How to communicate effectively with an international team?
Transcript
How to communicate effectively with an international team.
Understand the different cultures. To be able to communicate effectively, you need to bring this to a level that you build a team level of communications. You need to build kind of rules for the team to understand each other. It's specifically hard, at least in my experience, when you talk with native English speakers, most of the time the team language will be English and you need to dumb it down. I'm often the black sheep in this, because I'm German, English is my second language. So I always try to get it to a level where it's like we need to be very, very simple because people don't understand this complicated word. There is a simpler word of that.
So when you communicate with your team, specifically if you're native English, but same if you're a little bit more advanced in the English language than others, use very simple language. And then of course, you need to understand what is the communication style of each individual. Some people love to read emails.
Some people love to have one-on-ones. Some people love to have physical conversations. Some people love to have digital conversations, video calls, whatever. So if you understand this over time as the leader, then you can cater your leadership communication towards your team members. In the right way that everyone can understand it in the best possible way.
Pay attention as the leader if people understand what you communicate into your team. Ask them, Hey, did you understand what I mean? What did you understand ?Specifically with different cultures very important because if you take me again as a German, I'm a direct communicator.
It's similar in the Netherlands, where you have a direct communication style. Can you do this, this, this, this, this in this way, please. And it's very direct in other countries. I lived in Sweden. It's a different way of doing it to be successful if you do this in Asia, I've had the conversation the other day.
It's again different. Understand the different cultures. That's the number one part. And try to understand on an individual level, even if you have 15, 20 and more team members, you need to understand what is their needs from a communication perspective and how would they like to get communicated to.