How to Communicate with Culturally Diverse People with Nadege Minois, PhD

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide, and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Nadesh, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for inviting me, Kwame.

Yeah, it's our pleasure. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Yes, for sure. So probably you can guess from my accent. I'm a French woman. I've lived in five different countries. I actually began as a researcher in biology, and so which is why I went to all these different countries. And so moving around like that basically means that for over two decades, I've been, if I can say, confronted with these different cultures in these different countries. And also because research, higher education is a very diverse field in universities, you have really people from all over the world and from very different backgrounds. I've seen, you know, all these people and I've learned so much. And I say, wow. And I got very interested in these cultural differences and mostly in the communication part of it, because what I saw is that, well, usually it doesn't work. And it kind of grew on me up to the point where I say, what can I do to help people? I've learned so much about the differences and how you can help to mitigate that and bridge gap. And so over these, over two decades that I've seen these people from different cultures and basically universities, research institutes, they are very diverse places with people from all over the world from very different backgrounds. And so I had so many experiences to see how difficult it is to actually communicate. We don't really understand each other when we have very different background. It's just normal because we don't know. And so that really grew on me up to the point say what, what can I do? I've learned so much about that. What can I do to help people communicate better? Because basically that's, that's really what I like, the interaction between people and communication. And so how to bridge these gaps between people of different background. And up to the point that I decided that this is what I wanted to do. And so now with my business coaching vision, that's what I do. And I help companies to build that culture of inclusion, of understanding, of trust and respect for their diverse people.

This is great. And it's more important now than ever before because we're so connected with the Internet, with just diversification of workplaces in general. And one of the things that was interesting that came up in a couple of the podcasts in the past about culture is that every interaction to a certain extent is a cross cultural communication because we're not all exactly from the same place, living the exact same lives. And so I think this will help us to communicate better to people even within our own culture. But obviously it will have a lot of benefit to people who are of different cultures when we're trying to communicate with them. And for you, this is, this is, it's not just the consulting because you also have a book on the topic as well, right?

Yes, yes, that's right. Thank you for mentioning that. Just my book, it's a really multi author, a big effort and it's a book called Actioning Inclusion, A Handbook for Socially Responsible Higher Education because it was aimed mostly at higher education being such diverse field, diverse places, but basically it's full of things both theoretical and a lot of practical things that basically almost any company, any business can look at and implement to help with inclusion. Yes. And if any of you who are listening is interested, just contact me and I'll send you a copy for free.

Thank you for that generous offer. And now when we're talking about culture and communication, this is one of my favorite topics and I start to enjoy it. It was interesting when we were kind of game planning for what we're going to talk about today. I said, where is your energy driving you? What's most interesting to you? And it was when it works. So one of the things I love about culture is that every time we do an episode on it, I learn a little bit more every single time because it's just so nuanced. And even when you think about culture, respect, diversity and inclusion, all of those things. When I asked you the question in our preparation, what is giving you the most energy? I loved your response because of its simplicity. You said, when it works, when communication works. And I love this because I think a lot of times we get so wrapped up in the tactics and the strategy and the theory that we forget the whole point of communication. It's to. Our goal is to simply be effective when it comes to communicating. And so let's start off with kind of working through a definition of what effective communication could be, and then let's move on to how culture impacts communication in general.

So to me, an effective communication is a communication that has sent the right message to the receiver, by which I mean the receiver has understood your message the way you wanted that person to understand it. And I think that, to me, is really the crucial thing about communication, is that usually we think about it. What am I going to say? You know, we tend to focus on ourselves, our ideas, our thinking. But no, communication is all about the people you're communicating with. And if they don't understand your message, if you cannot pass your message efficiently, you haven't communicated. There's a great quote by George Bernard show that I like. He said the biggest problem with communication is the illusion it has taken place.

It's a brilliant quote. And when I think about it, when I first heard it, I thought it was funny. And then I started thinking about it and I realized, wow, this is a tragedy, because so many people, we, if we think about ourselves, just kind of like animals. Humans are biologically animals, right? Animals make these sounds. Dogs bark, cows, moose, those type of things. But they do it with a purpose. And a lot of times we're just making our human sounds without caring at all whether or not it's received the right way. And then if we do care and we recognize, hey, that that human noise that I just made, it wasn't received the right way. A lot of times what we do is we blame the other person for not understanding, rather than looking at ourselves to see what we could have done differently or analyzing the situation to understand what. What nuances are making the conversation so difficult. And so when you think about communication, where would you say in general, the challenges start when we introduce differences in culture.

