In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Erin Meyer: Cross-cultural management, leadership and trust

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

How do cultural differences influence the way we interact and communicate? What defines an ideal organizational culture? And what influence have the Vikings had on Scandinavian corporate culture? In this episode, Nicolai welcomes Erin Meyer, a leading specialist in cross-cultural management and author of "The Culture Map." Erin shares fascinating insights into communication, the importance of understanding cultural nuances in feedback, and the varying ways trust is built across cultures. This episode is a deep dive into the complexities of cross-cultural interactions and offers valuable lessons for anyone working in a global environment.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New episode out every Wednesday.The production team for this episode includes PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was conducted by Kristian Haga and Isabelle Karlsson. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to our podcast In Good Company. Now, today we have a special guest with us, Irene Mayer, who is one of the world's leading specialists on cross-cultural management. At A Good Thing, she's written one of my favorite books called Culture Map. So Irene, what inspired you to write this book? Yeah, hey, so nice to be here with you today. Well, so I was raised in Minnesota. So a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota, you might know, which is in the Midwest of the US.

And so it was a very monocultural environment. I was really surrounded by people who had only lived in the same culture as me. And then after graduating from university, I moved to Botswana to Southern Africa and I was teaching school there. And I just saw how all of the techniques that I had learned in the US for how to motivate children and how to create a good classroom environment

were totally falling flat. And the things that they were encouraging me to do in the classroom environment, were totally falling flat. And the things that they were encouraging me to do in the classroom were so different than anything we would ever do in the US. So I became very interested in that time to just see how in different cultures, we not only that we motivate children differently, but that we motivate later on in life,

our employees differently. And then we have a whole different psychology about how to communicate and how to build trust and be effective. So that was the first step on this journey for starting to study how different cultures interact in an international environment, which is what I do now. Yeah, great. So you have kind of split culture into eight different dimensions. And if you don't mind, I'd just love to talk through some of them because I think it's so interesting. And it really made me think about how we run our fund when we are

in several different countries. You know, we are in Norway, London, we are in New York, Singapore. Yet we kind of treat it as one culture. And of course it isn't. But you kick off with communication and you have this differential between low and high context communication cultures. What does that mean? Yeah.

So maybe I'll just take a moment to explain the framework and then I'll jump into low and high. So I have a methodology that breaks culture down into eight behavioral scales. So we look at things like how do we build trust differently in different cultures or how do we make decisions differently in different parts of the world? And then through about 180,000 interviews that we've conducted in about 62 countries, we have these countries that are positioned up and down the scale. So you can compare one culture to another in order to think about both the similarities

and differences and how to be more strategic and empathic. And of course you've just highlighted one of my favorite dimensions. It's the one I write and speak about the most, which is one that looks at what it means to be a good communicator in different parts of the world. And what we have, what we call low context cultures, these are cultures where we're really trained

to be very explicit in the way that we communicate. So the US, which is maybe the most low context or explicit culture in the way that we communicate. So the U.S., which is maybe the most low context or explicit culture in the world, then I was like taught as a child to tell them what I'm going to tell them and then tell them and then tell them what I've told them. So the very focus, a strong focus on like spelling things out. And what I've learned living in other parts of the world, I live in France currently, I've lived in France for the last 23 years, is that in many other cultures, like France for example, there's a lot more, like a good communicator is really passing a lot more information between the lines and picking up a lot of unspoken messages.

So the sophistication of the communication is much higher. And I mean, an example of that would be just even in the French language, like we have this word in French, sous-entendu, means don't listen to what I said, listen to what I meant. We don't even have these words in English. So I think this is a great dimension to help us start thinking about how effective communication is so different from one part of the world to another. So when I go to New York, for instance, how should I communicate differently? Well, I think I mean in New York, which is, of course, a place of immigration, right?

