The Cost of Lack of Trust in Multicultural Teams
In diverse settings, trust is more than just a feel-good factor; it's the cornerstone of effective teamwork. The absence of trust, which often stems from a failure of team members to understand and open up to one another truly, doesn't just erode team morale—it leads to tangible financial losses.
If you don’t take action, many cultural nuances, unspoken misunderstandings and assumptions will subtly but significantly impact the team dynamics and the bottom line.
When I first faced this stark reality as a manager leading an international team, hesitant to share ideas or admit mistakes, I quickly realised I needed to adapt. For most people in leadership positions, blaming the team, organisation, or available resources is not an option.
Here are some common pitfalls leaders can identify and address by understanding the cultural factors at play:
Silence Over Speaking Up
In hierarchical cultures, questioning authority is viewed as disrespectful, resulting in silence even when contributions are essential. This reluctance to speak up can cause inefficiency and the loss of vital insights.
Consider the aviation industry, where cultural hierarchies in the cockpit between captain and copilot might have played a part in disastrous outcomes, like the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash.
While silence may be a sign of respect, it is essential to understand that failing to voice concerns often stems from fear of punishment for speaking up.
What would the cost of silence be for your team?
Hiding Mistakes
A story comes to mind of an employee who caused a six-figure financial loss but was terminated for hiding the mistake and violating the company's integrity and accountability values, not the error itself. This scenario is exacerbated in collectivistic cultures where mistakes are seen as a collective shame, not just an individual failure, so teams may want to hide them. And naturally, in hierarchical cultures, the fear of punishment for mistakes often leads to a reluctance to admit them.
What can hiding such mistakes cost your team?
Reluctance to Seek Help
Consider the team member who, due to cultural perceptions of competence, didn't seek clarification and jeopardised a project's success:
“An individual, after committing themselves to a project, failed to ask for further clarification when needed. This reluctance resulted in missing a vital part of the assignment, ultimately delaying the project's launch and impacting the entire team's professional reputation and client satisfaction.”
In many cultures, seeking help is perceived as a weakness, causing team members to conceal their lack of knowledge.
What would be the cost of not asking for help for your team?
Information Hoarding
In multicultural teams, information is often power. Not sharing knowledge can lead to duplicated efforts, misunderstandings, and, ultimately, a product or service quality decline.
Diverse teams that excel use their different perspectives and valuable insights and share best practices to improve their work and streamline processes. Teams that do not share information effectively may struggle to identify and apply the best solutions, impacting customer satisfaction and leaving the company vulnerable to competitors who manage collective wisdom more effectively.
One example of the detrimental effects of not sharing information is the Yahoo data breach incident in 2016 that exposed the accounts of 500 million users to hackers. It successively came to light a year later that company insiders were aware that the breaches had affected all 3 billion Yahoo customers, not just some of them.
Yahoo failed to communicate internally and act promptly about the data breach, which resulted in significant brand damage and financial loss.
What could the cost of hoarding information be for your team?
Building a Bridge of Trust
How do we combat these trust issues in multicultural teams? It will take some specific action steps, and you can find great pointers for where to start from my previous article, where I listed 14 Tips on how to build interpersonal trust.
To summarise, it begins with recognising and valuing diverse cultural backgrounds, encouraging open communication, and nurturing a team culture that sees mistakes as opportunities for learning.
- Seek out and highlight similarities: people instinctively trust those who resemble them more. Actively seeking out similarities can strengthen trust in the team.
- Building awareness and understanding of differences: It is easy to assume others want to be treated the same way you do, but every team member comes from a unique background and has their own personality. It's beneficial to discuss these differences openly to build trust. Understanding each team member's preferences, particularly in how they wish to be treated, is key.
It is also natural for building a bridge of trust to take time. Especially in relationship-oriented cultures, people need time and proof before they can trust others and start sharing information more openly.
Give your team opportunities to learn about each other's personal lives, backgrounds, preferences, and work habits. Creating deliberate opportunities for personal interaction is crucial for building trust, which often develops through sharing vulnerabilities.
When you are ready to take the next step, I am here to assist you in exploring the data-based analysis tools designed to provide you with tangible insights into levels of trust in your team, paving the way for focused strategies to enhance them.
In your experience, what strategies have worked in building trust in multicultural teams? How do you navigate the complex interplay of culture and trust?
Follow InCultures’ Pia Kähärä on LinkedIn for her latest insights, and join our newsletter for regular updates on how to cultivate a thriving, culturally intelligent team environment.
Wondering if your team is reaching its full potential? Discover key insights with InCultures’ Global Team Success Indicator assessment. This tool offers a comprehensive evaluation of your team's current performance, pinpointing areas for improvement to unlock its true potential.
Other InCultures’ blog articles that will help you build trust and approach leadership in multicultural teams strategically:
How a Lack of Trust Undermines Leadership in Multicultural Teams
Why CQ is more important for global team managers than IQ or EQ
