Appreciating nuance…
It was a big step when I moved to Hong Kong from Sydney, and while I knew the cultural changes would be there, I didn’t really appreciate how big the assimilation would be until I was on the ground. Language was a big factor, as it is for everyone, but even as an English speaker my proud Aussie ways needed adjustment.
I realized that clients and colleagues simply did not understand Australian slang or the way we abbreviate everything! Saying things like “see you at the meeting this arvo” or “gee that client really put us through the wringer” might as well have been another language. I had to adjust immediately.
The longer I was in Asia, on internal video conference, the more I noticed the constant slang and local references. There had been a history of the Australian business struggling to gain trust with global leaders, and now I started to understand why. It is hard to build trust when the language used is not received with clarity.
Selling across cultures…
I also noticed in the process of selling, there were big cultural differences. In Australia, the tension between needing to sell, and the client not wanting to be sold to, was always present. My credibility was dependent on me successfully navigating that tension. In those instances, I would need to ensure my self-orientation was low. Intimacy would grow via a consultative selling process.
In Asia, I noticed that it was different. The same tension was less of a barrier. Clients in Hong Kong and Singapore were generally more open to being sold to, and my credibility was dependent on the quality of the pitch. Intimacy was built by delivering exactly what they needed in a short space of time, and success happened fastest when their needs were closely aligned to ours.
In hindsight a framework to navigate or a coach to guide me would have accelerated my success. The above infographic was pretty much as good as it got! Ideally, I needed a coach in every meeting to help me navigate the subtleties of the meets, helping me to adjust to the different audiences.
Looking to the future… gamified coaching to drive growth
At Relate, a company has approached who has a team in India who run weekly WIP meetings with their clients in Australia.
Trust is important because the India based team are tasked with changing a range of business processes, based on the data they are receiving from upgraded software and analytics. Let’s be honest… The cultural divide is huge, and communication has been a real challenge, but our Generative Ai Coach (Sandi) is up to the challenge!
Sandi is available for every meeting, helping them build trust effectively by providing a framework to follow. Put differently, Sandi encourages observable behaviors that can be gamified. Sandi identifies behaviors, measures and scores them in every meeting. The India based team can adjust in the next meeting and see the impact. These adjustments are all designed to increase how credible and reliable they are perceived to be by their Australian customers. Sandi will coach how well they build intimacy or feeling of safety, and how self-orientated they appeared to be in each meeting. These observable behaviours are a roadmap for team in India to follow, a process to gamify, that should lead to higher trust between them and their customers. Sandi ultimately builds better top-line business performance.
I wonder how many other global businesses would benefit from having Sandi in every meeting?
