Do you want to promote feedback? Good call: in a study conducted by leadership development consultancy Zenger Folkman, 94% of the 2,700 respondents thought that well-presented corrective feedback improved their performance.

Do you also want to enhance the diversity within your teams? Indeed, that is the direction history is moving in. And the company has everything to gain by fostering a more varied mix of viewpoints.

But beware: combining these two ambitions raises some difficulties. A criticism or an advice expressed by a person from another culture often engenders defensive reactions. We feel less secure with someone whose codes we do not master. For example, the American culture seeks to preserve self-esteem, thus the emphasis placed on positivity. An American will therefore be easily rattled by criticism from a colleague hailing from a more direct culture, such as Germany or France—whereas Asian cultures, based on less explicit communication, will find “American-style” criticism brutal…

One solution consists in implementing structured feedback loops, in pairs—or, ideally, collectively, if the team members know one another well.  This positions feedback as a legitimate element of cooperation, and not as an aggression. What’s more, the reciprocity of exchanges helps everyone to better account for the culture of their interlocutors.

Source:  When Diversity Meets Feedback, Erin Meyer, Harvard Business Review, September-October 2023.