0:07      Kay Summers: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters. Long gone are the days when you went into your office every weekday, saw all your coworkers in the break room, knew all about their families, and gathered around an actual water cooler to talk about what was on TV last night. Those days were already pretty much gone before 2020, and then the pandemic blasted an unfillable hole into that 1950s model. Combined with an increasingly diverse and global workforce with people communicating in real time across multiple time zones to collaborate on the same project and you have a recipe for miscommunication, missed meanings, missed context, and missed opportunities.

0:55      KS: So today, we're talking about how people can build trust and solid connections at work in a global workforce. I'm Kay Summers, and I'm joined by Melissa Hahn. Melissa is an intercultural trainer and consultant, and she teaches intercultural communication in SIS's online master's degree program. Her recent book is called "Forging Bonds in a Global Workforce: Build Rapport, Camaraderie, and Optimal Performance No Matter the Time Zone." Melissa, thank you for joining Big World.

1:24      Melissa Hahn: Thank you for having me.

1:26      KS: All right, Melissa, let's start off with an easy question. What time zone are you in right now?

1:30      MH: I am in the Pacific Time Zone. I'm in the LA area.

1:33      KS: And I'm in the Eastern Time Zone. So we are three hours apart. Would you say that the times you interact with someone at work who's in the same time zone as you are the rule or the exception at this point?

1:44      MH: They are definitely the exception.

1:47      KS: Yep. That's why we're talking. So, Melissa, getting into your book. Your book includes interviews with people from various cultures to develop a practical approach to forging cross-cultural bonds in business settings. What inspired you to write this book?

2:02      MH: So there were two sources of inspiration. The first was that I was having an increasing number of students and clients coming to me and saying, "All of these cultural differences and frameworks are interesting, but how do I actually feel like I belong? How do I actually establish a real, meaningful, sustainable connection?" And then, when I turned to find the resource for them, I couldn't find it anywhere. And so I realized that there was a need and there was also a gap in what was available. So Andy Molinsky and I decided that we would do the research ourselves and try to create this resource for people.

2:37      KS: You discuss at the start of the book this idea of the cultural differences approach, which essentially focuses on trying to avoid mistakes by recognizing differences between cultures. And you write that through research you've found that "myopically focusing on differences can often get in the way of building relationships." So in broad strokes, what is the new approach you lay out in the book for building stronger cross-cultural relationships and, I guess, more authentic cross-cultural relationships?

3:08      MH: I do want to emphasize that the realization that cultural differences existed was really valuable for its time because we could understand that when we, for example, were going into Europe with the Marshall Plan and we were encountering all these differences, they weren't personal, they were just cultural, and I think that was really helpful. The difficulty that we're having now is that we're not just working with one culture at a time. We're working with possibly dozens of cultures at a time, and keeping track of all of the differences and cataloging them and retrieving them has really taken on a cognitive load to the point where it's not actually useful.

3:44      MH: The other challenge I'm seeing is that understanding a culture in a broad, abstract sense is really intellectually interesting. It can help us comprehend things, but it doesn't necessarily help us to interact effectively with the real-life person in front of us. And I think that that's especially true in a global work and an international relations context where the very people who choose to go into those professional environments actually may not be typical of their home countries. And so what we want to do is help people understand that culture is an influence and cultures can be different, but there often are many, many overlaps, and we want to try to harness those areas of overlap so that we can form a bond with that particular person.

4:28      KS: I think that's so important because I do think a lot of the discourse around the global workforce and how we work together has to do with understanding broad swathes of a culture and understanding it at a 50,000-foot level, understanding another culture as almost a monoculture that all the rules that you're learning would apply to everyone from that country. And of course, that's not true. That's not true here. It's not true anywhere. You say, you mentioned when you're talking to people in international relations who kind of maybe already feel like they have a lot of competence here. How do you help them to understand that there is cultural competence and then there is an interpersonal part of it that is both different and the same?

5:19      MH: So it's interesting watching the evolution of how we approach culture, and I think certainly several decades ago we might have, at least from the US, seen more of a "my way or the highway," or "the US-American way is the best way, so just do it." Now I'm actually seeing less of that, and I am seeing instead an attempt by people to use some of our domestic diversity discourse as a way to try to understand international relations. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I think it's creating a labyrinth for people, and they're getting lost in it. And what we're trying to do is say, "You actually don't have to get a PhD in culture. What you need to do is sort of return to the basic interpersonal skills that you may already know."

