Key messages of this article:

• Cross-cultural communication in Vietnamese intercultural teams can be improved with a training consisting of 5 modules.

• In intercultural teams low-context communication styles have proven to be most effective.

• If the number of misunderstandings can be reduced by 20% how much time and money can your organization save and how much better quality will your team deliver?

Train skills which help to create value

When people hear that my company helps individuals and organizations in Vietnam to thrive in the international and intercultural field there are usually longer discussions about what intercultural training is all about.

I remember there were times when I needed to explain that our training is NOT about the proper way how to hand over business cards to customers or about the customs at Lunar New Year how some expats expected. In these days such information is available for free on YouTube and in blogs and information given by a Vietnamese local regarding their holidays and cultural events is much more accurate and exciting to listen to anyhow. Neither is our intercultural training about learning behavior patterns of Vietnamese like not waiting in a queue at the ticket counter like a Vietnamese lawyer expected when he made our company license. These examples might be true and be discussed in cultural awareness workshops but given the pure knowledge of behaviors of people from a different culture does not create a sustainable value for the learner.

When it comes to creating VALUE for example by helping intercultural teams achieving better results as a diverse group, intercultural skills need to be applied in daily business situations. Selling to customers from a different culture, intercultural project management or cross-cultural communication are fields where intercultural skills applied properly can create enormous value for the team and the customer.

COMMUNICATION in the cross-cultural field

Communication can be sometimes annoying and frustrating. Mistakes or a bad atmosphere in a team can often be affiliated to misunderstandings or miscommunication. As the ways we communicate differs across cultures the risk of misunderstandings can grow by multiple times when different cultures are involved.

In low-context cultures like the USA, Germany or the Netherlands communication is more explicit with people explaining more about the background of why they do or say something. What has been said before is often repeated to make a point, silence is usually considered as something uncomfortable and a good communicator is someone who can deliver a message in a way other people have as little room for interpretation as possible. In business situations people from low-context cultures will usually make very detailed agreements or contracts and will prefer minutes about meetings to ensure mutual understanding among all participants. People from high-context cultures might perceive this way of communicating a waste of time or in some cultures as a sign of mistrust.

In high-context cultures like Vietnam communication is much more implicit. Vietnamese have learned how to read between the lines as not all information is given as explicitly as in low-context cultures. This can for example be observed when criticism is said between partners of the same hierarchical level. Criticism can be described as subtle. Western people new in Vietnam will experience more differences in communication when sitting in a meeting room. While it is very common in Europe or the USA to have vivid discussions, this will not often be the case in Vietnam. Hence, people from a low-context culture might perceive the Vietnamese way of communicating unclear or they will feel uncomfortable as not all information has been shared explicitly.

My personal perception is that communication in professional settings has changed in the past years in Vietnam. Especially young Vietnamese tend to participate more actively in discussions, ask more critical questions and have ways to express themselves more explicitly. For me, having a Western cultural background and giving training in Asia, this is highly enriching because discussions are the source for everyone to learn more. However, Vietnam – like most Asian cultures – is clearly high-context. When I speak to Western company team leaders they usually confirm to me that communication is one of their biggest challenges in intercultural or cross-cultural team work.

How to improve communication in a Vietnamese intercultural or cross-cultural team?

What is the solution? Shall Vietnamese adapt Western working and communication styles or shall the guests in Vietnam adapt Vietnamese behavior and communication at work?

Regardless your personal preference to this question, company and team leaders should apply the solution which is best for their business. What do cultural scientists say?

Erin Meyer discusses this question in her book “The Culture Map” and she strongly recommends intercultural teams to work out rules for low-context communication and processes at work. She writes:

“High-context communication works beautifully when we are from the same culture and interpret cultural cues the same way. […] But when team members come from different cultures, high-context communication breaks down. The speaker may be passing a message between the lines, and the listener may be actively focused on scanning for meaning. But because the two individuals come from completely different cultural contexts, the message received is different from the message sent […] There is just one easy strategy to remember: Multicultural team need low-context processes.”

If people from low-context cultures believe they can now lean back and let the others learn to adapt their communication style, they are wrong.

While people from high-context culture will need to train their skills to communicate in a more low-context, hence explicit way, team members from the low-context cultures will need to train identifying possible gaps in meaning and help their team members from the high-context culture to communicate more explicitly by asking the relevant questions in the gaps. Further, the change in communication will need to be actively supported by the leaders and the management of an organization.

It is needless to say that the members of the high-context culture are not supposed to completely change their communication style for all work related situations as their professional high-context communication skills are highly needed to interact with their customers and other stakeholders from the high-context culture.

5 training elements for communication in Vietnamese cross-cultural teams

For multicultural teams in Vietnam aiming to improve communication and reduce misunderstandings we help with a course program consisting of 5 modules:

Teams with a high level of cultural awareness can possibly improve their team communication themselves by giving more attention to the 5 fields mentioned above as they will have learned problem solving skills in an intercultural context. Other teams might need initial external assistance before they can continue improving their intercultural team communication continuously on their own.

Value generated from cross-cultural communication training

What is the value of such training? Try to remember how many cross-cultural misunderstandings you have encountered in your organization only in the last 3 months and in how many delays, errors and quick-fixes they ended. If this training can only reduce the number of cross-cultural misunderstandings by 10% or 20% – the investment in this training will become profit-yielding in very short time.

Are you aware of your team’s cross-cultural ambiguities in communication and misunderstandings resulting from cross-communication flaws?