How to Best Manage Multicultural & Multilingual Meetings
Some Elements that Are Typical of Multicultural & Multilingual Meetings along with the Related Risks
Different Languages
The first thing to think about when dealing with multicultural & multilingual meetings is without a doubt the differences in the languages spoken by the participants. This is something concrete, easy to identify (people only need to start speaking!) and with immediate consequences – if we don’t speak the same language we don’t understand each other. That’s also why this is the least problematic aspect. Any difficulty posed by differences in the language used is obvious and the participants will quite naturally look for a solution, several of them being quite common (language courses, translation, interpretation…).
Nevertheless, let’s look at some scenarios and the risks associated with each and that we perhaps don’t think about.
Scenario 1: No Common Language Between the Participants
The most obvious solution is to use an interpreter. Although this will indeed deal with the language problem, it won’t be as efficient in dealing with cultural aspects as we’ll see in the following part of this article.
Scenario 2: A Common Language that Isn’t the Mother Tongue of at Least One of the Participants
A. Participants that “speak the language well enough”
There are of course several levels of mastery of a foreign language and we’re talking here about the specific case of people who speak the language of the meeting with no real problems but who could still find it difficult to say what they have to say, especially when faced with native speakers.
We’ll quite logically assume that the person in front of us will have no real problem expressing him or herself during the coming meeting (and that an interpreter is not necessary) if we’ve already talked via e-mail, over the phone or even face to face. And yet, a meeting is quite a different context from the day-to-day life: more stressful, with objectives, decisions to make, arguments to present, perhaps even some debates…
If some participants truly master the language – because it is their mother tongue for example – then it can prove difficult for someone who speaks “well enough” to take his or her place in the conversation. This person will most likely follow the discussion without any problem but may have a harder time actively participating. He would almost need to ask everyone to stay quiet to give himself time to expose his ideas!
The risk is then that competent people don’t speak up (let’s not forget that the level of intercultural & language skills has nothing to do with the person’s skills for the job) or that their lack of participation is interpreted as a lack of interest or as silent approval, which can be even worse (the “he speaks the language well enough so if he doesn’t say anything then it’s probably because he has nothing to say or doesn’t care!” syndrome).
B. Making Mistakes
The participants that don’t have the common language as their mother tongue may make mistakes when using it, with more or less severe consequences.
For instance, the word “globalement” in French can be used to designate a global phenomenon (“globally”) but also to wrap up and summarize one’s speech (“all in all”). Some French speaking English may tend to use “globally” when they actually mean “all in all”. Add to this a couple of conflict-avoiding Swedes who won’t highlight the lack of logic in the sentence or some Americans with English as their mother tongue and who don’t know French and thus cannot guess where the mistake comes from, and you’ll easily picture how a misunderstanding can happen!
Different Cultures
The second element to take into account when managing multicultural and multilingual meetings is the cultures of the participants. This is something much more theoretical than languages and much more difficult to identify since it is not obvious at first. Besides, the consequences often take some time to appear and remain more or less indirect (meaning that when problems arise it is difficult to link them to culture-based issues).
All of this leads to a general underestimation of the impact of the culture when communicating, even more so when the participants come from cultures that are considered “close” (European culture, Western culture…) and/or when there’s a common language; the typical “we understand what the others say so the message obviously gets through” assumption, which is wrong as we’ll see further down due to differences in expectations, in the use of the language, in non-verbal communication (which accounts for at least 50% of the message, meaning it is as important – if not more – than what is actually said), etc.
On top of this, the solutions are much less widespread and known than for languages and often demand long-term work and/or human skills that are difficult to teach (humility, open-mindedness, patience, tolerance…).
In the end it all contributes to making this aspect much more of a problem than the language. So let’s have a look at some elements that are different from one culture to another and may lead to tensions, the wrong interpretation of the participants’ behavior, the wrong “reading of the room”, difficulties to earn your counterparts’ trust and respect and any other form of misunderstanding.
The goal of the meeting is one of the main sources of misunderstandings because although the participants all come with a clear idea of why they’re here, they assume – often unconsciously – that it’s the same for everyone, whereas that isn’t necessarily the case.
For instance:
Each culture has its own way of communicating and it’s very easy to misunderstand the resulting behaviors.
The words we can/should or can’t/shouldn’t pronounce change from one culture to the next. So understanding what’s being pronounced is very different from understanding what’s being said, which brings us back to the limitations of an interpreter introduced previously.
The notion of what’s acceptable or not when it comes to the time devoted to a meeting is one of the major sources of tensions among people from different cultures. Mostly because this is deeply unconscious.