Mind your colloquialisms

We all have our little speech quirks, turns of phrase and col­lo­qui­al­isms, the little things we often say without think­ing, that make per­fect sense to us and usu­ally, though not always, make as much sense to our col­leagues. They can be things we have picked up from our par­ents, our chil­dren, our friends, favour­ite films, books, music, etc. and while they may wear a bit thin on some of our col­leagues, they are typ­ic­ally inof­fens­ive and are often deemed to be quite endearing.

Using these little col­lo­qui­al­isms in con­ver­sa­tions or cor­res­pond­ence with people from other cul­tures or coun­tries, who may have a rel­at­ively rudi­ment­ary under­stand­ing of your nat­ive lan­guage, can lead to all sorts of unin­ten­ded con­sequences such as the fol­low­ing example which was relayed to me sev­eral years ago.

A nego­ti­ation party from a UK com­pany were meet­ing with an asian cli­ent to dis­cuss con­tract terms and con­di­tions, the UK nego­ti­ation man­ager, after greet­ing the pro­spect­ive cli­ent in the first meet­ing and exchan­ging pleas­ant­ries for a few minutes enquired after the client’s health and said

“You are look­ing a little grumpy today…”

The cli­ent, not famil­iar with the word grumpy pulled out his phrase book and looked it up, to find the fol­low­ing defin­i­tion “Grumpy — A small, bad tempered, dwarf”, under­stand­ably feel­ing ter­ribly insul­ted so early in the dis­cus­sions, the cli­ents nego­ti­ator, along with his team, walked out of the meet­ing and nego­ti­ations hal­ted for sev­eral hours while the two teams met to resolve this inter­na­tional incid­ent and for the UK company’s man­ager to explain that what he had inten­ded his com­ment to mean was that his client’s rep­res­ent­at­ive looked a little unhappy, and that he was going to ask next if there was any­thing wrong that he could assist with.

While the story above seems a little com­ical on the sur­face, what it does do is show how easy it can be to offend oth­ers with inno­cent com­ments that are often inten­ded as rela­tion­ship build­ing by the unthink­ing speaker and are taken as insults by the listener who may be too quick to assume the worst, neither party here acquit­ted them­selves well, the UK’s man­ager should have been far more care­ful in his choice of words, if he did not yet know his cli­ent well he should have kept to simple, unequi­vocal lan­guage, and the cli­ent could have asked for cla­ri­fic­a­tion before walk­ing out.

Such simple com­mu­nic­a­tion break­downs occur all the time, a care­less word here, an unthink­ing ges­ture there and the bar­ri­ers go up and nego­ti­at­ing or col­lab­or­at­ing return to an adversarial stance that can take weeks or month to over­come, caus­ing unne­ces­sary delays to the pro­ject and divert­ing time of both parties from their primary tasks. These trips and traps are there for all of us to fall over, regard­less of our years of exper­i­ence in inter­na­tional rela­tions, our level of seni­or­ity and our own self con­fid­ence, it is up to every­one in these situ­ations be be tol­er­ant at all times and, when a per­ceived slight is encountered, to query the intent with the pos­sible offender, it is most likely they will be ter­ribly con­cerned that they have made the offen­ded party feel slighted, retract and offens­ive com­ment or ges­ture and be keen to see both the error of their ways and learn the accep­ted way to con­duct things.

So, the mes­sage here is, think before you speak or act, and if you don’t under­stand the intent behind a com­ment or action and it is out of con­text, cla­rify what was meant before you react to it.

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2010 Francis Norman

Related Posts:

• Mer­its of face to face meet­ings in a vir­tual teams project
• Do you need a com­mu­nic­a­tions coach?
• Mak­ing first con­tact across inter­na­tional projects

Tagged as: international communications, virtual teams