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Cultural Stereotypes – Worth The Trouble?
Ask anyone who has sourced or managed a globally distributed project. Collaborating with a customer, supplier, or co-worker located in another country typically brings more than you bargained for – a multicultural learning experience.
You can muddle through on your own or get help. Specialized trainers can heighten your cultural awareness and teach you about the tendencies and work styles of one culture compared to another. But there’s a catch: Fostering multicultural awareness usually involves perpetuating generalizations.
Let’s face it, cultural stereotypes often have more than grain of truth to them, but they also tend to rub people the wrong way. Is it possible to educate globally-collaborative workers about different cultures without making generalizations?
“People don’t like to be generalized about,” concedes Craig Storti, one of the leading cultural consultants. “And they especially don’t like somebody from another culture doing it. What I say in my book and in my workshops is I’m describing how Indians come across to westerners – it’s not how Indians see themselves.”
Storti, the author of Figuring Foreigners Out, wrote that “a generalization can tell you at best how people from a particular culture may behave in a given situation but necessarily how they will behave …”
Storti has a recent book called Speaking of India: Bridging the Communication Gap Between India and the West. While useful for westerners seeking to distribute work to India, the insights may vex Indian outsourcers – especially the ones contending that no such gap exists.
Naturally, the communication gap is unintentional. Take it from someone who misses his share of cultural cues, especially when I’m tired or under stress. “When Americans hear questions [from Indian citizens] they just answer them because they don’t realize that they’re polite ways of saying something,” says Storti. “When an Indian asks ‘Does that work for you’? It’s not a question – it’s a polite way of saying it doesn’t work for me.”
Storti explains that stereotyping is “what higher-order intelligence does – we have to put things into boxes or it doesn’t make sense. And as long as you realize you’re never going to meet the [stereo]type. In the end you have to listen to the person in front of you.”
Are you better off knowing how people from other cultures view your culturally-driven communication style or behavior? Arguably yes. Then you have the possibility of anticipating gaps and meeting one another in the middle.
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