A few years ago, after delivering a workshop in Germany, I received feedback during the lunch break.
“You could have done this better. Next time, I expect more structure in your flow.”
No warm-up. No small talk. Just the observation and it landed like a cold shower.
A few months later, I facilitated a similar session in Italy. The feedback came wrapped very differently.
“It was wonderful! Maybe just a tiny thing, next time you might consider slightly changing the order. But it was great!”
Same message, completely different packaging.
One felt like a correction. The other felt like a compliment with a small note folded inside it.
Neither person was being difficult. Neither was being evasive.
They were simply following the rules of feedback they’d grown up with, rules so familiar to each of them that neither had ever thought to make them explicit.
That contrast has stayed with me. Because it wasn’t really about feedback. It was about a word.
“We need people to be more direct.” I’ve heard this sentence many times, in many organisations. Almost every time, it meant something different.
In one company, being direct meant speaking up during meetings.
In another, it meant giving critical feedback immediately, regardless of who was in the room.
Some leaders associated directness with honesty. Others associated it with efficiency.
Nobody questioned the word itself. And that’s exactly where the misunderstanding started.
Words like direct, respectful, transparent or collaborative sound universal. In reality, they carry different weight depending on where you learned them.
Not only national culture. Organisational culture. Professional culture.
Even team culture, built up meeting by meeting over years.
When people use the same words but attach different meanings to them, communication becomes surprisingly fragile. Everyone believes they agree. Until behaviour reveals they never did.
Erin Meyer‘s Culture Map gives this a useful shape: some cultures separate the message from the person delivering it, others don’t. Neither is wrong. But sitting in the same meeting, they read each other’s signals completely differently.
I’ve sat with multicultural teams discussing exactly this.
One participant was certain that honest feedback should always be immediate.
Another believed giving critical feedback in front of colleagues was disrespectful, almost careless.
Neither person was wrong.
This is why intercultural communication is much more than learning facts about countries. It’s about becoming curious before becoming certain.
Instead of asking:“Who is right?”
a better question is: “What assumptions are we bringing into this conversation?”
That small shift changes everything.
People stop defending their own style and start exploring someone else’s.
Trust grows, quietly, because curiosity replaces judgement.
International teams don’t need everyone to communicate in exactly the same way. They need shared agreements. Clear expectations about how feedback is given and received.
And enough psychological safety to talk openly about differences before they turn into frustration, the kind that never gets said out loud, but slowly erodes how people work together.
Communication becomes easier the moment people stop assuming everyone gives the same meaning to the same words.
One habit helps more than any framework here. Before a feedback conversation starts, not after it goes wrong, ask directly: “How do you prefer to receive feedback? Straight to the point, or with more context first?”
It takes ten seconds. And it does something most feedback training doesn’t: it moves the cultural translation upfront, before anyone has to guess.
Reflection
The next time someone in your team says, “We need to communicate more directly,”pause for a moment.
Ask what direct actually means to them, specifically.
You might discover that everyone in the room has a different answer.
Noemi Salamone works with international teams navigating change, communication and collaboration across cultures.
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