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

The shape of it

How this course works