Like when you go to New York, you've got people from all over the world who are now living together under the umbrella of the American culture. And in that highly diverse culture, we've learned that we really have to spell things out. So if you don't say it, it was uncommunicated. And maybe I'll just give like a brand new example that I have just from last week. But like I had this person from Italy in my class who said to me, you know, Aaron in Italy,

like if you make a joke and the other person thinks it's funny, they laugh. But in the US, if you make a joke and the other person thinks it's funny, they say that's funny. And I had never thought about this. Why do nobody ever say that about my jokes? It's all between the lines. So in any case, I mean, at the end of that situation with the Italian was I'd never thought about this. So I said, oh yeah, you're right. We laugh and we say that's funny. And he said, no, Erin, I've been observing this a lot in the US. The laughter is optional.

Do you think the world is moving towards a more American communication style, more punchlines, shorter sentences? Well, I mean, I do believe that we have to be that we've become perhaps shorter in our communication, which happens with in our communication, which happens with being more and more virtual, but I want to give you an example. So I had an example just a couple of, well, maybe 12 months ago where I was giving a presentation in Japan. And at the end of the presentation, I asked if there were any questions. No one raised their hand. I went to sit down. So one of my colleagues, this Japanese guy who was traveling with me, he came up to me and he said, Erin, I think there were some questions. Would you like me to try? And I said, yes, please. So he stood up in front of this group of Japanese and he said, you know, Professor Meyer has

just spoken with you. Do you have any questions? No one raised their hand. But he stopped and he quietly looked around the room. And then after several seconds of silence, he gestured to someone who was sitting there from my perspective motionless. And he said, you know, do you have a question? And this Japanese guy sat up straight and he said, thank you very much. I do. He gave a fact. He asked a fascinating question. So afterwards, and then my colleague

did that three more times. So afterwards, I said to him, but how did you know that those people had questions? He said, well, it had to do with how bright their eyes were. And I thought, wow. for me, coming from Minnesota like I do, that's very challenging. But then he clarified, he said, you know, Aaron, in Japan, we don't make as much direct eye contact

as you do in the West. So when you asked if there were any questions, most people weren't looking right at you. They were kind of looking somewhere else. But I noticed that there were a couple of people in the room who really were looking right at you, and their eyes were bright, suggesting they would be happy to have you call on them if you would like to.

That was such an important learning experience for me. And you might think, oh, OK, well, that's Japan. Japan's really different from the rest of the world. But I can tell you, when I got back to INSEAD, so I'm a professor at INSEAD outside of Paris. And I teach these hugely international classrooms. And when I got back to INSEAD with this kind of lesson about looking for bright eyes in my classes,

I saw there were all of these people who were giving me this physical indication with their faces that they wanted to speak that I was entirely missing because in the US if you want to speak you always raise your hand, right? What's the key to this cultural sensitivity? The key to observe people in this astute way? Do you have to live in a country and train? Or do people just have better antennas? So what is it? Of course, if you go and you live in another country, eventually you will really start kind of absorbing that culture in you. You have those experiences, you learn to be more humble, you learn to be more curious. Hopefully, you learn to be more curious be more humble. You learn to be more curious. Hopefully you learn to be more curious and more humble.

But I don't think you have to, I mean, you don't have to devote your life to developing these skills by moving from country to country. I do believe with a little bit of systematic understanding, thinking about, you know, how do different cultures relate on this aspect that you can become more effective. Can I give you another example? Sure. Well, let's just think about feedback. I

mean, feedback is, of course, something that we do so differently in different cultures. This kind of ties in with your second dimension, right? Evaluation and feedback. Yeah, that's it. Right. Yeah. So that is the second dimension. The second dimension looks at how we provide feedback in different countries.

And I think that that one is the most sensitive. And in some ways, I mean, the communicating dimension is perhaps the most kind of interesting one. But if you want to know, if you want to, if you want, if you're going to cause offense or you're going to break a relationship, it's because of the feedback dimension. And maybe I'll just give you an example. So of course, as I already said, I come from the U.S.

and in the U.S. we think of ourselves as being a very direct culture because we're so low context because we're so explicit and we spell things out. But we actually have this tendency in the US, I learned as a child to, when I give feedback, to give three positives with every negative or to catch people doing things right. And like if you're from Norway, where maybe you've learned that, you know, you, if you have something that, well, I think in Norway, often you don't give the positive feedback. The positive feedback may be just kind of assumed.