6:06      MH: And by following what we call the six Ps, there's six different aspects of the relationship-building code. By looking at the process by which we can connect across differences or in alignment with similarities, but by looking at the process for building a relationship and figuring out how to engage, knowing what to look for, knowing the range of different norms within lots of different countries, and being able to deploy different strategies in light of what you're observing in real time, we think that's the essential skill rather than trying to memorize lists of dos and don'ts.

6:46      KS: And I'm wondering for people, especially maybe people who recently entered the workforce and came in a post-COVID landscape, may find themselves wondering, "Why is it important that I have these good interpersonal relationships, especially if we're in different time zones and I'm working on something and then you pick it up and you work on it and we communicate by email and everything should be super straightforward, and why does this even matter?" So why would you explain to someone with that perspective that it's important to build cross-cultural relationships in business settings?

7:22      MH: So there are two main reasons. One of the reasons that we explore in the book is that relationships themselves are often the vehicle and the mechanism by which we can accomplish the work. One quick example is of somebody that I interviewed who worked on a global team, and he told me that the weekly brief check-ins, 15 minutes to a half an hour, with the managers who were in countries—the US, the Netherlands, France, Malaysia, and China—those quick check-ins were the opportunity not only to get to know each other, but when his colleagues would actually share information like, "Oh, just a reminder everybody, it's Ramadan next week. Our factory is going to be closed" or "Just a reminder, we have spring break in France; my family's going to the Alps; we'll be skiing; we won't be in the office." The relationship in the sense of knowing somebody, the sense of having a feeling that you're invited to share that information, wasn't just like a warm, fuzzy, we're all getting along kind of goal.

8:20      MH: It was actually the only way that he would have been privy to that information about what was going on with the teams in other locations. And he told me that if he hadn't had the relationships that he did, he wouldn't have been able to have done his job. And he was an engineer, so he's very science- and math-oriented. The second reason, though, that I think relationships are important, and this might seem a little bit paradoxical, is that there is no universal standard or norm for how relationships are treated in the workplace. So if you sense that relationships are not a big part of your job right now, you might not be wrong. It might be that in your particular setting, your particular situation with those particular people, maybe everybody is fine just accomplishing the tasks and you don't have a lot of interaction.

9:03      MH: That may be working for you, but that doesn't necessarily translate to the next project you're going to be on or the next organization you're going to work for with people who are going to be having different personalities, different cultural backgrounds, and working in different professional contexts. So I think recognizing that yes, sometimes work is just about the tasks, and I think we can say that that can sometimes be true, especially in cultures that are more task-oriented. Butif we're going to be working with a revolving set of cultures, which is often the case in international relations and global business, we want to be able to adapt and pivot to the new reality that we're facing on the next project and the next team, rather than getting stuck in a rut of what we believe to be true.

9:54      KS: Melissa Hahn, it's time to Take Five. You, our esteemed guest, get to daydream out loud with five policies or practices you believe would change things for the better. Saying you want to build cross-cultural relationships is easy. Doing it isn't always easy. So what are five tools to help build cross-cultural relationships?

10:15      MH: One of them right off the bat might sound a little surprising, but that's that you need to bring yourself to the table. In our book, we ask, "If you aren't being yourself in a cross-cultural relationship, then who exactly is the other person getting to know?" So yes, we can dial ourselves up or dial ourselves back, or make modifications, but we want to realize that we are part of the equation and cross-cultural relationships do not depend on us being self-effacing or erasing ourselves altogether. Second, I would say that you really want to cultivate your curiosity. Of course, we don't want to be exoticizing or otherizing other people, but there's a lot of room to just express interest in each other as human beings. I would also say to listen, to connect when people are sharing with you about who they are and where they come from, and what their goals are for the project that you're working on together.

11:08      MH: The last two things I'll share are that conversational styles and small talk styles can vary. So you want to be thinking about how you can have a flexible range of ways that you can engage in conversation depending on the person that you happen to be talking to. Every culture has a way to get to know people and to establish rapport. If it's not the way you're used to, you can look for ways that you can scooch a little bit one way or the other way to try to be more in alignment with the person that you're talking to. And finally, we want to be emphasizing that it's not just about memorization but about engagement. And when you're engaging with somebody in real life, it's going to be an open-ended experience. It's not the same as following a script. So don't be afraid to put yourself out there, say hello to somebody, and see where the conversation might take you.

