A Quick Dip into Intercultural Communication - with Mariana Barros

Sarah: Hi everyone. Welcome to A Quick Dip, a series of short conversations about culture, communications, and change. I'm Sarah Black, founder of Athru Communications. I'm the communication strategist who is passionate about making sure you're not endlessly creating comms content. You're actually starting conversations that matter to your organisation, and that's what this podcast is about.

It's a series of conversations, introducing ideas to help make your communications activity more culturally relevant, more inclusive. And more effective.

Sarah: Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of A Quick Dip into culture, communications and change. I'm your host, Sarah Black, and I am delighted to be taking a dip into intercultural communication, intercultural relationships at work with, Mariana Barras. Welcome, and would you like to introduce yourself?

Mariana : Yes. Hi Sarah. Hi everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. Thank you, Sarah, for the invitation, I'm very honoured with that. Well, I am Mariana. I'm an interculturalist from Brazil. I've been in the field for 20 years now, coming from the countryside of Brazil. So suffered some linguistic bullying, uh, because of my countryside accent.

That's the first time I had to face challenges with being different from other people. And then I was an exchange student in France, which changed my entire life because I lived there before the internet, so I had to integrate, I always joke, I was obliged to like the French because they fed me and I had no contact with Brazil, but that definitely changed my entire life. I love my French family up to today, was an amazing experience. Came back to Brazil, uh, entered the international relations field. In Brazil we still don't have intercultural relations or any kind of formal education in the intercultural field. So I learned by experience because I started working in the field when I was 20, 19, 20, and this is what I've been doing so far.

Sarah: And I've had the, the pleasure of working with you on a couple of occasions and it's been an education for me in lots of ways. So one of the things we've talked about a little bit is, oh, people not understanding the intercultural dynamics if they're in a global or multinational organisation.

So I wanted to ask you a little bit about why is it important to understand intercultural differences or to understand that you need to understand intercultural differences?

Mariana: Well, there are different levels of importance. The first, I would say for surviving, uh mm-hmm, and this is where my story with intercultural communication starts and being Brazilian, I'm very personal, so I'll bring personal stories.

I was in France living with my French family. I didn't speak French very little, and I was hungry all the time because the way they eat is very different the way we eat in Brazil. And then my mother would, my host mother would offer me food and I would say, no, no thank you. And she would take the food and put it in the refrigerator, and I was really hungry.

To the point that one day I was starving just thinking that the family didn't like me because they didn't want to give me food, but I was so hungry. Then when she offered me the food, I said, yes, I want it, in a very aggressive way, but she was relieved, she said, oh God, thank you. Finally you're accepting my food.

And I said, but I, I have always been hungry, and she said, but why don't, don't you accept? And I said, because you have to insist because in Brazil it is not polite to accept things when people are offering for the first time, you have actually to insist up to three times. And then she was, oh, but I would never do that.

I have to respect your word, yes is yes, no is no. And that was the first time that I understood. No, not in Brazil. Because in Brazil we never say no unless we mean yes. And that's why I say it is first for surviving, I was hungry. I was just starving. I needed food. I need to understand the French style of communication.

Uh, I would say secondly for avoiding conflict. Or interpersonal for conflict because in many different situations, also with French people or Germans or even Americans, the way they communicate can be perceived as very aggressive to us. So more relationship oriented cultures, when a person sends an email, uh, can you please send me the report by Friday?

We feel like, uh, the person is not engaged in a personal relationship, so we don't even feel obliged to answer the email. Yeah. So, uh, and we get hard with this kind of message. So it starts building or uh, uh, it starts a personal conflict, interpersonal conflict. And for sure, lastly, it should be empathic, uh, and understand what's going on to the other person.

Uh, so one thing that I, I think that is very different around the world is how people show emotions in their way of communicating. So in Brazil will be very, very common that in the end of the year, the speech of the end of the year, the CEO will come and cry in front of the employees.

So engage people emotionally. Whereas in many, many countries in the world, it would be perceived as an unprofessional behaviour.

Sarah: Yeah. And you can see then, you know, from the personal level to the organisational level, that if you have a leader that doesn't understand how their communication, how they present themselves as seen by other people, that can all get a bit messy and complicated. What can people in organisations do? If you're working in an organisation across different cultures from your own, what things can you do to try and address or minimise this conflict?

Mariana: I would say first being sensitive to the impact of cultural differences, uh, my experience shows that people tend to, uh, underestimate the impact of cultural differences.

So being sensitive to that and then getting awareness of the different communication style and that you can Google it. You have direct indirect communication style. You have confrontational non confrontation. You have how emotions impact communication. You have communication flow, and the pandemics because of virtual communication, we have Latinos or, uh, interacting all the time and being overwhelming to Asians that will not open their cameras and they will reflect on what you are saying. Then there is silence in the room and we, Latinos, we get very uncomfortable, we start interrupting the person and then we are just seeing each other as non-polite people.

So yes. Getting awareness about that and then trying to adjust. Uh, in our company in Brazil, we have created, Adrian Sweetwater has created the acronym dance.