So then you're giving me feedback and you start by telling me, you know, what you think I could do differently. I may really take that as a sign of disrespect, right? And then in the other way, I may really take that as a sign of disrespect. And then in the other way, it gets really confusing. So, okay, you know I live in France and I was working. And in France, positive feedback is given a lot less frequently than in the US. And negative or corrective feedback is definitely giving more strongly than in an American context.

So I'm working with this French woman. Oh, here's someone from the book, this woman Sabine, right? And she's really excited about this move that she's making to Chicago. So we spend a little time, she's all energized, then she moves to the US. And after she's been in Chicago for four months,

I do a pre-scheduled follow-up call. And before I call her, I call her new boss, this American named John. And I just say to John, how are things going for Sabine? And he says, Erin, not well. It's so frustrating because I've spoken with Sabine a bunch of times about these things she really needs to change if she's going to be successful. And she hasn't made any effort to make these changes. I had my performance review with Sabine last week, still no effort. So then I call Sabine, how are things going in the US?

And she says, Erin, they're going great. I just had this fabulous feedback from my boss. It was the best performance review I've ever received. So of course, when her American boss starts his feedback at his performance review by saying, you know, this was really fantastic, and this part was really thought out, and I really think you're making a huge impact here.

She's thinking, wow, that's the best performance review anyone has ever given me. And by the time he gets to the real message, she isn't even listening anymore. What do you think? What do you think is the best way of doing it? What's the best way to give feedback? Well, I do believe you asked me earlier

whether you should adapt your style to the culture that you're working with. I mean, I do think when it comes to feedback, of course it's important to get the message out there. But if you give the message in a way that's too direct for the culture that you're working with, you may break the relationship and that's not going to be good for your future.

And if you give the feedback in a way that's too indirect for the culture that you're working with, then they won't pick up the message and you may find that you need to come back and be clearer the next time. It's just so difficult to give and receive feedback, right? And it's so easy to offend people and it's so easy to be offended. And I've, of course, read your book and one of the things you recommend is to give, you know, a positive and a negative straight after the action. So I tried this today.

I gave a presentation together with two of my colleagues straight after the presentation. I said, Hey, you know what? Let's give each other one, one positive and one thing we need to improve. And it was just great. You know, really low stress felt really natural and easy to take aboard. Yeah, thank you. So that's actually you're now pulling from my other book, right? From my no rules rules book, where we have a chapter on giving feedback in an

organization and how to create an organizational culture around this. So I think the message is that if you're working with people outside of your own company or your own team, I mean, really, we want to just try to watch how other people are doing it. Try to be a little bit less direct in general because we don't want to risk breaking the relationship and then gradually kind of ease into being a little bit more direct. But if it's- But Irine, you made a framework of four rules.

What are they? They all happen to start with an A, okay? Okay, yeah, those are my four As. I do believe it's a really good strategy to say, okay, in this company, this is how we will give feedback, which of course gives us a common platform for how we work with one another. And the four As's of feedback,

which you may implement throughout your organization are, number one, when you give feedback, you need to aim to, I mean, for you to remember, you need to aim to help, aim to assist, right? So that's of course the first one, meaning that I don't give feedback just because I'm frustrated or I'm angry

or I need to get something off my chest. If that's how you're feeling, don't give the feedback at all. But if I see, oh gosh, you know, I think that Nikolai could be a better interviewer if he did X, Y or Z, and I have an idea for how that could help you. Well, in that case, I have feedback that I could give you with the aim to help you,

with the aim to assist. That's your first A. The second A is the feedback must be actionable. And that's, of course, critical because if I have feedback for you, but there isn't anything you could do about it, I mean, keep it to yourself. Then it's kind of a personal attack, you know? Yeah, I mean, then again, I think we come back to like, what's even the point? What's even the point of giving the feedback if the person can't act on it? So those are the two A's of giving feedback. And then the two ways of receiving feedback are number one, show appreciation.

