Context Is King

  Communications Management   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Programs requiring cross-cultural team cooperation are on the rise. One important key to leading and working with multi-cultural teams is to understand how context factors into all communication, from developing plans to gaining consensus. Here’s a summary of the main differences between high- and low-context cultures.

The great American anthropologist Edward T. Hall was, at one point in his illustrious career, a cross-cultural program manager. As a construction foreman and manager, he supervised the building of dams and roads, deploying white construction crews to work within Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona. The culture clashes his teams encountered inspired his PhD at Columbia University, and make for fascinating reading in the books he later authored.

Many of the difficulties that Hall encountered, as he tried to direct projects and negotiate consensus between white and Hopi cultures, were related to communication. Not the type of communication dependent just on translation between languages, but encoding information as well as context. As he describes it in his book Beyond Cultures:

In English a man says, “It rained last night”... whereas a Hopi cannot talk about the rain at all without signifying the nature of his relatedness to the event – firsthand experience, inference, or hearsay (Hall, 1976, p. 87)

Through extensive field …

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