When you communicate with somebody, as we say, when, when you can see the other person, it basically starts when the person sees you for the first time. You haven't opened your mouth, you haven't said a word, but already the person has made a lot of judgments, unconscious, but a lot of judgments about you. And so really it begins here. And so where, just a simple example where cultural differences can be something that people will not understand, it's that in some culture, when you talk to somebody, you make eye contact. In some other cultures, depending with whom you're talking, it might actually show a lack of respect if you make eye contact. And so imagine you expect you're in a senior position, I can say, and you expect the other person still to make eye contact with you and suddenly you see another person and that person doesn't make any eye contact with you anyway, that's not good. But actually that person was only showing you respect because in their culture they would never look in the eye like that. Somebody senior. And that's it.

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So it can begin like that very, very early actually in the interaction. And then of course, as you go into the interaction, everything like that will be different. The words you use, how you address people, and all that will be different between different cultures. And so there's so many parameters, variables that could trigger that kind of, ooh, I didn't like that in the communication, it's very, very tricky, especially if you don't, if you don't know and you don't understand what's going on.

Absolutely. And nadesh, to that last point, it can be tricky, especially if you don't know or understand what's going on. I think a lot of us, and for me, as I've been on this journey of learning and reading and things like that, I think one of the things that's been most interesting is the impact of The Dunning Kruger effect. And so when you think about the Dunning Kruger effect, this is the phenomenon where people who don't know very much are very confident in what they know. The example I love going back to is I remember when my son Kai was two years old, I came into the backyard and he was standing on the chair, reaching up to the sky. And I said, kai, what are you doing? He's like, I'm trying to touch the moon. And in his mind, because he had no idea what it would take to get to the moon, he thought it was possible. Right. And so a lot of times when it comes to our ability to communicate, we're overconfident simply because we don't understand the complexity of the interaction that we're having.

And I think for a lot of.

People, they expected with your response to, to start with the communication in terms of the words that we say. But we're recognizing that the challenges with cross cultural communication begin the moment you become aware of each other's existence.

That's right, yes. Yeah, no, that's right. Absolutely. And our culture is really the result of every day, if I can say education. It's really, you know, every day, Every day, every day, what we see and what we hear, we are basically taught what is appropriate, inappropriate, how we should behave, how we should communicate from the very earliest of ages. Basically, as soon as we can understand anything, it begins. So then it's very, very hard to even just imagine that it can be different for the people, that the world can be different. And I know it was the case for me, even if you kind of know it on a kind of theoretical basis, you know, really when I first move from France and actually I went to the USA and you know, it was really, oh, wow. And you know, even if I knew on the theoretical basis that yes, it could be different, seeing it, experiencing it, and really saying, yeah, yes, I can really see it's really something different. And for most of us it doesn't happen because we just don't have that opportunity, you know, even if we are very connected with the Internet and things like that. But a lot of the time the interactions we have kind of stay superficial. There's not enough depth really to begin to, to understand the differences. So most of us, we just don't have the opportunity. And so we get fixed in our way of saying things.

Yeah, it's, it's so true. And the thing is, a lot of times we are so. We're so used to interacting in a certain type of way ourselves. We're so used to other people interacting in the same type of way that we don't even ever have a reason to stop and think that there is any other way to interact with other people. Right. And one of the funniest things is that a lot of times the cultural differences are so nuanced that it's hard to even give voice to what it is that we're experiencing. It's more like just a feeling. And so I want to go back to one of the things that you said, because you said sometimes you might be in a conversation and somebody says something or does something, and then you're like, ooh, right, that's just a sensation. And what's interesting is that the body will feel something, but it might take the mind a while, or the mind may never get to the point to being able to identify with consciousness. What about the interaction made you feel that little twinge of discomfort, which makes it really difficult. Right. And so what we have to do is we have to be able to become better listeners of ourselves and our own bodies to recognize, oh, hey, that had an impact on me. I wonder what that was. But also, as we're communicating with other people, we want to start using, reading their body language to a certain extent to say, hey, okay, I was talking, and it seemed like they had a little bit of a negative response or some kind of response to something that I said, and I didn't expect to get a response there. Maybe it's time to slow down the conversation and check in to see what that was. Right. It's so interesting how nuanced and subtle these things can be, but they can have a really massive impact on the conversations that we're having.