So even if you doesn't feel good to receive that, even if you disagree with the person, don't defend yourself. Just say if you doesn't feel good to receive that, even if you disagree with the person, don't defend yourself. Just say, you know what, you go, I thank you very much. Thank you for having given me that feedback. I'm going to think about it. But if you really get a feedback, a culture of feedback going in your organization, if you manage to get your employees giving a lot of feedback to one another, which can be hugely beneficial for the organization, you're going to need a fourth A also. And that fourth A is that each person can accept or decline whatever feedback is given

to them. I don't mean that I say explicitly, thank you, but I decline your feedback. I mean that I think about the feedback you give me, and then I decide what I'm going to take and what I'm not going to take. And we all know that that's part of a principle of developing a culture of feedback. So then that brings me to what you've said earlier.

And I think that in that case, if you get that culture of feedback going, we can really do what you suggested, Nikolai, which is that at the end of a meeting, we can really do what you suggested, Nikolai, which is that at the end of a meeting, we can say, hey, let's just sit down and give one another a little bit of feedback so that we can be more successful the next time. I guess the advantage of doing it straight after a meeting is that you can be pretty quick and it works. It's a bit like when you respond to an email, if you're really quick, it can be one sentence. If you take a little time, it needs

to be much longer. So I guess you save some time as well. But just moving on here. So another dimension you talk about is trust. How do you build trust in different cultures? What's the key here? Yeah. So I think that that's actually the most foundational of all of the dimensions. So of course, in every country in the world, we have to have trust in order to get work done. I mean, that's culturally universal. But when it comes to how we feel trust for someone, that's quite different from one country to another.

And we can just keep it simple. There's two kinds of trust. So there's cognitive trust. That's like trust from my brain. That's like, I see you are on time. You do good work. You're reliable. I trust you. And then we have what we call effective trust.

That's like trust from my heart, right? That's like, I feel an emotional connection or a personal bond with you. I feel like I've seen who you are at a beyond your professional persona. And because I've seen who you are inside, I trust you. Now, if I ask you why you trust your mother, it doesn've seen who you are inside, I trust you. Now, if I ask you why you trust your mother, it doesn't matter where you come from.

We'll talk in every country, we'll talk about effective trust. But if I ask you why you trust a business partner, we'll see a lot more difference from one part of the world to another. I mean, some cultures like my actually both of our cultures, right, both the US and Norway, which are both quite task oriented cultures. So in these cultures, like actually both of our cultures, right, both the US and Norway, which are both quite task-oriented cultures. So in these cultures, we really try to separate cognitive trust for work and effective trust for home. And then in many other world cultures, for example, every emerging market country in

the world, just to get us started, we can really see that kind of cognitive and effective trust all woven together in a work environment. So the importance of dining and whining is bigger? Yeah. I mean, yes, clearly. But I think that we could take it to a different level by saying that the goal in a task oriented society is to be friendly and enjoy working together, but to really minimize, well, minimize distractions in order to stay focused

on getting as much done as we can in a short period of time versus in a relationship oriented culture, we really want our initial goal to be to do whatever we can virtually if necessary, or if we can go there, yeah, I mean, wining and dining definitely, but really exposing who we are inside, laughing together, spending time developing some kind of a friendship together. And then if we start like that, we'll find that the rest of the work will kind of all fall into place at a later, you know, after we get that in place.

Now what are the implications for leadership? So in particular, the difference between an egalitarian society and a country with more hierarchy. So Norway, totally flat society, very little hierarchy. Things are anchored left, right and center so that everybody participates in the decision making versus other countries where that's different. So how do you look at these different things? Yeah. So I think that leading scale is quite an interesting one because it's true, like you come from one of the most egalitarian cultures in the world, right? So in your culture in Norway, there's this very, like, I think, strong belief that the

best boss is almost like a facilitator among equals. So we like our boss to, like, look like everybody else. And we want our boss, instead of telling us what to do, we want our boss to like look like everybody else. And we want our boss, um, instead of telling us what to do, we want our boss to be there kind of like facilitating discussion. And then of course, in more, well, we'll call it hierarchical, but I hesitate with hierarchical the word, I call it low power distance versus high power distance, because I know like in, in your, and my country, Norway and the U S we, we think of the word hierarchy

as something negative. But if you think about this idea of power distance, so Norway, a very low power distance culture, very low respect shown to the status of the person that we're working with versus in a higher power distance culture, maybe we're in India or maybe we're in China. Well, you work in Singapore, clearly, higher power distance culture, where people really learn from a young age to show a lot more respect for the position of the person that they're working for. And then this gets, I think, really complicated as a boss, because it means we have to really know how to kind of adapt our leadership style to the position, to the culture that we're working with.

