I’ve just finished reading The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer, and I absolutely loved it because it finally explained my past 10+ years of international teamwork in a way that made me think: "oh… so THAT’s what was going on".
I’m currently an Engineering Manager leading a fully remote platform engineering team based in Germany, with team members from Germany, India, and Tunisia (and myself being Italian). Previously, I led a fully distributed team comprising colleagues from Egypt, Jordan, Ukraine, Turkey, and Brazil (a few were in Germany, living as expats, therefore with at least some exposure to German culture and international environment). And before that, I was working as Software Engineer in teams with people from Albania, Russia, Spain, Scotland and US.
Looking back, The Culture Map gave language, structure, and explanations to many situations that had previously caused confusion, frustration, and unnecessary friction.
This post is both a short summary of the book’s core ideas and a personal reflection on what I learned, sometimes the hard way, about leading across cultures.
The Eight Scales of the Culture Map
Erin Meyer describes culture not as a set of stereotypes, but as relative positioning across eight behavioural scales. Every culture sits somewhere on each scale, and misunderstandings often arise when we assume others are positioned where we are.
Very briefly:
Communicating: Low-context vs. High-context
How much is said explicitly vs. implicitly.
Some cultures rely heavily on context, shared understanding, and what is not said; others value clarity, precision, and explicitness.
Evaluating: Direct vs. Indirect negative feedback
How feedback, especially critical feedback, is given and most importantly, how comfortable people are with blunt criticism.
Persuading – Principles-first vs. Applications-first
How people build arguments: starting from theory and concepts, or from practical examples and concrete use cases.
Leading – Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical
How power distance shows up in teams, decision-making, and expectations toward managers.
Deciding: Consensual vs. Top-down
Who decides, and how much input is expected.
Trusting: Task-based vs. Relationship-based
Whether trust is built primarily through reliability and delivery, or through personal relationships and time spent together.
(by the way, speaking of performance and trust - here's a great video by Simon Sinek)
Disagreeing: Confrontational vs. Avoids confrontation
How openly people challenge ideas, debate, and express (and react to) disagreement.
Scheduling: Linear-time vs. Flexible-time
How people relate to time, deadlines, agendas, and plans.
Individually, none of these are good or bad. Problems arise when we unconsciously assume our position on the scale is “normal” and everything else is wrong - when we treat our way (explicit over implicit, structured over flexible, confrontational instead of harmony-seeking, task-focused instead of relationship-driven) as the only reasonable one, and everyone else must therefore be just rude, lazy, unreliable, dishonest, disorganised.
Why This Book Was Eye-Opening for Me
Reading this book felt like replaying old team interactions - so precisely that it was at times funny and embarrassing.
Many situations that had previously frustrated me, or others, were not about competence, motivation, or personality. They were about cultural mismatches we never made explicit.
What makes this especially interesting in my case is my own cultural mix.
I’m Italian (from the north, which already comes with footnotes), but I’ve lived for 18 months between Australia and New Zealand, and I’ve been living and working (with international teams) in Germany for over 13 years. In many ways, I’ve become more German than Germans:
- I value clear scheduling and planning
- I’m comfortable with direct disagreement
- I trust through delivery and reliability
And yet… the Italian side still shows up loudly, sometimes literally.
I got that! Do you think I am stupid?
One of the first scales where I laughed out loud was high-context vs. low-context communication; because the example in the book described exactly how I (Italian, relatively high-context) tend to react when working with people from lower-context cultures like Germany or the US.
“Stop stating the obvious! We talked about that, you don’t need to repeat it three times and then send me a follow-up email.”
I find low-context communication overly specific, verbose, and sometimes even condescending or patronising, stating the obvious, adding excessive detail, recapping things that were clearly already understood (at least in my head).
When dealing with Americans and Germans I often found this style boring and unnecessary.
And yet with colleagues from Brazil, India or Giordan I often found myself thinking or asking:
“Why didn’t you ask immediately if it was unclear?”
“How could you miss the requirements so badly?”
“We talked about this! didn’t you get the decision we made in the meeting?”
From my perspective, it was obvious. From theirs, it wasn’t and they were often waiting for signals, confirmation, or shared context that I assumed was already there.
What I thought was clear, was, in fact, just implicit while what I perceived as over-communication was often just safety.
Understanding this scale helps adjust in both directions: being more explicit than feels natural to me, without assuming others are being pedantic or mistrustful.
Honest Feedback shock
I consider myself a fairly direct person, and I’m generally very open to criticism. But… in Italy we usually soften feedback, sometimes a lot. We dance around it. We add context, empathy, and occasionally so many disclaimers that the actual message risks getting lost entirely.