Yeah, absolutely. And you described really well exactly what you should do as that. You write this kind of sensation and feeling, or sometimes you can call that a trigger. You know, that you have to be able to recognize that and to stop and then say, yeah, what's going on here? And again, to recognize that in the other, just like you said. Thank you. You described it really very, very well about how you should approach things. Unfortunately, most of the time, the way we approach it, and you mentioned that earlier, is we put blame on the other person. Look how they behave. How can they do that? They have no manners. How can they talk like that? They can't understand. They haven't understood me. And so we put the blame instead of saying, okay, I am part of that experience of that situation, and as an actor in that situation, what can I do? Well, how do I Myself influence it, and what can I do then to make it better? And as you say, learning about ourselves, self awareness is really the start. Because if you don't understand what you're about, if you don't understand your own culture, and we think we do, but actually it's so ingrained, so unconscious, that if we begin to think about it, a lot of the things, oh, well, I don't know, why am I doing that? I don't know, why do I speak like that? Yeah, well, that's funny. I don't know. So a lot of the time, actually, we realize that we don't know the influence of our culture because it's so pervasive, it's so deep, so ingrained that it's completely unconscious. And so doing this work first to understand that is really the first step because then you can begin to understand the others. But you need to understand yourself, where you come from first.

I love this so much because I don't think many people would say to themselves, at least consciously, oh, when I'm thinking about cultural intelligence and improving my cultural competence and being able to communicate cross culturally, I think most people would say, all right, I need to learn about other cultures, I need to immerse myself in other cultures and things like that. And that's very good. Not going to dissuade you from doing those things. But it starts with yourself. And I think that's where people really struggle. Because if we're thinking about cross cultural conversations, we have to have an understanding of what our culture is like. And if we can't distinguish between just how humans should operate and how my culture chooses to operate, then we're not even going to realize those points of friction. And when we think about culture, when culture also comes with feelings, so if you're in your own culture, a lot of times you might feel safer, you might trust it a little bit more, and you feel more comfortable. So we have to be able to understand our ourselves, have that self awareness and have emotional intelligence as well to recognize when there's a deviation from our own baseline. Hmm, I feel uncomfortable in this conversation. Why is that? It might be a cultural thing. And so it just adds another layer of analysis that we could put into this. Is this an emotional challenge? Is this a substantive challenge where they disagree maybe with the terms of the agreement or the deal or the relationship? Is it a timing issue? Is it a cultural issue? Is it a financial issue? It just adds a layer of depth to our analysis that allows us to navigate the conversation with more confidence and Clarity.

Yes, absolutely. Basically, we don't like what is unfamiliar, that the way our brain is wired, we just don't like it because our first reaction is, I don't know what it is, so I'm going to assume it's going to be a threat. It's not something good. So just going to back off or maybe even flee if I think it's way too much. But that's, that's just how we are. Basically, that's how our brain is wired. So that's our first reaction. So, yes, when we're confronted with different people from different cultures, that's just the first thing. It doesn't look like me, so I'm not sure. And then on top of that can come all the biases and prejudices and all the assumptions. And so you put all that on top of each other, plus the differences, cultural differences and things like that, you just don't understand about until you can see why you might not be ready in most cases to come into that interaction with a required open mind that the situation demands.

Exactly. And I can't. I can't remember the book, but I think it was a book on decision making. They were talking about trusting your gut, your instincts, your intuition. And yes, good. That's the response I wanted to see. And for those of you who didn't, who are just listening, there was a massive eye roll, which is good. And so what they said is that when it comes to intuition, your intuition is most valid in situations where there is. There are confined options, and it's something that you've done repeatedly, like thousands of times. So, for instance, a chess master who kind of gets a sense this position. I feel like I should move my knight, but I'm not exact. I can't articulate why, but I feel like that's the right move because I've seen thousands of these positions on the board. Now. It's a sense. But then we realize that those same intuitions are essentially biases when it comes to human interaction and the complexity of human. Human cultures and experiences too, because like you said, what is unfamiliar is sometimes scary. And so if it's a negotiation, a relationship, those type of things, there are going to be a lot of things in our brain that are telling us, no, stop, unsafe, not comfortable. Right. But it might not be something bad. It might just be something different. And the more we're able to understand culture and actually have the confidence in our negotiation abilities to, like, lean in and communicate across cultures, the more we're going to be able to second Guess ourselves in a meaningful and appropriate way and say, hmm, I don't feel comfortable. Let me explore what that is. It may be a bad deal and maybe I need to say no. Or it might be an inappropriate bias because I'm talking to somebody of a different culture, but I'm going to stay in it and figure out what the right decision is to make. And so we have to be able to understand ourselves at a deeper level in order to make these conversations more effective.

