Why this matters
When companies expand through nearshoring partnerships, offshoring teams, distributed offices, or new international hires, cultural patterns become visible the hard way: through delays, missed deadlines, and contracts that don't deliver what was promised on paper.
Most organizations address symptoms: better processes, clearer roles, new tools. Few look at the layer underneath: the cultural assumptions shaping how every message is sent, received, and interpreted. That layer is where my work can make a difference.
In multinational teams, 70% of employees attribute collaboration breakdowns to communication and cultural issues. Not to strategy, structure, or skill.
Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School in The Language of Global Success (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Some examples
A French manager's Chinese team nods and agrees in every meeting. But when the next meeting comes, nothing was executed the way she expected. She spends weeks thinking her team is passive or unengaged.
The real issue: in their culture, questioning the boss or asking for clarification in front of others would be disrespectful.
A Brazilian manager feels undermined: his Swedish team constantly questions his decisions instead of executing. The Swedish team feels steamrolled: they're used to building consensus, not receiving orders.
Neither side understands the other's expectations about authority.
A Canadian director invites Mexican key opinion leaders to an intimate dinner at his home. After a certain hour, he asks them to leave, all perfectly normal in Canada. The group leaves offended and surprised.
The dinner meant to build relationships achieved the opposite.
The Workshop
A facilitated experience where your team discovers its own cultural communication patterns and learns to work with them.
A short conversation is enough to understand whether this kind of workshop could help your team and what it would look like.