Communicating Across Cultures: Working Well With Anyone

By the end

What you'll build

• State any cultural observation as a testable hypothesis that names a specific check and can be proved wrong
• Locate yourself and a colleague on five communication scales without reducing either of you to a type
• Distinguish high- and low-context communication and detect when a hedge is carrying a refusal or a warning
• Convert a vague yes, a silence or a soft deadline into a written commitment line with owner, absolute date and early-warning point
• Adjust the directness of feedback while proving, against a three-part test, that the message and the required action survived
• Invite genuine disagreement from someone who will not volunteer it, using at least four different devices
• Speak and write plain English for a mixed-fluency room: no idiom, one idea per sentence, numbers and names in writing, and counter accent bias in your own judgement
• Design schedules, meetings and shared meals so that no colleague has to request an exception
• Repair a cross-cultural misunderstanding in five parts, including the public record, without asking for reassurance
• Write and present a one-page working agreement that makes a real team's norms explicit and checkable

Curriculum

What's inside

7 modules · 48 lessons

1. 01

   Culture, Carefully

   7 lessons
   • Start Here: What This Course Is And Is Not
   • Culture Is A Tendency, Never A Prediction
   • Three Layers: National, Organisational, Personal
   • Where Stereotypes Come From, And What They Cost
   • The Vocabulary Of Cross-Cultural Workword power
   • + 2 more lessons
2. 02

   Dimensions As Hypotheses

   7 lessons
   • How To Use A Dimension Without Labelling A Person
   • Direct And Indirect Feedback
   • Task-First And Relationship-First
   • Monochronic And Polychronic Time
   • Dimensions Recallflashcard sr
   • + 2 more lessons
3. 03

   Reading Signals: Context, Silence And Yes

   7 lessons
   • High And Low Context, After Hall
   • The Same Silence, Two Meanings
   • The Many Meanings Of Yes
   • Deadlines: Promise Or Aspiration
   • Decode The Signalquiz
   • + 2 more lessons
4. 04

   English As A Shared Language

   8 lessons
   • Who Carries The Burden Of Being Understood
   • Plain English Under Pressure
   • Idiom, Humour And Metaphor That Do Not Travelmetaphor idiom
   • Accent Bias, In Others And In Yourself
   • Names, Honorifics And Pronunciation Respect
   • + 3 more lessons
5. 05

   Feedback And Disagreement Across A Gap

   6 lessons
   • Feedback Across A Hierarchy Gap
   • Adjusting Directness Without Losing The Message
   • Inviting Disagreement From Someone Who Will Not Volunteer It
   • Give Upward Feedback Across A Gapinterview lab
   • Choose The Better Phrasingquiz
   • + 1 more lesson
6. 06

   Distance, Time And Written Work

   6 lessons
   • Asynchronous Work Across Time Zones
   • Writing That Survives Translation And Delay
   • Religious, Dietary And Family Awareness In Scheduling And Hosting
   • Rewrite An Ambiguous Asynchronous Updatewriting lab
   • Async, Rotation And Hostingquiz
   • + 1 more lesson
7. 07

   Repair, And Your Team Working Agreement

   7 lessons
   • Repairing A Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding
   • The Repair Conversationspeaking lab
   • What A Team Working Agreement Contains
   • Working Agreement Templatespeech template
   • Capstone: Write Your Team's Working Agreementwriting lab
   • + 2 more lessons

The shape of it

How this course works