Germans, on the other hand, often separate ideas from people with almost surgical precision.
I still remember one of my first code design review meetings in Germany. I presented a solution and asked for feedback:
“What do you think of it?”
A German colleague looked at it for a moment and then very calmly said:
“Oh. That’s a silly idea. I don’t agree with that.”
No smile. No softener. No “but maybe we could…”
At that moment, I felt embarrassed and quite angry at that unnecessary rudeness. Over time, though, I learned to appreciate this style. There is no sugar-coating, no backstabbing, and no “everything is fine” in the meeting followed by complaints afterwards. You know exactly where you stand.
Of course, being polite, constructive, and specific still matters everywhere. But without cultural awareness, it’s very easy to feel personally attacked or to unintentionally attack others, when in reality, it’s just a different way of delivering feedback.
Winging It
Another chapter that felt painfully accurate: scheduling and meetings.
My meeting style was ( often still is ) very Mediterranean:
- No agenda, just a vague title/topic of discussion.
- Let the discussion flow
- See where the conversation takes us
- end when it feels right
That worked well with some colleagues but from germans I also received very clear feedback:
- Calendar invites without an agenda (with time slots!) were confusing
- Meetings that “derailed” were frustrating
- Decisions and next steps were unclear
I still value some flexibility, but again, adapting to the context and being aligned on the expectations makes meetings dramatically more effective.
Disagreement and Expressiveness
One of the most mind-blowing chapters for me was about disagreeing and expressiveness and this is where I’ve had the most trouble in the past (and sometimes still do).
As an Italian, I:
- Use my hands a lot
- Change tone and facial expressions
- Get passionate when discussing ideas
To me, this means: I care about the topic.
To others, it sometimes means: I am furious and attacking them personally.
I’ve had people (from Germany, UK or Russia) tell me later they were surprised that two minutes after a heated discussion, I was perfectly calm and even joking, with the same person I had the conflict with.
What felt like a lively debate about ideas to me felt like a distressing argument for others.
This can even become more complex:
Colleagues from Brazil or some Arab cultures may be even more expressive than Italians but handle confrontation very differently.
Colleagues from India or East Asian cultures may find open disagreement overwhelming or inappropriate.
I recently experienced this again while traveling in Thailand. I was surprised and honestly annoyed by how impossible it is get a clear “no.” Instead, refusals were phrased in ways that sounded like a “yes,” which was incredibly confusing to me.
The book helped me see that this wasn’t dishonesty or avoidance but a deeply ingrained cultural approach to harmony and face-saving.
Same Same, But very different
The main takeaway of the book is that
We are all the same and we are all very different.
Individual personality matters a lot. But cultural traits absolutely play a role, often subconsciously.
Leading international teams feels to me like another level of situational leadership: understand, adapt, and make the implicit explicit.
Situational leadership is the idea that there is no single “best” leadership style. Effective leaders continuously adapt their approach (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating) based on context, the people involved, their experience, the situation, and the environment.
Leading international teams simply adds another dimension to this: culture. What motivates, reassures, or challenges someone in one cultural context may confuse or discourage someone in another. The core skill, then, is not knowing all cultures perfectly, but being curious, adaptable, and willing to adjust your default behavior.
This also means practising humility, especially when pointing out the idiosyncrasies of other cultures, while acknowledging our own.
"They" are not
- Rigid: they value structure
- Disorganised: they operate in flexible time
- Unreliable: they prioritize relationships
- Confrontational: they separate ideas from people
Labelling people based on our own cultural lens is easy but dangerous.
From Awareness to Practice
Awareness alone is not enough. What really matters is collectively discussing and agreeing on how we work together. This book showed me that talking about these differences explicitly as a team is crucial.
I’ve used Team Canvases (sometimes called Team Charters) many times to define vision, purpose, roles, and stakeholders. But I never thought of using them to align on
- Communication styles
- Feedback expectations
- Meeting norms
- Decision-making
- Disagreement and escalation
Although recently, I’ve also introduced Manual of Me / Personal Readmes to support onboarding and mutual understanding. Now I see how well these practices complement the ideas from The Culture Map.
I think in the near future I will start introducing in 1:1s the book and the 8 dimensions of the culture map and then have a team session to discuss altogheter and position ourselves on the culture map. I found a great Miro Template to facilitate the session and I will likely update this post with some sort of form/cheat sheet to facilitate the discussion.
Final Thoughts
The Culture Map is an outstanding book that should be on the shelf of anyone working with or within international teams.
It doesn’t give simple answers but it provides us with a shared language to talk about differences without judgment.
And sometimes, that alone can save you from yet another meeting where everyone leaves slightly confused, mildly offended, and convinced the others are just… weird.
Highly recommended.
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