But how do these differences actually happen? So if you just move from Denmark across the border to Germany, right? Very, very different. And France, very different. Just how does it happen? Yeah, well, that specific one I think is very interesting because if we look at, okay, let's talk about you in your own way. Well, I mean in Denmark, you are on your first name with your boss, right? In Germany, you are on the surname

and you put the doctor in front, right? Yeah, well that's actually, it's interesting because if you look at a culture map, like if we look at a culture map of Denmark up to Germany, in many ways those cultures are quite similar, right, on my culture map, right? So like both of them are pretty direct with negative feedback. German's a little bit more direct, but both of them pretty direct. Both of those are rather task-oriented societies, not very different on that scale. But when it comes, both of them rather low context, although Denmark a little bit more high context than Germany. But when it comes to hierarchy,

that's where you've got a big difference. So Denmark actually on my mapping and my research is the most egalitarian country in the world. And then I know in Scandinavia, you talk a lot about Sweden. I think maybe you say Swedes are more egalitarian, but Swedes are more consensual, right? Swedes are clearly like a lot more consensual than other Scandinavian cultures, but Dane's the most egalitarian, the least deference to authority. And of course in Germany, that deference to authority is in comparison to Denmark, quite a bit stronger. And if you just like you asked me why I don't, so I'll just do my professorial thing for a moment.

But if we think about what's led to these differences across Europe, you can see like in Scandinavia, the cultures well across Europe, the cultures that fell under the influence of the Vikings tend to be some of the most egalitarian and consensual cultures in the world. And the Vikings, of course, they led by consensus. So there are all of these stories

about Southern Europeans historically coming to Scandinavia to negotiate and having to come home early because they couldn't figure out who was in charge. And then of course, the cultures that fell under the influence of the Roman Empire tend to be a little bit more hierarchical. So you go to Italy, you go to Spain, definitely a stronger hierarchical structure in comparison to Scandinavia.

And then I think the most interesting one is actually religion, because the cultures that, well, when the Protestant religion came to Europe in a way in the 1600s, in a way it removed the hierarchy from the church. So now I talk directly to God instead of talking to the priest, the bishop, the pope before speaking to God. And actually, like even in the Netherlands, if you move from the Protestant part of the Netherlands to the Catholic part of the Netherlands, you can see a movement from a little bit, well,

from a super egalitarian to like slightly less egalitarian as you move to the Catholic part. So, I mean, I don't talk too much about like the history, but I do think it is interesting to think about. But I imagine, Nicolai, when you come to work in the morning, that you're not thinking about the Vikings or the Roman Empire. Maybe you should be, though. I really should be. But it's really, really interesting. It's a trend. There was a time a little while back where there seemed to be a trend towards more Scandinavian leadership styles

across Europe, certainly, right? So very important companies in Switzerland, in the UK and so on had either CEOs or chair persons from Scandi. Is there still a trend towards Scandinavian leadership style or not? Yeah. So I do believe in the world, I mean, we can see with research that every country in the world is generationally becoming a little bit more egalitarian. So in India, the younger generation is more egalitarian than the older generation. In Korea, the younger generation a little more egalitarian than the older generation. And even in Norway, the younger generation a little more egalitarian than the older generation.

