Why you should speak now or forever hold your peace

Communicating well is not just a matter of personality or training. The country in which we were born plays a key role in our ability to communicate in the workplace

I never imagined that working in groups was something that needed to be studied and to be learned. It always seemed to me that the ability to share activities and build something together was innate — or not — and was more or less present in one’s personality. For me, the success of working together has always been about the ability of members to interact naturally. After all, we are all social beings and we communicate all the time, right?

It was in the Work Team Concept Skills discipline of Project Management Certification that I am doing at the University of California San Diego that I found that group work is really a matter of study. Our teacher presented an exercise that made me reflect on the fact that the seemingly simple act of talking is actually an action permeated by countless layers that we don’t even realize are there: we need to consider who our interlocutor is, the context of the situation, what message you want to get through, the medium… and in an intercultural environment like UCSD that’s even clearer — beyond the language barrier, each student has a completely different cultural background from the others.

In the exercise we should “ask” any three things for a subordinate, a peer and a boss. The challenge was to use a mandatory verb in our sentences: “to demand”.

In Brazilian culture “demand” is a totally imposing verb. When you demand something, you are not asking, you are claiming. Imagine how the exercise went:

• Subordinate: “I demand that you deliver this report by the end of the day.” How did the person who received this command feel? Maybe exploited, probably amazed at the boss’s level of aggression, wanting to say “so do you!”?
• Peer: “I demand that you finish this analysis by noon so I can
  do my job.” What the colleague thought: “Who do you think you are talking to me like that?”…
• Boss: “I demand that you welcome me to a meeting next week to
  talk about the project I’m working on.” Surely the boss will find it very petulant to place an order in those terms…

There are, of course, different ways of asking for something — the exercise of demanding has served to show how using the right words at the right times is crucial to the success of any act of communication — and each culture has a different way of expressing itself. My colleague Max, Swedish, said that in his country it is normal to communicate very assertively with colleagues, regardless of hierarchical level. The same goes for fellow Americans. Javier, a Mexican student, however, has revealed that in his country communication is smoother, using milder words — and with different ways of addressing those above or below the hierarchical chain.

Catastrophe on board

In January 1990, an Avianca Airlines Boeing 707 with 158 passengers aboard crashed on Long Island, near New York City, killing 73 people. The cause of the crash was fuel shortages — but research into how the aircraft has run out of fuel has revealed striking facts strongly related to how each country’s communication culture works. The analysis of the case is in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, and refers to a study done in the 1960s and 1970s by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede. In a paper known as “Hofstede’s Dimensions”, the researcher explores intercultural paradigms that may explain how the Avianca case — and many other situations where clear and constant communication is needed — ended in disaster.

Hofstede explains that, among other dimensions, some cultural/behavioral differences between countries can be understood from the level of individualism of its members in the so-called Individualism-Collectivism Scale. The country with the highest score on the individualism scale is the United States. At the opposite end of the scale is Guatemala.

Another dimension of the same study is the Aversion to Uncertainty. Some countries are more tolerant than others regardless of the circumstances. In the researcher’s list, the countries that top the list of those who avoid uncertainty are Greece, Portugal, Guatemala and Belgium — as opposed to Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Jamaica and Singapore.

A third dimension, and perhaps the one that best explains the Avianca crash, is the Power Distance Index. This index has to do with hierarchy — how free members in lower layers of a given structure feel to communicate with members of the highest hierarchy.

Avianca’s pilots were Colombian — a culture with a high Power Distance rating. The plane’s black box recordings revealed that the co-pilot tried to alert New York’s captain and flight controllers about low fuel levels — but using the wrong words. As the second person in charge of the flight, he found himself in a subordinate position — which did not entitle him to question the knowledge of his superior (who, in his assessment, should obviously be aware of the fuel situation). To the flight controllers — Americans, members of an individualistic, straightforward culture in their communications — the co-pilot said, “We’re running out of fuel” — without any danger warning or mention that the plane would not arrive at the airport. The pilot was focused on other activities, and it was not his responsibility to take care of the fuel level; The flight controllers, in turn, understood that everything was fine — if there is no danger alert, why imagine that there is any imminent risk? The co-pilot did not return to the subject or seek confirmation — and 37 minutes (enough time for a safe landing in nearby locations) after mentioning the problem for the first and last time, the plane crashed into the ground.

In 1999, in a study entitled Cultural Diversity in Crew Communication, linguists Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu identified six communication styles among the crew:

1. Command: Do it.
2. Collective Statement of Obligation: We must do this.
3. Suggestion: It would be interesting to do this.
4. Question: What if we do this?
5. Preference: I think it might be a good idea if we did that.
6. Tip: This does not sound like a good idea, but it is the best we have for the moment.

Researchers have found that captains invariably speak to their crew directly and forcefully using commands (1), while subordinates tend to talk to their superiors using clues (6) — the milder format of what the researchers called “mitigated speech”.

Back to work

We often assume that something is obvious and well-known to everyone — but we forget that each one’s cultural experiences are different from ours, and what is obvious to me may not (and probably isn’t) to others. We also harbor unfounded fears by wondering how others might react in certain situations and contexts — and in fear of something unreal we give up before we even try.

In the workplace — as well as in our personal lives — we must learn to put aside our fears of hurting the feelings of others and say what has to be said — in a cordial way, certainly. Communicating the right thing at the right time can avoid a lot of headaches — and in more extreme cases, like in an airplane cockpit, can save lives. Interacting with peers and superiors in a culture such as Brazil, where the power distance index is one of the highest in the world, is no easy task — but the “demand” exercise and Avianca’s case show that clear and direct communication is much more effective — and necessary — as inappropriate as it may seem.