When feedback is causing friction in your team.
In international teams, cross-cultural feedback rarely lands the way it was intended. What reads as direct and honest in one culture reads as aggressive or disrespectful in another. What sounds like agreement in one context is actually discomfort being expressed through silence. This workshop surfaces what’s actually happening — and builds a shared approach your multicultural team can use from the next day forward.
Book a discovery callFeedback problems in international teams rarely look like feedback problems.
Someone gives clear, honest feedback. The receiver hears it as a personal attack. No one says anything. The tension stays. This is the most common pattern in teams where direct and indirect feedback styles collide — and it erodes trust faster than almost any other form of cultural friction.
Indirect communicators signal discomfort through omission, not objection. Direct communicators miss it entirely. Decisions land that nobody actually agreed with. The feedback was given — just not in a way anyone recognised as feedback.
In hierarchical cultures, critical feedback flows up through layers, not directly person to person. The manager is always the last to know there’s a problem. By the time the information arrives, the relationship has already been damaged.
Practical. Named. Specific to your team.
How your team gives and receives feedback — mapping the actual styles present in the room, not generic theory. We name the specific cultural patterns at work: who defaults to directness, who communicates through context, and where the misreads are happening.
Where the friction is coming from — identifying the specific cultural mechanisms creating tension. Direct vs indirect feedback across cultures, hierarchy, face-saving, formality — we name the patterns your team has been navigating without language for.
What to do differently — concrete adjustments, agreed by the team, that work across the cultural mix you actually have. Not abstract principles. Specific, actionable changes to how feedback is given, received, and followed up on.
A shared framework — a set of norms the team builds together and owns. The goal is a cross-cultural feedback approach that doesn’t require an external facilitator indefinitely. The team leaves with something they can use the next morning.
Half a day or a full day. Real outcomes.
Pre-workshop conversation
30 minutes with the team lead. I understand the specific friction, the team composition, and what’s already been tried. The session is built around your actual situation, not a generic curriculum.
The workshop
In-person, with the team, as a half day or a full day. Structured but not rigid. We surface what’s happening, name the patterns, and build the shared norms together. Designed for teams up to 12 — large enough to represent the cultural mix, small enough for real conversation.
Follow-up
Two weeks later, a short check-in call to see what’s landed, what needs adjusting, and whether anything deeper needs addressing. The workshop is the beginning, not the end.
Your team is international and feedback is a recurring problem.
- You manage or lead a team where people come from different cultural backgrounds
- Feedback is either being avoided, misread, or causing real tension
- You’ve noticed that direct conversations go differently depending on who’s in them
- You want a practical solution, not a workshop people forget by Friday
If you’re not sure whether this is the right fit, that’s what the discovery call is for.
Questions about the feedback workshop
What is the Cross-Cultural Feedback Workshop?
It is a half-day or full-day workshop for international and multicultural teams where feedback has become a recurring problem. It works through the specific dynamics on your team — how feedback is given, received, and misread across cultural orientations — rather than teaching a generic framework. It runs in three parts: a pre-workshop conversation to understand your team, the workshop itself, and a follow-up.
Who is the feedback workshop for?
It is designed for leaders and teams that are international or multicultural and where feedback is a recurring friction point — for example, where direct feedback lands badly, where people go quiet rather than raising concerns, or where the same feedback is read as helpful by some colleagues and harsh by others.
How long does the workshop take?
The core workshop runs as a half day or a full day — you choose the length that suits your team. Either way, it is bracketed by a pre-workshop conversation beforehand and a follow-up afterwards to embed what the team worked on.
Is the workshop based on nationalities or stereotypes?
No. The work is framed around cultural orientations — such as how a team relates to hierarchy, directness, and how feedback is expected to be delivered — rather than around nationalities. The goal is to build skill in working with difference, not to reinforce stereotypes about where people are from.
The friction is real.
It’s also fixable.
Book a 30-minute call. No pitch — just a conversation about what’s happening in your team.
Book a discovery call