And I think that's happened actually because of the internet. I mean, like when I was a child, okay, I'm 52. When I was a child, clearly there was no internet, which means that the people who had more expertise and more experience were the source of knowledge. So what my teacher tells me or my father tells me, I mean, I have to put faith in that experience. But of course, with the internet, we started, let's say, an egalitarianism of information. So now the young person can look something up on the internet. And whether I'm in India or Korea or Norway, I can say to the

teacher, hey, but that's not what I read on the internet yesterday, or doctor, hey, I looked it up, I don't think you're right. So I do believe that that created this kind of notion of, wow, it's great that we can all have the power. But I think it's important when you ask about this, about this kind of leaning towards Scandinavian leadership, because we talked about egalitarianism, but one of the other big aspects that you have in Scandinavia is this consensual decision making. And that's where I would say, I mean, people generally lump those two things together, like egalitarian means consensual decision making. I have two separate dimensions for those.

Because like in the US where we are, well, okay, we're rather egalitarian, although much more hierarchical than you are in Norway. But the boss decides. But the boss decides, right? Or at least the individual decides. And usually that's the boss. We don't really like this thing

that you tend to do in Scandinavia, which is like take a long time to make decisions by groups. Right. So I mean, like, okay, in Norway and even more so in Sweden, but clearly the tendency is that over a period of time, we share our ideas, we come to some kind of group agreement, and then once we implement that idea, we don't go back easily because it took us a long time to get to it. So what I refer to as consensual cultures,

decisions tend to be slow to be made, but then they're definitely, as much possible fixed. Right. And interestingly, like, okay, in Norway, you are egalitarian and consensual. But we talked about Japan earlier. I mean, Japan is, I think your listeners will know a very hierarchical society. Okay. A lot of deference to the position of the person that you're working with. But it's also the most consensual culture in the world, which more so than Sweden, which means decisions are made slowly by the group. And then once they are made, they are fixed.

So I think it's just like, let's say what's the most modern approach. I mean, it depends on what kind of work you're trying to do. So like Japanese people, they're really good at automobiles, right? Okay, well, if you are developing a product where you want very little risk of a mistake, then a consensual decision making is great. It's good to take a really long time to make the decision. And in those, let's say, like a more manufacturing environment, hierarchical leadership methods also can be very fast. But if we're in an agile environment, we need creativity. Egalitarianism generally leads to a lot of creativity throughout the

organization. So you've seen all these different companies and all these different corporate cultures. So now we're going to make a company here. Irene and Nikolai, Inc. You know? Yeah. What do we want the culture to look like? What is the perfect culture? If you can take a little bit of each. Yeah.

What is a great company? Okay. So, I mean, as I said, it has to start with what you are going to do. Are your listeners mostly entrepreneurs? Is that right, Nikolai? They're all over the place. Oh, okay. All right. So let's say- But they're all very, very clever. Otherwise, they wouldn't have listened to the program.

They're the smartest people. Totally. Totally. Okay. But let's say that you and I are doing an IT startup. Okay? I mean, if we're doing an IT startup, then we want the egalitarianism of Scandinavia, right? Okay. So we want very low levels of hierarchy throughout the organization, but we want super fast and flexible decisions like in India. We want decisions to be made quickly and we want them to be able to be changed quickly.

And that's because of course, in the startup environment, everything's changing around us like in India. Everything's changing around us. We may need to change our product quickly. We might need to reinvent ourselves again and again. So often, a more top-down decision-making approach would be more effective. And I actually think in a startup environment,

we want to be as direct as possible when we're giving communication. The most direct cultures in the world, the Netherlands and Israel. So let's be Dutch or Israeli in the way that we give feedback. But let's also invest time in getting to know one another. And I actually think that's true across industry and across work that you're doing. If you have any international component in your work, you wanna spend a lot more time in building personal relationships.

Because once we have that fundamental trust, then if you speak too directly to me, I will forgive you. If we don't have that trust and you speak too directly to me, that's really gonna be the last time that I wanna work with you. So I think you can really think about what's my goal? What industry am I working in? What do I want to accomplish? And then you can kind of map out even which type of country would be best for you, for your organization based on the dimension you're looking at. I can already see that this is going to be a huge success, this company of ours.

