What Is Cultural Friction? (And Why Nationality Is Only the Start)

Here are some examples of how cultural friction shows up at work. A manager gives some quick, clear feedback, and the person that receives that feedback goes quiet for a couple of weeks and they don’t really quite know how to handle it. A team leaves a meeting, half of them think a decision’s been made, only to realise that that decision keeps getting opened up and revisited and we just keep going around in circles. Or a boss asks for some honest views. Everyone in the room says, yeah, it’s a great idea, but two people in that room they really know that it isn’t. Things are getting lost along the way here.

This is cultural friction. 20 minutes or thereabouts, one real problem, and what we can actually do about it. Today’s a little bit different. Normally we pick one problem, we dig into it. Today we’re looking at the idea that sits underneath every episode that we do. What cultural friction is, why it’s so quiet and so easy to miss, where our working habits come from, nationality first, and then all the experience that we pile up on top of it. The three places it tends to show up: communication, authority, and trust, and three things that we can do about it on Monday morning. Let’s go.

And we’re gonna do that, we’re gonna have a few examples and we’re gonna get underneath the surface really of what it is and how it shows up at work. Because there’s a lot of discussion around culture at work and and what that what that word culture actually really means. So I really want to open this up a little bit for us today. So I’m gonna start off with an example just to give us some context, and then we can look at that in some more detail. So let’s start with Anna. So Anna runs a product team, eight people, all from different backgrounds, a few from the same place where she’s from, some people from different nationalities, and they’re also spread across different time zones.

She’s really good at her job and her team really likes her. So she’s got a great rapport going on within her team. So on a Tuesday, one of her analysts, Daniel, sends a report before a client meeting. Anna reads it over lunch, she sends back a review of that report in three sentences, and this is what she actually wrote in her email. She said, the analysis in section three is weak, the numbers don’t support the conclusion. Can you rework it by Friday? Okay, so this is always straightforward and clear, and if you come from a culture where direct negative feedback is delivered in this way, this isn’t gonna faze you in the slightest.

And this is kind of how Anna works. This is her default working position. However, if you’re Daniel, you’re gonna read this very differently because where he learned to work, or kind of in his culture or his work culture, feedback like that kind of says that maybe my manager’s got a problem with me, not with the report, but a problem with me. It’s really short, it’s really blunt, there’s no pleasantries, there’s no hello, how are you doing? How was your weekend? There’s no sign off or I hope you’re all good, kind regards, none of none of that. So Daniel’s starting to think that maybe Anna has a problem with him, you know, because if she was happy with him, she’d have started with all of this good stuff, you know, and she would have made a little bit more effort in the email.

So, what does Daniel do? He fixes the report and he does a great job, and then Daniel kind of goes a little bit quiet for a couple of weeks. You know, he kind of takes a little step back, he’s he’s not throwing his ideas forward anymore. He stops dropping by with questions, you know, he does exactly what he’s asked, and he doesn’t really do a lot more than that. And Anna, she hasn’t really noticed too much that Daniel’s kind of stepped back from stuff. She’s she’s given feedback to four or five people in the office this week, exactly the same kind of feedback. So in her head, it’s actually been a really productive week, people are getting on with things, things are getting done.

Now, in this scenario, there aren’t any there aren’t any bad people in this scenario. Anna isn’t being harsh in her in her work culture, and Daniel isn’t being oversensitive in his work culture. They’re just playing by two different sets of rules, and neither of them knows that each person is playing by different rules. And that is what cultural friction is. And if you kind of want it in one sentence, this is the definition that I tend to use. Cultural friction is the performance cost that builds up when people from different cultural backgrounds work together without a shared way of working, and that’s the key thing here that shared way of working.

Now, most of the teams, in fact, I would say nearly all of the teams that I work with have not really established shared ways of working, and they they haven’t is they haven’t realised or they haven’t gone through a process of opening up and understanding that we’re all bringing different expectations in how decisions get made, in how we build trust, in how we schedule meetings, in in leadership, communication, all of these things. And so having shared ways of working removes that friction or minimises that friction and allows team to work super efficiently and to work, in my opinion, to the to the best of their abilities.

