cultural Detective Self Discovery to clarify your own values and styles, and develop a better ability to explain yourself to those who are different.

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Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-31355-1

The Power of French Food Culture…Even for Selling Men’s Underwear!

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underwear omeletteAnother guest blog by the wonderful Joe Lurie—I will say that I’m about ready to get on a plane and enroll in Joe’s next class!

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As a follow-up to my blog posts, Bicycling in the Yogurt — the French Food Fixation and Ads as Catalysts for Intercultural Conversations, I’d like to share this French ad for men’s underwear, shared with me by a French student:

The ad shocked my Chinese students — underwear in the kitchen? References to a man’s genitals in a TV ad? Not only does it reflect in an amusing and extraordinary way the seduction of food in French culture, it also reveals a theme of sensuality commonly accepted in the French public square.

While there’s plenty of pornography in North America, a French marketing professional explained to me recently that using a bare breasted mermaid to sell an ordinary product in the United States simply did not work. And so, one understands why many visitors to France are shocked by bare breasted women on public beaches. Everything, in every culture, has its own culturally accepted place.

While discussing the French underwear ad, some of the French students noted that to break one’s eggs would often suggest breaking one’s balls — being a real pain. This occasioned a vigorous, animated debate, some French students insisting that breaking one’s eggs does mean breaking one’s balls, others countering with equal force that this was generally not true, rather at best a gross exaggeration. And so in that conversation emerged other common French values and related behaviors, emerging nearly verbatim as they appear in the Cultural Detective French Values Lens — the importance of debate, of challenging ideas, of being rational, of not exaggerating, of being precise. Listen to French conversation and you will hear, over and over again, the words preciser, “to be precise,” and il faut pas exaggerer— “one must not exaggerate!”

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Joe Lurie is Executive Director Emeritus at University of California Berkeley’s International House, a cross-cultural communications trainer, consultant, university lecturer, and certified Cultural Detective facilitator. He is a frequent guest contributor to this blog.

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Linked to the My Global Life Link-Up at SmallPlanetStudio.