Communication Challenges for Leaders of the Future—Part 4: The Clash of High-Context Versus Low-Context Cultures
A client recently called with this leadership challenge: “Our accounting team is located in the U.S. We crunch numbers, interpret them, draw conclusions, and recommend. Our headquarters is in Germany. The Germans are precise.
“They gather mounds of data—but resist drawing conclusions. They are very literal. They want someone to tell them what to do about the data—precisely—with nothing left to interpretation. Then we have engineers from 27 other countries and cultures, and they fall everywhere in between. Getting them all to interpret the data and agree to conclusions is mind-boggling difficult.”
This is but one example of the integration of high-context and low-context cultures in our global workforce that has created enormous potential for miscommunication.
Leaders of the future will create more than a passing awareness of cultural differences—enough to bridge the divide.
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