And there’s plenty of research that says that you know, diverse teams, teams that are culturally diverse, especially within creative environments, they perform better than homogeneous teams, teams where everybody is from the same working culture. We all bring rules with us into work, rules about how direct to be, when to challenge somebody, whether a decision is something that gets made in the meeting and it’s solid and it’s unmovable, or whether it’s a movable thing, it’s never really a firm decision, whether it gets made outside of the meeting, before the meeting, sometimes, even after the meeting. How much we can tell our boss that their idea probably isn’t a great idea, whether we can really get into it with somebody in a group setting, whether that’s appropriate or not, and and how we build trust.

Do we build that? You know, do we trust people because they deliver consistently on time? Or do we trust people because we we’ve built a relationship with them and and that then allows us to trust them? So we have a lot of rules that we bring with us, and often we’re not aware that we have these rules. I often refer to this as our kind of individual reference point because we we tend to measure people from our standing, from our reference point, but we’re not really sure unless we’ve done some work on this. We actually don’t know what our reference point is, we just know when things feel different.

And so those rules they kind of work fine when we’re in our groups in our you know at home. They feel just super normal, and that’s great. But and and Anna doesn’t think, you know, oh I have a direct style. She thinks I gave Daniel some feedback and that’s all good. And Daniel doesn’t think I expect feedback to be softened, he just thinks that my manager is not happy with me. So we’re not always super conscious about our reference points and what they actually mean and how they show up within us as we take them into work, and so it becomes even more difficult to understand how they show up in other people when we don’t really first kind of understand how these things are showing up within us.

So this friction doesn’t mean that something’s broken within our teams, it just means that people have different ways of working, they have different reference points, and when people with different sets of rules of how things get done kind of come together, there’s a mismatch, and that’s where friction starts to get created. And and if the kind of difference is quite large in our expectations, then the potential for friction is is is quite high. So, why is this so easy to miss? And honestly, I see it so much in in so many of the teams that I work with that people are just not realizing that these are just we have different ways of working, and the reasons I have these different ways of working are because of my my culture, because of my experience, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that.

And actually helping teams to go through that to understand themselves better, to then be able to understand others better, really does open up the opportunities for much more productivity and efficiency and a better working environment, actually. So, so why is it so easy to me? Some people, when they hear cultural friction, they often think of culture clash, and this clash, like a pair of symbols, is like this huge big explosion of something’s gone really, really wrong. There’s a huge big argument, somebody storms out, the client complains, four or five people who are in the corner, you know, talking quietly about this person or that person, and that can be that can be a clash of cultures.

Now, that’s not what I’m talking about here. Because clashes, everybody sees it, it’s loud, and it often gets sorted out because it’s it’s it needs to be sorted out. But friction is quiet, and and that’s actually the the biggest problem about cultural friction, because it doesn’t look cultural from the inside. Anna isn’t thinking to herself, oh, we’ve got some cultural difference here about feedback. Or she she’s probably not, and my experience is that she’s not. She’s probably thinking that Daniel seems a bit flat lately. I wonder if he’s tired, if something’s going on. With him, friction almost always looks like one person being a bit difficult or just being a bit disengaged, or somebody not quite doing it the way that they should be doing it, or the way we expect them to.

So, how do we spot it? So, what I do is I tend to listen for things when I work with teams, I look for how decisions are being made. That you know, decisions get made in meetings, but then they don’t get followed too on. The same three or four people doing all the talking in every meeting, that means quiet voices aren’t getting an opportunity, and they’re not quiet. Well, typically they’re not quiet because they don’t have anything to say. Often these people have some of the most amazing things, the best things to say, but they’re never given the opportunity to say them.

So, and then there’s that everyday feedback that people take, you know, very personally, trust that that looks a bit patchy. Often, when I hear people complaining about this person, that person, there’s there’s very little trust. And also psychological safety, which is a real key thing in in teams, in that you know, when that psychological safety isn’t there, and and that tends to get battered down and down when there’s when there’s a lot of cultural friction, people aren’t speaking up, people aren’t raising the hand, people aren’t contributing in the way that we we really ultimately want them to, and they’re definitely not pushing back on things because they just don’t feel safe to, and it’s and so that psychological safety just gets kind of ground down because these frictions are happening day in and and day out.

One of my favorites is the meeting after the meeting. Maybe you have experiences of this, but you you know, everybody nods along on the call, and then 10 minutes later, someone pops up into your office and says, you know, oh, can I can I just mention something about that meeting that we just had? You know, if those real, really important conversations are not happening inside the meeting, then nobody else is getting that information. If those decisions are happening by the water cooler or in the kitchen whilst you’re having a cup of coffee, then that’s friction because all the other people in that meeting think that the decision is being made in the meeting, so that’s that’s a real friction.

