Framework library · International strategy
Cross-cultural management
People from different national and organisational cultures bring different defaults: who decides, whether disagreement is voiced in the meeting, whether trust comes from the work or the relationship, what a deadline means. Cross-cultural management makes those defaults visible and comparable, so a team can agree working rules where its members differ most instead of reading the differences as bad faith or incompetence.
Use it when
- Teams from different countries or companies must deliver together, for example after an acquisition or in a joint venture.
- An offshore or outsourced team is underperforming and the problem may lie in how work is handed over rather than in skill.
- You are about to negotiate or launch with a partner from another country and want to avoid predictable misunderstandings.
- Friction in a cross-border team keeps being blamed on individuals.
Avoid it when
- You want to predict how one person will behave from their nationality. Culture describes group tendencies and individuals vary widely. Use the scores to start a conversation, never to label a person.
- The problem is a contract, incentive or process that rewards the wrong behaviour. Fix that first. A RACI matrix or a revised service agreement may do more than a workshop on culture.
- You need to describe and change your own organisation's culture. Use the culture canvas or the competing values framework.
How to run it
Name the teams and the shared work
List the groups that must work together, by country, company or function, and the work they share. Culture matters most where hand-offs, decisions and escalations cross between them.
Have each team score its own defaults
Each team scores itself from 1 to 10 on every statement. If teams also score each other, add a column for each of those views. Where a team's view of itself and the others' view of it differ, that difference is a finding.
Find the largest gaps
Read the chart for the statements where the lines are furthest apart. Those are where misunderstandings will happen, and usually already have.
Find the incidents behind each gap
For each large gap, name a recent moment when it caused trouble: a missed escalation, a decision reopened, feedback taken as an insult. Evidence keeps the session from turning into stereotypes.
Agree explicit rules for the gaps
Write a rule for each large gap that does not depend on anyone's default, such as "any risk to a cutover date is reported within 30 minutes" or "decisions are logged and reopened only at the weekly forum".
Score again after real work
Re-score after a month of joint work. Rules that are followed can be relaxed; gaps that have not closed need a different rule or a different hand-off.
Work through it
Answer the questions below, or load the worked example to see a finished one. The drawing updates as you type. Export the result as a PowerPoint deck, a Word document, an Excel workbook, a PDF or plain text.
What you type stays in this browser, so you can close the page and come back to it. It is not sent to Blue Prysm or anyone else, and the exports are made here, on your device. Privacy policy.
Mistakes to avoid
- Using published national scores as facts about your team. National averages say little about a group of engineers in one company. Score your own teams.
- Treating one team's defaults as correct. The aim is an agreed rule for the joint work, not to make one team behave like the other.
- Ignoring organisational culture. Two teams from the same country but different companies can differ more than two teams from different countries.
- Holding the conversation once. Defaults return under pressure, usually at the first outage or missed deadline.
Where it comes from
The field rests on Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Sage, 1980), which found four dimensions of national culture in surveys of IBM employees around the world; long-term orientation and indulgence were added later, and all six appear in Cultures and Organizations (third edition, 2010, with Gert Jan Hofstede and Michael Minkov). Other widely used models are the GLOBE study (Robert House and colleagues, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations, 2004) and Erin Meyer's eight scales of workplace behaviour in The Culture Map (2014). The statements in the workbench are this library's own; several echo Meyer's scales, and none carries published country scores. Source.
Use it with
Work through it with us
The frameworks here are free to use as they stand. If you would rather work through the question behind this one with us, these are the ways an engagement starts.