Sarah: I love that.

Mariana: Which means, uh, intercultural communication is about dancing. And switching when needed. But for that, you need to be sensitive and you need to be aware.

Sarah: And I wanted to ask you this, I think some of that awareness starts with understanding what cultural baggage you bring in or what, like knowing your own style of communication so you can figure out whether you're direct or indirect or you know, verbose or whatever that happens to be, or emotional. Do you think that's true, that that little bit of sort of self-awareness is important?

Mariana: Well, Sarah, to me, self-awareness is the first step for anything in life. Right? And then cultural self-awareness is another dimension. Yeah. Uh uh, and I, again, I also think that people underestimate the importance of self-awareness.

I'm always shocked how the father of the field, Edward Hall, spoke about self-awareness and we interculturalists, we just forgot about that because it's difficult. It's difficult to bring self-awareness to the room, but honestly, this is the most impactful message we delivering our workshops is self-awareness.

So when people ask me, what do you do? And I say, I explain Brazil to Brazilians, of course I can work with other cultures, but this is the most impactful message because gaining, cultural, self-awareness, learning about your patterns, your patterns of communication, will definitely at least, mean that you don't take it personal when someone is communicating in a different communication style.

Sarah: And I think it's that ability to ask yourself that question like, is this a cultural issue? You know, is this conflict or perceived conflict, a cultural issue, or, because sometimes it is and sometimes it's not, but a lot of time that's really underestimated in global workplaces.

Mariana: Yeah. Differentiating the individual and the group. It's always very difficult, very difficult. Again, this is why I think we need some interculturalists in the room to help people to read the patterns. Because there is specialised knowledge. Yeah, but yeah, I would say that most of the time it has to do with cultural difference much more than interpersonal conflict.

Sarah: I completely agree with you, and a lot of time it's from not understanding that there is an intercultural dimension to what's going on. If you were talking to someone who had maybe stepped into a global job for the first time, in addition to what you've said, is there any specific advice that you would give someone who was doing that?

Mariana: I would say always giving the other person a chance, so you understand that might be a different perspective that you were not even aware it exists. I had this job in Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and the challenge was that the Brazilians, they were constructing a road in the middle of a forest working with people from the tribes.

And these people, they were always, they had their faces closed, and to the Brazilians, the message was that they were unsatisfied with the Brazilians. And Brazilians were afraid of a confrontation or even a war with those people. And they invited me to go there and ask what was going on. And they just explained me that in their culture, it's not used it or it's not seen as professional to smile while you are at work.

But for the Brazilians, it was so aggressive, that they couldn't handle this, and amazingly enough, after coming back, and I work a lot with immigrants in Brazil, and their biggest challenge in finding jobs in Brazil is because they come to the job interview with a serious face, and Brazilians will take this as someone that is not really willing to get the job.

Sarah: They're not excited enough.

Mariana: So you see it goes through Yeah. All those things.

Sarah: Yeah. And I know we've talked about communication today. I did want, uh, sort of draw out that point because to me, that speaks to us all having different attitudes to how we think about work and how we show up at work. It's, it's not just about our style of communication always. It might be different cultures feel differently about leadership or hierarchy, for example, and that presumably can have an impact on miscommunication and misunderstanding in the workplace as well.

Mariana: Definitely. Just taking Brazil as an example, the first time we learned about the concept of working, because our native people didn't have this developed, so the first time we learned about this was with slavery.

So the concept of working itself is a big challenge in Brazil. Uh, just to take Brazilian history as an example and the way things were developed in Brazil. I like the saying that in Europe or in the us, we tend to, I think therefore I am. So there's this rational approach towards life.

And the way you built structure and you perform on this structure is perceived as good performance or working. In Brazil we use, uh, I feel therefore I am. So to get results, you have to engage people emotionally. So those are very different words. Very, very different mindsets. Uh, even hard to say, we come from the same species in terms of.

Sarah: No, and, and having lived, certainly I lived in, in Norway and the way that Norwegians feel about work in my experience was very different to the ethos for work that I was brought up with in, in Ireland. Just very subtle nuanced differences, but they were there. Um, so yeah, it's definitely a factor in like I love that you brought in the history and the context because there's a long legacy for a lot of these attitudes and the way that we are culturally well, it's always evolving, but there's a long history for a lot of it.

So thank you for bringing that element up. Um, Mariana, it's been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for that little glimpse into the importance of intercultural communication and understanding intercultural difference as well. Um, we'll put a link to your business in the notes for anybody who would like to learn a little bit more, um, about dancing between cultures. Anything else that you want to share before we finish?

Mariana: Well, no, it's been a pleasure always. I'm always passionate about this object, always learning. So thank you for the opportunity.

Sarah: Oh, thank you very much. And, uh, we'll see you all next week. Thank you. If you've enjoyed today's conversation and maybe wanted to join it, then please do get in touch so that we can talk more.

I'd love to hear from you. You can sign up from my newsletter by finding me on LinkedIn. And let's connect and continue the conversation.

Thank you.