And those frictions they have a real cost to us, and it’s never in a way that shows up on a spreadsheet, you know, there’s cultural friction has cost us a thousand dollars this month, it’s never like that. But the costs are real, and the costs are there in the good people that leave because they just can’t quite fit into the team, or they just feel as though they’re not working well in that team, or or or they’re not really accepted, or their way of working isn’t working for that team as a whole. You know, it’s it’s the decisions that don’t get made, the projects that go late because we’re struggling to make those decisions, it’s the people that never feed back to us in time or on time.

It’s it’s it’s all of these things, and all of this slipped timelines, people leaving, difficulties at work, all of these ultimately have a financial cost for the team. And you know, some of these problems come because we just haven’t helped people to understand that they’re operating differently and we don’t have those shared ways of working together. So, where do our rules come from? Where do we get all of these rules? So, the way I put it is is like this our nationality is the foundation. So, there’s been lots of work done on national cultures and how we show up at work and how our culture is shaped by where we were born and where we grew up, and this is really true.

And I just want to add that caveat that we we should never really be measuring individuals against national identities, but there is a lot of evidence that shows that if you were born and grown up in a particular culture, then you’re gonna have some of these these kind of individual reference points where certain things feel like the right way to do things, and that’s gonna be how I communicate, how directly I communicate, how much I can challenge my boss, how I build trust, how I deal with time and scheduling, how decisions get made. All of these are are kind of built into us from our culture, and when we take when we go into work, especially into our first job, our our bus also has quite our first boss has quite an influence on how we work professionally.

So, anyway, nationality is kind of like a foundational thing, and lots of research to say how nationalities tend to work with regard to all of those elements I’ve just mentioned. But then on top of that is experience, and that gets built on top of our national identity. So, to understand how somebody works, we don’t just need to understand their nationality, but we also need to understand their experience. So let’s just take that nationality part first. So the country we grow up in teaches us a lot before we ever get a job. How you talk to older people, people who are more senior, how much respect you pay, how much you speak directly and say things straight out, or how much you leave the other person to talk, and then you wait for your opportunity, whether you disagree openly with people or not at all, maybe you can’t, maybe it’s not possible.

There are certainly some cultures and cultures that I’ve worked in where it’s nearly impossible for the other person to say no. And and me being more from a lower context culture, I need to hear no, and I understand exactly what that means, but when that no comes in all lots of different shapes and forms, I sometimes miss that. So our national identity kind of informs how these things, how these things work. And and it and again, it like I say, it’s not just a feeling, there’s lots of research that’s been done about this. Robert House and the GLOBE study, they studied CEOs in 24 countries, and they studied what people expected from a leader, and it was clearly different from one particular nationality to another nationality, and the leaders who matched what their people expected tended to be seen as better leaders.

So when Daniel reads those three sentences, a lot of his reaction was probably learnt at home or at school from his first few buses, and that’s real, and and we’d be really silly to pretend that it isn’t, it really is real, but then life adds on top of that another layer. So, where in the country we grew up and what our first language is, our family, our education, the job we trained for, the companies that we’ve worked in, the countries we’ve lived in, and and all of those little moments over the years that have taught us what’s what what’s safe to say at work and what gets us into trouble.

And what might be right in one place we may have learned isn’t right in another place. That changes. That’s our adaptation, that’s how we adapt as we go into work. Now, Vas Taras, Piers Steel, and Bradley Kirkman, they pulled together 558 studies from 32 countries to look at this, and they found that about 80% of the differences in people’s work values are actually inside countries, not between them. 80%.

And if you heard episode four, you read the culture guide and then you met the actual person, that number will probably sound a little bit familiar to you. They found something else that I really like. So for some things, how people feel about authority, for example, your job and your social class told you more about someone than their country did. But for other things, like how comfortable people are with uncertainty, country was still the better guide. So it’s not nationality doesn’t matter, it’s nationality matters and so does everything else. So let’s just get back to Anna and Daniel for a second. What if Anna spent her first 10 years at an engineering firm where feedback was short because the product shipped on Friday, ready or not?

No matter what happens, Friday that product goes. And what if Daniel started his career in a big formal bank where nobody ever criticized your work without a lot of care first? Their first jobs might explain that Tuesday just as well as their nationalities do. So those experiences that they’ve picked up at work, they may be informing how they how they’re feeling about that feedback that was received. And then there are the people who carry more than one culture around with them, which is a lot of us. You know, Ying Yi Hong and her colleagues found that people like this often switch rules depending on who they’re with.

