Working Across Cultures

Every office communicates somewhere along a spectrum from direct to indirect, and misreading where yours sits causes more foreign-workplace friction than any language gap. In a more direct, low-context culture, people say the thing plainly: feedback is explicit, a 'no' is a no, and silence is just silence. In a more indirect, high-context culture, a great deal is left unsaid and carried in tone, context and what is politely omitted: a 'that is interesting' may be a gentle rejection, a drawn-out pause may signal disagreement, and harsh news arrives wrapped in softening. Neither style is better - they are simply different operating systems, and the skill is to learn which one you have joined rather than assuming it runs like home.

The trap for many who move from India is not a single direction but a mismatch in either direction. You might arrive from a relatively relationship-rich, hierarchy-aware setting into a blunt, flat office where people openly contradict the boss in meetings, and read that bluntness as rudeness when it is simply the local norm. Or you might land somewhere even more indirect than home and miss the real message entirely because you were listening for words rather than reading the room. In both cases the error is the same: assuming your own calibration is neutral. It is not. It is one culture among many, and abroad it is the minority report.

The practical move is to become, for a while, a deliberate student of your own office. Watch how people disagree, how praise and criticism are actually delivered, how decisions get announced, how much small talk precedes business. When you are unsure, ask a trusted colleague a calibration question - something like how do people here usually raise a concern with a senior? - and then listen without defending your own habits. Within a few weeks the pattern resolves, and what felt like a minefield becomes a map. You will never read it perfectly, and you do not need to; you need only enough fluency to stop misreading kindness as coldness, or a soft refusal as a yes.

Offices also differ sharply in how they handle hierarchy and feedback, and these two are where a newcomer most often stumbles. In some cultures the structure is flat and informal: you call the principal by first name, you are expected to challenge ideas openly regardless of rank, and staying quiet in a meeting reads as having nothing to contribute. In others, deference to seniority is strong, you wait to be invited to speak, and contradicting a senior in public would be a serious misstep. If you carry the wrong model into the room - staying silent where voice is expected, or speaking over seniority where it is not welcomed - you will be misread in ways that have nothing to do with your ability.

Feedback is the sharpest edge of this. In blunt cultures, a senior may critique your work directly and at length and mean nothing personal by it; treating that as an attack will exhaust you. In softer cultures, the real criticism may be so gently wrapped that you miss it entirely and repeat the mistake, or a cheerful 'maybe we could explore other options' may actually mean 'redo this'. Learn how your office encodes a problem. And learn how to ask for feedback in its terms - in a direct office, 'tell me plainly what is not working here' invites exactly the candour that helps you; in an indirect one, a quieter, one-to-one 'what would you change if this were yours?' may draw out what a group setting would suppress.

Decision-making is the third variable. Notice whether calls are made openly in the meeting or settled quietly beforehand; whether consensus is genuinely sought or the senior's view simply prevails behind a show of discussion; whether your input is wanted early, when it can shape things, or only after the direction is set. Reading this saves you from the frustration of pushing an idea at the wrong moment to the wrong person. None of it requires you to become someone else - it requires you to notice the mechanism and work with it, which is a professional skill that will serve you in any office, in any country, for the rest of your career.

There is a particular, tiring experience in being visibly or audibly the outsider, and it is worth naming honestly rather than pretending good attitude dissolves it. You may be asked to repeat yourself because of your accent, and feel the small sting of being momentarily treated as less capable. You may stay quiet in a fast, idiomatic meeting not because you have nothing to say but because you are still translating, and worry that the silence reads as dimness. You may bump into assumptions - some merely ignorant, occasionally prejudiced - about where you are from, what you can do, or what you are 'like'. This is real, it is unfair, and most people who move abroad meet some version of it.

Two things are true at once. First, a great deal of this fades with familiarity and confidence: the accent that felt like a spotlight in month one is barely noticed by month six; the meetings speed up in your ear; colleagues who know your work stop hearing an outsider and start hearing a peer. Much of what feels like bias in the early weeks is actually just unfamiliarity on both sides, and it thaws. Second, some of it is not unfamiliarity but genuine bias or, rarely, unlawful discrimination - and it is important to know that a difficult or unwelcoming culture is not the same as an illegal one, and that most destinations have real, enforceable protections against discrimination and harassment. Where the line is, and how to raise a concern, is something to verify through the official channel for your country rather than to suffer in silence or to assume.

The stance that serves you is neither thin-skinned nor falsely thick-skinned. Do not catastrophise every awkward moment into proof you do not belong; most are ordinary friction that eases. But do not gaslight yourself either, or accept genuine mistreatment as the price of being abroad. Speak up clearly and without apology when it matters, lean on colleagues and mentors who see your worth, and keep your footing by remembering that your value is your work and your thinking - not your fluency in someone else's idiom, which will come.

The final move is the most important, and the one that separates people who merely cope abroad from those who flourish: learning to treat your difference not as a deficit to hide but as an asset to offer. Everything that feels like a wall in the first months has a strength on the other side of it, if you can make the turn. The accent and the careful pause that make you self-conscious also mean you often listen harder and choose your words with more precision than the native speakers rattling on around you. The training in another system that makes some references unfamiliar also gives you a second toolkit - a different way to detail a joint, structure a plan, or think about climate and material - that the office does not have and can genuinely use.

The outsider's position, which can feel like exclusion, is also the bridge position. You can see the office's habits and blind spots precisely because they are not yours; you can connect the practice to markets, clients and ways of building that your colleagues do not understand; and on international projects your cross-cultural fluency is not a soft nicety but a hard commercial advantage. Firms that work globally need people who can move between worlds, and that is exactly what a thoughtful immigrant designer becomes. The very thing that costs you in the first year pays you back in the third, if you stop apologising for it and start deploying it.

> Do not spend your years abroad trying to disappear into the local norm. Read it, respect it, adjust where it matters - and then offer the one thing no one else in the room can: your own way of seeing.

This is the healthy middle path between two failures: erasing yourself to blend in, which is exhausting and wastes your real value, and refusing to adapt at all, which reads as arrogance and closes doors. Between them sits the skill this lesson teaches - read the room, adjust where it matters, and keep and offer what makes you valuable. Get that balance right and difference stops being the hard part of working abroad and becomes the reason you are worth hiring.