Erin Meyer recounts her personal journey from a monocultural Midwestern upbringing to a career studying cross‑cultural dynamics, beginning with a pivotal experience in Japan where she learned to read non‑verbal cues (bright eyes) and the concept of "kuki yomenai" (KY). She describes the development of a research‑based framework that maps cultures along multiple behavioral scales (e.g., time orientation, hierarchy, communication) and illustrates how cultures can be compared relatively rather than absolutely, using Brazil‑France and Germany‑Singapore examples. Meyer explains how cultural norms shape leadership expectations, contrasting egalitarian Swedish classrooms with hierarchical Mexican ones, and shares a case where Mexican managers struggled with Swedish employees. She introduces the notion of "authentic flexibility"—the ability of global leaders to retain their cultural grounding while flexibly adapting leadership styles across cultures, likening it to a muscle that strengthens with practice. Finally, she highlights how digital communication amplifies cultural misunderstandings, such as German preferences for written recaps after phone calls versus Saudi Arabian expectations that verbal agreements suffice, showing that technology does not erase cultural differences but often makes them more salient.
Chapters
I have spent the last 16 years studying how cultural differences are changing global organizations. But I have not always been working in a cross-cultural space. I was raised in a very monocultural place. I was raised in Minnesota, in the Midwest of the US. And it was only later, as an adult, that I started living in other countries and kind of learning about these things. Aww. But I had a situation early in my career that got this all started for me, where I was on a trip to Japan. with a Japanese colleague, and I gave a short presentation to a group of Japanese participants. And at the end of the presentation, I asked them if they had any questions. When I looked at the group, no one raised their hands, so I went to sit down. My Japanese colleague then said to me, Erin, I think actually there were some questions. Do you mind if I try? And I said, okay, fine. So he then stood up, and again he said, any questions? And again, no one raised their hand. But this time, he looked very carefully at the group. Oh, do you have a question? And the woman said, well, thank you, I do. And she asked a fascinating question. And then he did it again. Oh, do you have something you'd like to say? Yes, thank you, I do. So afterwards, I said to him, you know, how do you— how did you know that these people had questions? And he said to me, well, it had to do with how bright their eyes were. And I thought, wow, you know, they don't teach us that in Minnesota. So then I said, well, how do you know how bright their eyes are? And he said, well, you know, in Japan we don't make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West. So when you ask people if they have any questions, most people are not looking at you directly. But a few people in the audience are looking directly at you, and their eyes are bright. And that indicates that they would be comfortable with you calling on them. So the next day I gave another presentation, and again I asked if there were any questions, and again no one raised their hand. But this time I thought, OK, I'll just try. So I did as he'd instructed, and I looked carefully at the group, and I saw, just as he said, that only a couple of people in the room were looking directly at me. And if I really thought about it, well, yes, OK, their eyes were bright. So, you know, I gestured to one of them, and he kind of went like that, and then I said, would you like to say something? And he said, yes, thank you. So this was a very important experience for me because, well, there's an expression in Japanese which is kuki yomenai. They shorten it to KY, and it means someone who is unable to read the atmosphere. Or someone who's unable to read the air, meaning to pick up the communication that's in the air. And here I— we could see that he clearly could read the air, and I was clearly KY. But I also saw that with a little bit of assistance and direction, that I also could become better at picking up those signals that were in the air. So then as I was thinking about this, I became very interested in trying to figure out if there was a method that we could use to help people to better read the atmosphere when they were working with cultures that they didn't know intimately. And we then started to develop this framework that came from lots and lots of research where we divided culture up into different types of behaviors. And we started looking at, you know, how is trust built in different parts of the world, and how do we make decisions differently in different parts of the world. And we saw that we were able to come up with patterns. For how countries or cultures fell differently on those scales. And what was very interesting was that we could also then start to map cultures up to one another. So, for example, here you could— we mapped— I mapped Brazil next to France for you, Brazilian culture to French culture. And you can see on some scales the cultures are very similar, and on other scales they're very different. I also mapped out here, for example, Germany, German culture to Singaporean culture. And you can look again at where the similarities and where the differences differences are on those 2 scales. Now, as we were going through this, we also— I also started to see that there were a few key lessons for people who were trying to use this type of mapping. And the first was that when you looked at these scales, people, humans, seem to have a tendency to want to look at them like there was a center of the world with a right-hand side and a left-hand side. Right. Yet in our multicultural economy, that doesn't make any sense. I saw instead that we had to think relatively about the scale. So I was amused