No, that's right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And yes, to come back with intuition. Yes, intuition works in a very constrained, familiar situation. So you took the example. Yes. Of a chess master. You know, he will see the pieces on the chessboard and pop. That's it. He knows people like firefighters and nurses or something like that seem very constrained that suddenly they had. So you know, the firefighters, they don't know what it is. But no, we're going now and they go out, the house collapses. They don't know why. Well, if they really think about it, then they can. Yeah, okay, yes, there was this and there was that. But at the moment. So yes, intuition works like that. In cross cultural environment that you're not familiar with. Well, the most likely thing that your intuition will tell you is I don't like it. Don't lie that I'm going away. That's basically, don't listen to your intuition if you're not in a familiar environment. That would be my advice. Because intuition relies on previous experiences and patterns that your brain knows by heart. And that's not the case in an unfamiliar situation. In cross cultural interactions, that's not the case. So yes, you have to be, to say, you have to be aware again to stop that and say, no, now I need my brain, not just my guts and I need my brain here, what's going on?

Absolutely. And one of the things, because I want to make sure listeners, they're listening and they're like, wow, this is more complicated than I thought, what do I do? And really the solution is quite simple. And I want to get your thoughts on this too because I know when I'm having conversations, cross cultural conversation, those type of things, we're going to have those moments of oh, what was that? I don't feel safe, those type of things. And so I use that as a guide for my curiosity. So I make notes, what was it, what was said, what was done? Those type of things. And then I, after the fact I start thinking to myself, what was it about that? Let's break it down, what's the Difference what led me to feel that way. And then we turn these moments of discomfort into really unique, organic opportunities to learn.

Absolutely, absolutely. That's the key. And there's two ways of doing it is as you say, you take it back and then reflect, take your time and reflect on your own. The other way it's, while it is happening, you open the conversation and say, just say, hey, wait a moment here, can I share something? This is what's just happened to me and I want to understand and what's going on. So what is, you know, whatever you want to ask, what is your point of view or, you know, that, that, that was my feeling, my understanding. What, what do you think? How do you think it came. It came this way and, and trying to understand. So the other way is having that conversation there and there, basically the two, the two ways. And you mentioned curiosity and that's funny because from studies that have been done, they tried to look at personality traits and that kind of things. And curiosity was actually the only personality trait that they found to be useful on all aspects of cultural competence, of cultural intelligence. You have no different aspect like emotional intelligence. You know, it's about understanding yourself, understanding others and all these kind, all these kind of things. And curiosity was the only trait that was really useful and a predictor of how well you would do so.

Selfishly, there are many reasons I love this, but selfishly, the reason I love this the most is the framework we talk about is compassionate curiosity. So I like that it works in this situation too. This is fantastic. So that's very validating. I like to hear that. And the other thing is about your response, about how you can actually address it in the moment. The thing that I love about that response, well, multiple things. First thing, like you said at the beginning, I like communication. When it works, that works, right? So it checks that box of efficacy. This is an effective way to communicate and address those potential points of friction that come in these cross cultural conversations. And the other thing is simplicity. That's not hard to do, but it requires some courage, it requires vulnerability to be able to say, you know what? I am not this all knowing, amazing person who knows everything that you mean to say what I mean to say with a perfect understanding. No, hey, I am a human and I have flaws. Something happened, I'm not even exactly sure what it was. I wanted to let you know that I saw it and it had this impact on me. I wanted to give you some space to share how you felt about it. Is this something that we should talk about? And there is no magic trick. There's not like three quick and easy saying to make every conversation easier. It's not like that. It requires vulnerability. It requires curiosity and just a willingness to lean in and have those conversations.

Absolutely, absolutely, totally. And also a willingness to learn from the other people, really, so that. That willingness to listen. Because again, it's, you know, it's your feeling, your reaction that will begin that conversation. But once again, as said at the start, you know, actually communication is not about you. It's about the people to whom you're communicating. And so having this, this open mind to really listen also to their point of view and how they feel is happening to them.

Nadesh, I could talk to you about this, like, forever, but I know the commute is winding down for people who are listening, so for the sake of time, we're going to start to rein it in here. But I know listeners are going to want to learn more about you, more about the work that you do. What is the best way for them to connect?

Definitely, LinkedIn is the best way to connect. So as you said, if you put my LinkedIn details, please do request a connection and send me a message, and I'll be very, very happy to connect and to begin a discussion.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Really appreciate you spending time with us today.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much again for the invitation.

My pleasure. Congratulations.

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