I started rewatching a sci-fi TV series called Star Trek: The Next Generation whose main character, Captain Picard and his crew, explore the frontiers of space. In one episode, they encounter a new alien species who only talk in idioms, which are a group of words whose meaning is different from the individual words literal meaning. Although Picard could understand the words, the phase itself had no meaning to him. This is because the idiom only has meaning in the context of the alien species’s cultural experience. Since Picard did not have that experience or knowledge of it, communication between the two had been disrupted. This episode reminded me of similar situations I have had with cultural colloquialisms, which included idioms, slang and jargon, disrupting communication with others.
I lead a set of technology teams at a global university based in Pittsburgh, PA with campus locations in Australia, Qatar, Rwanda, and many U.S. cities like Washington, D.C. and L.A. My teams are culturally diverse with members from India, China, Australia, New Zealand, U.K., Cameroon, and Peru. We are based in Pittsburgh so everyone speaks English but this does not mean everyone totally understands what is said. I found this out when the Information Services (IS) team was merged under my leadership.
When I was a child, all I wanted to be was a cowboy. This lasted for over a year where I would only wear cowboy gear and talk like a cowboy. To this day, I still greet people by saying “Howdy!” or “Howdy partners!” to a group of people. This expression comes from watching Hollywood Western movies which were very popular when I was growing up. This is a fairly unique American cultural experience. The first few weeks of meeting with the IS team, one of the members, who was from India, stopped me at the end of a meeting and asked, “What do you mean when you say Howdy to us?” That Star Trek episode immediately jumped into my consciousness. I was guilty of using a cultural colloquialism which caused calamity in my communication.
Cultural and linguistic boundaries can cause difficulty in having effective communications which require specific approaches to listening and speaking (Moran et al., 2011, p. 38). To be successful at communicating, the message must be sent in a way that the receiver of the message understands what the sender is meaning (Moran et al., 2011, p.38). During communications, a message sender must translate an idea from their thoughts into a message through a process called encoding and in a similar way, the receiver must decode the message to understand it (Pennsylvania State University, 2021, para. 2 ). During this process of encoding and decoding, the message can be influenced by cultural experiences, among other things. Like my childhood experience with wanting to be a cowboy influences how I form messages of greetings. This was the situation with my IS team member who had never seen a Hollywood Western.
I have also experienced cultural colloquialism as the receiver when I was in our Australia campus. One of the directors, who is from New Zealand, was showing me around campus and the various technology implementations. The whole time he was talking, he almost always ended the sentence with, “You know”. I found it confusing. Why was he always asking me that? Does he think I don’t understand? It got distracting, causing me to turn up my active listening to show him that I indeed understood what he was saying. Well, it turns out that “you know” is quite a common cultural colloquialism for people from New Zealand, equivalent to “don’t you think” or “‘eh” (Stubbe & Holmes, 1995, p. 64). My decoding of the message was missing the knowledge of the cultural colloquialism causing me to misinterpret the message.
Communications with others can be influenced by how you encode or decode a message. When communicating with someone with different cultural experiences, it is important to be mindful of how a message is encoded or decoded. Gaining an understanding of other cultures, customs and practices may be helpful to reduce the errors that can occur during communications. When communicating with others, it is best to avoid cultural colloquialisms and keep the message simple. However, sometimes miscommunications can give you the opportunity to learn about other cultures. After explaining what “howdy” meant to my co-worker, he became fascinated with Hollywood Westerns. In turn, I started watching Cricket after learning it was his favorite sport. Now all we talk about is Westerns and International Cricket Council matches.
References
Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2011). Managing cultural differences. Routledge.
Pennsylvania State University. (2021). Defining communications. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2103357/modules/items/30942187
Stubbe, M., & Holmes, J. (1995). You know, eh and other ‘exasperating expressions’: An analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of new zealand english. Language & Communication, 15(1), 63-88. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(94)00016-6
Hi Thomas,
There are definitely variations in communications among those I work with. For example, when communicating ideas about a project, like developing a solution for handling faculty teaching load letters, I use a different communication method depending on the developer I am talking to. The developers from China, India and Korea want to understand the project parameters and requirements and think about possible solutions offline. I often schedule following up meetings in a day or two to discuss the options. While developers from the U.S. and Canada like to discuss possible solutions in the first meeting and make decisions on which solution to use. So I have learned adjust my expectations for a solutions discussion depending on which developer I am working with. Understanding this was important for me to develop a rapport and trust with our developers.
-Ed
This was a very interesting and insightful post! With being influenced to speak a certain way because of pop culture, especially one of a certain era and specifically American, I would have never thought a seemingly simple greeting like “howdy” would be a cause for confusion, but now I see how easily it would be! With team members from so many different countries around the world, I would imagine you have experienced quite a few times where communication has become an obstacle. You mentioned the confusion you felt with one of the directors from New Zealand, but have you found communicating with people from a specific area or culture is more challenging than others? I imagine with so many different cultures being represented within your team, you’ve had to fine-tune how you communicate with them as a whole.