We're on our way. Absolutely. How much time should a CEO spend on corporate culture? I want to just transition for a moment. So we were talking a lot about my culture mapping book, right? But I wrote this second book, as you know, with Reed Hastings, who's the

founder and chairman of Netflix. So what I saw when I was doing this work with Reed, because he leads his team, I mean, he's really trying to move away from this pyramid model where the leader is at the top of the pyramid and instead kind of put the leader like a tree down at the roots of the tree. And with a very egalitarian, Korean structure. So what I think we can think about that in is in a traditional company, the decision making model has the chairman at the top and the lower level employees at the bottom of the pyramid. And the lower level employees can make small, unimportant decisions. But for anything important or expensive, we have to push the decision making up in the organization.

And of course, in a traditional manufacturing environment, that's a great method. But in these newer companies and today's agile world where we have to be faster and more flexible and more creative, I do believe that the best decision-making method is a lot more like a tree. And with that tree, we've got the leader who's down there in the dirt at the roots of the tree,

not making the big decisions, but instead leading with context, not control, or something they say at Netflix that I love, don't seek to please your boss, seek to do what's best for the company. And with that model, of course, now I'm coming to the answer to your question. With that model, where the boss is not the chief decision maker, but instead setting all of the context

for the decision-making throughout the organization. And with that model, you have the lower level employees that are often there at the top of the tree, making often the biggest, most expensive decisions for the organization. And in that kind of model, I believe that a leader should be spending 50% of his or her time working with the individuals

in the company, coaching them on how we make decisions in this organization. So what is our organizational culture here? What kind of decision will we make in the face of this dilemma? What is our North Star? And how are we running towards that North Star? And we become more of a coach than a decision maker.

Or as we could say, a little bit more Norwegian in the way that we're leading, a little bit more of a facilitator among equals. Well, I think for sure I'm Norwegian enough. Erwin, we have tens of thousands of young people listening to the broadcast and I'd love to ask you, what is your advice to young people? Yeah, so of course young people today, they wake up in the morning, they open up their computers, they have people from all over the world who are joining them.

Maybe you've got, I don't know, a team you're working with in Brazil, someone else in Nigeria. And it's very easy to underestimate the impact of culture on your communication. So I think an example, a great example of that would be that maybe you notice that these guys from the US on your team, they're talking all the time. And maybe you've got this guy from China and he doesn't seem to speak very much. But you just think, oh, well, that guy from China and he doesn't seem to speak very much

But you just think oh well that guy from China He doesn't have much to say and those guys from the US they clearly have a lot that they'd like to contribute But so it's easy to slip into this kind of assumption that culture isn't impacting us So the advice to young people is don't So the advice to young people is don't underestimate how much culture impacts our communication, even when we are working in virtual environments, and even when the people that we are communicating with seem to be just like us.

And then take some time to learn. So, you know, what I do with my culture mapping methodology is I give people an opportunity to kind of look at one culture and say oh I see that culture is a little bit more direct than mine so maybe that guy wasn't angry with me maybe he was just showing me respect. build trust in a little bit more relationship oriented way than they do in my culture. So maybe the reason that that guy didn't respond to my email is because I dived right into the material and I didn't really give him, I didn't really share anything about myself

or even show interest in getting to know him personally. So when I get him on the phone the next time, I'm gonna take a different approach. And of course the mapping, it doesn't give you a recipe. We're all individuals, but it does help you to kind of tease out like what's cultural and what's personal so that we can be more strategic and more empathic. Really great advice. I perhaps want to add one thing. Spend all your savings on traveling and backpacking and see the world.

That's right. And of course, the more we see the world, the more we recognize how strange our own culture is. And I think that that own self, that self reflection is one of the most important types of of cultural learning, because otherwise we just think that everyone else is strange and doing it wrong. When we realize, actually, huh, seems that I'm just as strange as everyone else. Absolutely. I'm definitely going to think more about

how to adapt to the various countries where we have offices, when it comes to feedback and getting people on board and so on. It's been just tremendously interesting. I would recommend everybody to read your book, The Culture Map. It's been really changing the way I look at culture. So, a big thanks for being on air and good luck with your work. Thank you. Such a pleasure to be here with you.