I find in my experience the difficulty in managing the different culturally and professionally diverse teams is the way we use language. It doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that you can have any entire training session of conference call and everybody thought the speakers meant something. Quite often it’s because the speaker didn’t say what they meant or we thought we heard what the speaker said but interpreted differently. This becomes more of a challenge when you have different languages involved with interpreters or individuals using a common language but not original to them. In attention to finding the right words at times we can speak in figures of speech or idioms that other cultures don’t understand.

We can take-for-granted assumed understanding that cultures say exactly what they mean. There are cultures that don’t say what they mean and thus we have to read between the lines of what they didn’t say. In addition because of security situations and classifications we may not get the complete picture because it’s “outside of our pay grade”. What can be assumed in these missing pieces and how can we effectively plan and operate in this context becomes a job in itself.