11:58      KS: Thank you.

12:00      KS: Melissa, you mentioned earlier that the US framing around DEI initiatives, that when people try to adopt that in a global context, it isn't always accurate or helpful. It doesn't always overlay as neatly as we might think it would. Can you dig into that a little bit just for people who really only have a US perspective at this point?

12:25      MH: Yeah, so one of the things that's been really interesting for me, and this is actually a reason that we don't attempt to tackle it in our book, is that my colleagues from other countries have shared with me that their understanding of diversity in the workplace and their language around how to do that better varies widely. So in many European countries, diversity efforts are primarily centered around gender. And in other countries, such as France, there's been a lot of debate about whether you can actually have a hyphenated identity. Can you be French-Algerian, or do you just need to be French? And it seemed like it was going to be difficult to offer a guide that was going to address every different country. So I think sometimes when we come in with the language we're familiar with, we might think that we are clear because we are clear on what it means in our context, but we might actually be muddying the waters if the meaning that we're intending to send, when we're talking about diversity, doesn't have the same meaning in the other context.

13:24      MH: The other thing that I'm seeing though that sometimes happens is that people have absorbed the language that we're using here in the US, and they're often feeling pressure to make sure that they get it out there, that they're on the right page, they know all the vocabulary. And that vocabulary may be useful, but simply memorizing it is not the goal; you don't necessarily know all of the background of the person that you're interacting with, or if that's the way they even want to be approached, and if that's going to be the most helpful way to work with them. And so I think we want to be understanding that we have a really unique domestic context and we're working in a global context, and sometimes those are going to match and sometimes there's going to be a gap between the two. It doesn't mean one is wrong; it just means that we are operating on two different levels simultaneously.

14:15      KS: Yeah, it means that to be truly culturally competent, you have to acknowledge that another culture may approach the ideas of diversity differently than we do.

14:23      MH: Absolutely. And they might be in different stages. The US has been a much more diverse country for a much longer time, and so we might be at a different point in addressing what that means for us, and that may not translate so neatly to where another country may be in their stage of grappling with all of these domestic issues.

14:44      KS: Melissa, last question. For someone who wants to form more authentic cross-cultural relationships, where should they start?

14:52      MH: One of the best things you can do is to put yourself in situations where you're going to have real-world, hands-on practice navigating these moments that feel a little bit awkward. I know that's the last thing that people want to do because they're hoping that they can avoid those feelings of being awkward. But I think the cultural competence in building relationships is analogous to riding a bike. You can read about the theory of riding a bike, but really what you need to do is get on the bike and even tip over a few times.

15:20      MH: The same is true when it comes to building relationships across cultures. You might have a natural knack for it, but you might also find that you have to practice, you have to experiment, you have to see what seems to be working for you, what seems to be working for the other people. So I would go to conferences, I would find mentoring opportunities, I would volunteer in cross-cultural situations. If you are in the DC area, I would definitely take advantage of embassy events. Anywhere where you're going to be forced to engage with somebody else who might come from a different cultural background from you is going to help you to flex those muscles, and you'll find that you get better at it as you go.

15:59      KS: And it sounds like you can't be afraid to get caught trying. You know that you have to be willing to, if there is awkwardness that comes from good intentions to figure a way to work out of that instead of avoid it altogether.

16:08      MH: Absolutely. And of course, there are some faux pas that can completely undermine your attempts at relationship building. But on the whole, I've found that many people are far more gracious and forgiving than we give them credit for. If I'm interacting with somebody from China, they can probably tell I'm not from China. They're going to be appreciative of my effort to meet them where they are, more than they're going to be judgmental that I haven't mastered their culture. So we don't want to let the fear of imperfection hold us back from really achieving something good.

16:43      KS: Melissa Hahn, thank you for joining Big World and talking about cross-cultural and intercultural relationships at work. It's been a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much.

16:52      MH: Thank you.

16:53      KS: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever else you listen to podcasts. If you leave us a good rating or a review, and please do, it'll be like beating jet lag on a transatlantic flight. Our theme music is It Was Just Cold by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.