)
Cross-Cultural Teams: Communication, Initiative, and Decisions
Collaborative post with Culture-Inc.
The Dutch labour market has become markedly international. Intelligence Group, a labour-market research firm, estimates that 20 to 25 percent of people working in the Netherlands do not speak Dutch, close to one in four.
Yet, the same firm notes, few organisations have adapted how they recruit or run their teams to a workforce this international, and those that leave these workers out of their recruitment and retention plans put their own competitiveness and continuity at risk. The international team is not something most Dutch organisations are still preparing for; it is the team they already have. What stays open is how it works: how it communicates, collaborates and reaches decisions.
To see what that looks like from the inside, we sat down with Esther Janssen, managing director of Culture-Inc., who works with Dutch teams that have internationalised. What follows draws on both her experience and the research.
What Changes When a Team Becomes International?
The CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, has looked at exactly this question. Its conclusion is that culturally diverse teams bring fresh perspectives and creativity to an organisation, and at the same time raise the risk of conflict as values and attitudes clash. Which of the two dominates depends on how sensitively the team is managed.
Esther sees the shift arrive gradually. In many Dutch companies the workforce internationalises faster than the way of working adapts to it. Teams start out bilingual, then settle on English as the working language, and eventually the organisation adopts English as policy. In multinationals this is already standard; in SMEs and internationalising companies it is still a process. What surfaces in that process tends to show up in three places: how people communicate, who is expected to take the initiative, and how decisions get made.
Communication: Directness Read as Bluntness
Language is where it shows first. A study of fifteen multinational teams across three German corporations found that language barriers held back trust between colleagues, and unlike most differences within a team, the effect ran in one direction only: negative. Less fluent colleagues are read as less capable than they are, and even silence gets misread: a colleague who says nothing in a meeting may lack the language, may agree, or may disagree, and all three readings are plausible.
Beyond fluency, there is style. Dutch teams tend to communicate and give feedback directly, Esther notes, more so than many other national and professional cultures. A new international colleague has to get used to a more straightforward way of getting the message across, and may find it challenging if their own preference is to preserve harmony or to give more context before landing a point. The message is not meant unkindly; it is simply delivered with less padding than they expect.
Initiative: Who Is Expected to Find the Answer
The second place it shows is around initiative. Many Dutch organisations work in an egalitarian way: leaders expect team members to find their own solutions and to show initiative, while a newcomer may expect clearer direction from a manager. Neither expectation is wrong, but when they meet unspoken, the newcomer can read the space they have been given as a lack of guidance, and the manager can read the wait for instructions as a lack of drive.
Decisions: Disagreement as Engagement, Not Defiance
The third is decision-making. Dutch teams often decide by consensus rather than by a manager deciding alone, and team members are expected to contribute their views before anything is settled. For someone used to more hierarchical decision-making, that takes adjustment.
It cuts the other way too. A non-Dutch leader can feel undermined when Dutch team members openly disagree in a meeting, or show reluctance to act on an instruction without discussing it first. Esther reads it differently. When a Dutch colleague says “I disagree”, it rarely means they are discrediting the manager. More often it means they care about the topic and are after the best outcome, and they will usually follow the objection with alternatives. Taken that way, it reads as engagement rather than defiance.
Research in Harvard Business Review found what separated the teams that worked from those that did not: the ones that fared best recognised the cultural root of the friction early and dealt with it deliberately, setting shared norms rather than mistaking the problem for a personality clash.
What Makes an International Team Work
That is the pattern across the research and the practice alike: the teams that work are not the ones with no friction, but the ones where someone took the friction seriously enough to manage it early, before it hardened into how people saw each other.
Esther sees the same thing. Diverse teams, she notes, consistently outperform homogeneous ones, but only when managers know how to work with the diversity in front of them. That is why an international team needs extra care, from the manager and from the team itself. Cross-cultural competence is a critical success factor for any international professional and team. Many organisations discover this only once problems surface, though more are now addressing cultural alignment early rather than waiting for something to break. Which leaves one question worth asking early: is anyone in your organisation actually managing how these teams work?
)
)