with the first presentation where Denis gave this example of what the French are like. And I actually did some work a while ago where I was working with a global team. And at one point, I asked the British on the team what it was like to work with the French on their team. And the British said, a little bit like what you heard from Denis, they said, well, you know, the French, they're very disorganized, and they're always late, and they're always changing the topic in the middle of the meeting, so it's very difficult to follow them. But then when I interviewed the Indians who were on the same team, and I asked the Indians what it was like to work with the French, they'd say, well, you know, Erin, the French, they're so rigid, they're so inadaptable, they're so focused on the structure and organization and punctuality that they're not able to adapt as things change around them. And I saw that, you know, yes, we could see that type of difference that was reflected on one of the scales, the scheduling scale, which looks at time orientation. And I will just say that I gave this same example in Germany a little while ago, and one of the Germans in the room said, well, you know, Erin, this is a really funny example for us because we work with the British all the time, and we are always complaining that the British are exactly the same way that you've just described that the British complain about the French. Right? So when you look at the scales, the absolute positions of the scales don't mean anything, and trying to even describe what a culture is like is not really useful in this type of global organization that you're working in. Instead, we need to start being able to tease out these differences and how different cultures see one another. So that was the first point. The second point was that what it means to be an effective leader has changed so completely as we've gone through this globalization process because of these cultural differences. And that usually what it means to be an effective leader in one culture, in one society, is deeply linked to how children learn to think about authority in their schooling systems, for example. So, I mean, just to give you an example, I think a few people are from Sweden in this room. Well, Sweden is one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. And if you go into a Swedish classroom or you start looking at the way that Swedish children are raised, you'll see You can see that there's this strong emphasis on the fact that the adult is like a facilitator. The teacher can be challenged and contradicted and is just there to facilitate learning. And then if you wanted to look, for example, at, let's say, Mexico, you might find that the way that children are raised has a much stronger emphasis on the fact that the child should defer to or respect the authority figure. And the teacher, for example, in the classroom isn't giving the knowledge to the children, And don't confront the teacher back. And then this has all sorts of links for you in a global leadership role. I worked with a Swedish company, Seco Tools, and they bought a big organization in Monterrey, Mexico. And now I had all of these Mexicans who were managing Swedish people. And one of them said to me, well, Erin, you cannot believe what it's like to manage in Sweden because they do not care at all. that I'm the boss. You know, I go into these meetings, I'm trying to roll out my strategy, I'm trying to get everybody aligned, and they're challenging me, they're contradicting me, they're taking their ideas off in other directions. You know, sometimes I want to just get down on my knees and I want to plead with them, you know, please don't forget that I'm in charge here. So this is really complicated in today's world because it means that it's no longer enough to know how to lead the Swedish way, or the Mexican way, or the French way, or the Chinese way. We have to know how to do all of those things. And what I see with the most effective global leaders is that they may have one foot that's very deeply rooted in their own culture, but then with their own other foot, they're really working on learning how to motivate their teams in different types of ways. I call this authentic flexibility. And this, of course, for those of you who have done this, if you've moved to another country, for example, and you're doing this all day long, you might find this is exhausting. It takes a lot of energy, and once you're stressed out, you're snapping back to your normal tendency. But we also see that this is like a muscle. So the more that you work on it, the easier it gets, till finally you can get to a point that you move back and forth easily from one type of style to another. That's the future of leadership in this global economy. The third point that we recognized as we were going through this mapping process was that a lot of people were saying, okay, fine, today's world is all interconnected. We're working over Skype, we're working over telephone, so aren't cultural differences impacting us less? But in fact, cultural differences were impacting us in so many more ways than they were before, yet we're totally unaware of them. So to give an example of this, I worked a while ago— well, let me just get you thinking about this. So in Germany, at the end of a phone call, it's very comfortable and appropriate to get off of the phone and put into writing what's been decided, right? And you would then send the recap to the person that you've been working with. I was doing some work a while ago with a Saudi Arabian team. And one of the Saudi Arabian participants said, well, you know, Erin, in my culture, if we have a discussion on the telephone and we make some decisions verbally, that would be enough for me, especially if we have a little bit of a relationship. And then if you get off of the phone and you put everything that we've decided into writing and you send that to me, that's a clear sign to me that you don't trust me.
