Say Anything to Anyone, Anywhere: 5 Keys To Successful Cross-Cultural Communication

Chapter 19

Business and Social Behavioral Styles

Where Do You Start?

To understand and effectively utilize relationship strategies, it is essential to educate oneself on various cultures’ workplace and social behavior styles. Today’s global business marketplace features a multinational workforce in nearly every country—and in nearly every industry. It can be challenging to be able to work together successfully, especially when the expected behavioral protocol varies from culture to culture and from industry to industry.

This is clearly an obstacle for business travelers and expatriates. It’s not always easy to adapt to the behavior styles of a country or culture that might be very different from your own. Circles Of Excellence has had some interesting experiences doing just that in Geneva, Switzerland. In the words of one of my business colleagues, we couldn’t just pull out our blue U.S. passports and say, “We’ll do it our way!”

Every country and culture has preferred business etiquette and different approaches and expectations regarding both business and social behavior. These behavior styles are developed over the years and are part of an individual’s cultural layers.

One of the major differences in behavior styles is how different cultures view relationship development and business objectives. Some cultures tend to be more relationship-oriented, whereas others are more objective- or outcome-oriented.

It’s necessary to spend more time with relationship-oriented cultures developing ...