So Daniel might be completely direct with his friends at the weekend and very careful with his boss on Monday. The same person, but different rules. So let me give you an example of this. And I think I’ve used this example before, but I trained in the UK as a project manager, and my culture tends to be low context, but not super low context. We’re quite towards the center of the scale in terms of context, so there’s a lot more cultures that are much more higher context than us in Germany and the Netherlands. So but what I learned as a project manager is that ambiguity causes problems, and so to remove that ambiguity, we I have to communicate very low context, which means I all of the meaning, all of the things that I’m trying to get across are in the words.

I’m not leaving anything to chance, and then what I’ll do is I’ll follow up a meeting with a full list of the action points, who’s going to do those action points, when they need to be done by. Now that’s a low-context way of working, and that isn’t naturally my default based on my nationality, but it is based on my experience. So, this is just how our jobs kind of change how we how we operate. So, if we only look at nationality, we’re going to go looking for friction in some of the wrong places, and we’ll miss what’s really, really going on here. So, how do we see how someone really works, no matter what their nationality is?

So, this is where I use my own tool. I have a tool that we’ve created which is called a cultural assessment tool. I use it with all my clients, with their teams. It allows me to assess teams, create data based on how individuals within that team operate. Everybody takes the assessment, they get a profile on how they’re operating at work, and it allows me to assess how a team’s really operating, where those frictions are, where people are far apart on these scales for deciding, and trust, and leadership, and hierarchy, and time, and and And decision making, all of those different scales, but it also helps me to look at you know how culturally intelligent people are.

A lot of my research is showing that people tend to have a reasonable amount of a desire and motivation to interact cross-culturally and work cross-culturally, and there’s a certain amount of knowledge that’s there, but when it comes to actually putting it into practice in the moment, that adaptation, adapting our behaviour, that’s where people tend to find the biggest problems. And my data is telling me that most teams have this issue where they’re struggling to adapt in the moment, and and it also looks at psychological safety, you know, whether you feel able to raise a concern, to be yourself, to make a mistake. All of this data helps me to assess teams on how they’re performing and then target those key areas of friction and help teams to become better, more efficient, more productive.

So yeah, everybody takes that when I do that. Now let’s think about Anna and Daniel. If they’d both taken the cat test, my cultural assessment tool, when Daniel joins the gap in how they give and hear feedback, that would have been really clear on day one. And that would have meant that there could have been some training involved, or they could have at least given another layer where they adjust themselves and accept that okay, that’s how that feedback comes. That’s not about me, that’s about the work, and Anna’s been super efficient here. So, where we’re going to notice you know, teams working really well.

In my experience, it shows up in three places more than anywhere else, and this is communication. So, this is this high context, low context. How are people actually working together? Episode two looked at look at this when she I think it was Priya from episode two. She said that you know the deadline was quite ambitious to her. This was a really loud warning, but to him, it was just a careful comment. High context, low context communicators, when they come together, there can often be misunderstandings and information doesn’t quite get through or isn’t quite understood in the way that the person delivering that message wants it to be understood.

So that’s a key area where I we do a lot of work with communication and how to communicate. And and also people within teams that are both high context but they both come from different cultures. This is another added friction on top of it’s kind of a heightened friction because they’re operating from two different contexts, and so misunderstandings are also quite big and often bigger than people from low context and high context cultures. The second aspect is authority. Now, in some working cultures, pushing back on your boss in a meeting is super healthy, and that shows that you’re engaged and you’re ready to go, but in others that can have a severe cost.

So some people keep quiet and the boss kind of hears, you know, nothing but agreement, everything’s fine. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows teams improve when people feel safe to speak up. The tricky part is that people in the same room can feel very different levels of safety. And again, there’s there’s work that can that can happen there, and then there’s also trust. So some of some of us trust a colleague because they’ve delivered, others want need to build that relationship first. So there’s lots of areas where this shows up in our teams, where if we had this knowledge of how people are operating, and remember that individuals often don’t know how they’re operating themselves.

A lot of the work that I do is is helping people to understand how they’re operating as individuals, and when you start telling them, look, this is how you’re operating, there’s often a moment of wow, I didn’t know that. I didn’t realise that this is the person that I’m taking into work each day. So here’s what we can do on Monday morning. Well, you know, what can we do with all of this? We can’t get rid of cultural friction, it’s there. We now work in teams that are superly super culturally diverse, people from lots of different places, people with lots of different experiences.

