Checking understanding in international teams fails when leaders ask “does that make sense?” — a question that produces false alignment across cultures. This guide explains why yes does not mean agreement in cross-cultural teams, what indirect communication and high-context norms do to meeting alignment, and how intercultural training and cross-cultural workshops help teams in Barcelona and worldwide build real shared understanding.
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Why “Does That Make Sense?” Fails in International Teams
It feels like checking understanding. In international teams, it often isn’t. The word “yes” crosses cultures intact. The meaning behind it rarely does.
The project kickoff meeting ended well. Everyone was engaged. The lead asked: “Does that make sense? Are we all aligned?” Around the room — or around the video call — came the nods and the yeses. The meeting closed. Work began.
Three weeks later, two of the four teams had built something completely different from what was agreed. Not because they misunderstood the technical specification. Because they had understood the meeting itself differently — what was being decided, who had authority to push back, and what “yes” was actually meant to communicate.
This is one of the most consistently underestimated sources of cultural friction in international teams, and it plays out in almost every cross-cultural collaboration I work with. The language is shared. The word “yes” is universal. But what it means — and what the person saying it actually understood, agreed to, or intends to do — varies enormously by cultural context.
Why “Yes” Is Not Agreement Across Cultures
In many Western, low-context business cultures, “yes” in a professional meeting signals genuine agreement. The listener has understood the proposal, considered it, and is committing to it. Saying yes when you mean something else would be dishonest. So when everyone says yes, the leader reads the room as aligned and moves forward.
But “yes” carries different freight in different cultural contexts. In many East and Southeast Asian cultures, “yes” most commonly signals that the listener has heard you — not that they agree with you. The distinction is critical and consistently missed. Disagreement, particularly with a senior figure or in a group setting, is managed through indirect signals that a low-context listener is not trained to read. The “yes” is genuine. The agreement is not there.
In hierarchical cultures, there is a second mechanism operating alongside this. A junior team member who disagrees with a proposal made by a senior leader faces a real social calculation: expressing that disagreement openly, in the meeting, risks causing the senior person to lose face. The path of least resistance — and the culturally correct response — is to indicate that the message has been received. “Yes” does that. It does not commit to the proposal. The article on high context communication covers the broader mechanism behind this in detail.
There is also a third factor that most meeting leaders never consider: real-time language processing. A professional working in their second or third language is managing two parallel tasks simultaneously — understanding what is being said and formulating a response. In a fast-paced meeting, “does that make sense?” arrives before the listener has finished processing the content. The path of least resistance, again, is yes. Not because they agree, but because the question has come before the processing is complete.
The Phrases That Create False Alignment
It is not just “does that make sense?” The problem is a category of closing questions — questions that feel like checks for understanding but are structurally designed to produce confirmation regardless of what the listener actually understood or agreed to.
The most common offender. In most cultural contexts, saying “no, it doesn’t make sense” to this question is socially uncomfortable — it implies the speaker was unclear. The path of least resistance is yes. Nobody is checked. The alignment is manufactured.
In hierarchical cultures, asking questions — particularly after a senior figure has presented — can feel presumptuous or disrespectful. It signals that the presentation was unclear. The absence of questions tells you nothing about whether the content was understood.
A statement disguised as a question. The social expectation embedded in this phrasing is that everyone will confirm alignment. Contradicting it — “actually, I’m not sure I’m aligned” — requires overriding significant social pressure. In many cultural contexts, that override simply doesn’t happen.
Invites confirmation. Does not invite genuine assessment. In cultures where disagreement is managed indirectly, the expected answer is yes regardless of actual sentiment.
This connects to the broader pattern that the article on the Silence Trap describes — the structural invisibility of dissent in meetings that aren’t designed to surface it.
What to Ask Instead
Replace confirmation questions with action questions. Instead of asking whether people understood, ask what they are going to do next. The answer to an action question reveals whether understanding actually occurred — without putting anyone in the position of having to admit they didn’t follow.
“What are your next steps coming out of this?” surfaces both understanding and commitment without requiring direct challenge.
“What will you need from us to move forward?” identifies gaps and dependencies that pure confirmation questions never reach.
“What’s your biggest question about this going forward?” normalises uncertainty and invites genuine engagement rather than forced alignment.
The shift from confirmation to action is not just a phrasing adjustment. It changes the structure of the meeting closure entirely — from a ritual of agreement to a moment of genuine shared planning. That shift matters most in cross-cultural teams, where the ritual of agreement is most likely to produce manufactured consensus.
How to Build This Into Meeting Structure
If people have time to think before the meeting, they arrive with formed positions. The real-time processing problem is significantly reduced. Pre-meeting written input — “what questions do you have about this proposal before we discuss?” — surfaces genuine uncertainty in a low-pressure format and gives you the actual state of understanding before the meeting even begins.
The moment the meeting ends, send a written summary: what was decided, what was not decided, who is responsible for what, and what the next steps are. Ask for explicit confirmation of this written record within 24 hours. This catches the gap between what was said and what was understood — and gives indirect communicators a low-pressure channel to flag disagreement without the social exposure of speaking up in the meeting.
Many of the most valuable responses to “does that make sense?” will never arrive in the meeting. They will arrive in a follow-up message from a team member who didn’t feel it was appropriate to speak in the group. Building explicit one-to-one check-ins after significant meetings — “anything you wanted to raise that didn’t come up?” — captures input that the meeting format systematically suppressed.
For teams dealing with persistent alignment problems — where decisions seem to get made but don’t stick, where everyone agreed but implementation diverged — this is the pattern multicultural team training is specifically designed to address. And for leaders who want to develop the cross-cultural communication skills to navigate these dynamics in real time, coaching, mentoring, and advisory provides the sustained development that one-off training cannot.
Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map. PublicAffairs.
Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond Culture. Anchor Books.
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
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