Translating Culture

I am new to this group and I hope this is the correct forum to start a discussion like this. I am very interested in learning about the cultural challenges we all face when working with colleagues and customers from a different country. In my current employment I need to collaborate with colleagues in India. I am in the US. I often hear my colleagues here in the US complain about certain cultural challenges in dealing with our counterparts in India and over the past 3 years I have seen first hand what some of those challenges are. I am curious though about what people in India find most difficult when working with people from the US. I hope we can start a sincere and frank discussion here on this topic. The goal is not to be offensive or to solve these challenges. Rather I think it would be helpful to share honest views on particular mannerism and attitudes that do not appear to translate well across our cultures. By hearing about them we can start to understand them. So to start I will share one:

One thing that I find peculiar in working with my counterparts in India is that many seem not to distinguish well between formal and informal writing. I will often receive emails from people in India that are filled with misspelled words, poor grammar, and phonetic shortcuts like using “n” for “and” or ending a word in “in” instead of “ing” (ie, goin instead of going.) It is as if they are sending a text message which is expected to be shorten and informal rather than a business communication. I know these individuals are extremely well educated and very intelligent but their writing ability sends a different message. In the US our schools constantly teach the importance of effective written communication. Often people in the US can write better than they can speak, or at least their writing is more formal than they may be able to speak. This is because we are trained indirectly to judge a person’s intelligence base on his or her written communication ability. I think this creates a challenge for us in the US when receiving emails, reports, and other written communications from colleagues in India who, while they seem to value what they say, they don’t put much effort into how they say it.

So that is just an observation from me. What do you find unusual when working with colleagues in the US?

Tags: India, US, culture

Replies to This Discussion

AdminPermalink Reply by Posco on June 15, 2009 at 10:10am

Interesting observation because there is a general perception that it's american to behave in an informal way.As a matter of fact i have had a few official communications from US (through emails) where in the sender was completely at ease with the informal style of writing. See over here, i wouldnt say we try to ape you, however we are certainly influenced with the way Americans conduct themselves be it in private or public.

Having said that what i really appreciate in the US companies, is that they waste less time on procedure and focus more on results.
e.g. they are not hell bent on preparing a fool proof , near perfect agreement/ Mo U , it's the results that matters to them. over here in India we have lots and lots of procedural delay.

Permalink Reply by Kevin McPoyle on June 16, 2009 at 9:25pm

Thanks for the reply. Interesting perspective. Perhaps in the US we are accustomed to gradual levels of informality in our communications and we our stunned to see our India counterparts jump so quickly to a high level of informality. Yet our India counterparts may feel like they are only following our lead.

I do see what you are talking about with the focus on procedures vs. results. That is a very noticeable cultural difference between India and US. This becomes very apparent when we run into a problem in our workflow and have errors in our work. Often our India counterparts will say “But we did everything according to procedure” and they feel that is all they can be expected to do. However sometimes even with the most well laid out procedures in place, people still need to apply their intellect to recognize when, for example, a certain piece of data does not look correct. This recognition often requires a certain level of tacit knowledge about a particular workflow and this type of knowledge can not be reduced to a written procedure. I think here in the US we need our India counterparts to develop that tacit knowledge and stop relying solely on the procedures. In all fairness though, our India colleagues probably think their American counterparts need to do a better job of systemizing work flows and decision points and stop relying so much on tacit knowledge.

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