So cultural friction is here. But we need to we need to work on it so that it stops having a cost, so and that cost is minimised as much as possible. So the first is about how we use what we know. Country knowledge is useful, it really, really is. But we need to kind of treat that as our kind of foundation and not to judge people based on their nationalities, because that individual standing in front of us may have quite a story. Now, some people may have spent their entire working life within the same place where they were born, where they were educated, and then they worked, and so those people may have a stronger, maybe strongly more aligned with their kind of national norms, but we can’t do that because the places where we’ve worked, if people move out of those countries, then that changes and that experience changes who we are.

So you know, when somebody new joins a team, we need to ask about them where have you worked before? You know, what did your last manager do that worked for you? How did they do things? How would you like to get feedback? What drives you crazy? What is it you don’t like? You know, five minutes of kind of developing that kind of understanding of each other can tell us a lot more than any country guide that that that we can read. And people tend to enjoy it because, for once, somebody’s asking about them, about them as an individual, not about their work, not about you know, you know, how productive they are, but how they as an individual work and how they operate.

And it’s not about where they’re from either, it’s it’s it’s it’s getting to know that individual. Now, the second thing that we can do on a Monday morning is to think back over our last kind of team meetings, who was speaking, who wasn’t speaking. Did everybody walk out with the same idea of what had been decided? Did anyone come to us afterwards with something that they didn’t say in the room? You know, if the same names keep going missing or the real conversation keeps happening afterwards, that’s not really a motivation problem, that’s friction. And we need to know how to work with that.

And we need to understand it and be able to, as I say, work with it and appreciate it. And the third goes straight back to the definition of what cultural friction is, and that’s that friction builds up when there’s no shared way of working, so we need to build shared ways of working, not a big document, just a few things that you know help us to understand how we are gonna do this. What does decide actually mean in this team? How are decisions actually made in this team? Are some decisions re-revisitable? Are some decisions concrete? You know, maybe we finish every meeting with, you know, here’s what we’ve agreed, who’s doing this and by when, that that classic.

How do we give feedback? You know, that the classic, you know, feedback sandwich, wrap it all up in in wrap the negative up in in some positives. That only works in cultures where that works, but there are much more cultures where that does not actually work. So, how are we gonna do feedback? Anna could have told Daniel on day one, look, my feedback’s short, and it’s totally about the work, it’s not about you. I’m just trying to be efficient. That would have given Daniel much more understanding of what’s what’s going on. You know, yeah, and if I’ve got anything to say about you and your performance, don’t worry, I’m gonna I’m gonna say that.

I’m not gonna wrap it up in in other messages. That would save a lot of time and would save a lot of feelings, you know. And then how can people disagree? You know, if if saying it in the meeting is hard for them, you know, a one-to-one or a shared document, a direct channel where people can also feed into that, so they don’t have to just have be a loud voice in a meeting where everybody’s loud and they’re not that type of person. We have to look at ways where everybody’s able to contribute. And what we’re not doing is we’re not trying to force people to be something that they’re not, we’re just trying to develop shared ways of working in our team.

Okay, so we’re here at that final part of this episode, and and and it’s just this acknowledgement that every team with people from different backgrounds has some form of cultural friction, and that’s not bad news. A team that sees a problem from different angles can get to a better answer than a team that all thinks the same way. I mentioned it before that culturally diverse teams can actually perform better, especially in creative environments, than teams where people are from all from the same place. We get more creative answers to things, which is is super good. But that only happens if those differences can be talked about.

So the question isn’t whether our team has friction, the answer is that it does. The question is how do we work with it? Seeing people clearly when they work differently from you is a leadership skill and it can be learnt. That’s what the BASIS Leadership Programme does. It’s leadership training for team leaders, managers, and CEOs, built for real teams where people come from different backgrounds. It’s one-to-one, you can do that online, you can do it in your office in Barcelona, or we can come to your office wherever you are. You can find it at brendanthomasquinn.com/leadership-programme. The full article on this topic with all the references is also at brendanthomasquinn.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

Do follow me, I’d love to connect with you. And if you don’t want to miss that next episode, follow the show wherever you’re listening right now. All the links are in the show notes as well as the links to that leadership programme. Take care wherever you are.