We Tried to Tell You But You Weren't Listening!
"It's so frustrating. They say yes when they mean no. They won't tell us when there are problems. It's just hard to get a straight answer from them."
– Common complaint of Americans engaged in cross-cultural ministry partnerships
Few things in life are more challenging to manage than conflict. But even fewer things are more common. We don't always agree. We want our way, and we want to preserve our relationships with others who disagree. That's a recipe for trouble. It doesn't matter how close we are, how much we love each other, or how similar our thinking is; we still won't always agree. Conflict is part of life and is never easy, especially with people who are important to us. How can we express disagreement, hurts, unmet needs, or raise hard questions without breaking relationships? That is a perennial challenge everywhere all the time.
As difficult as this is in all relationships, it is even more difficult in cross-cultural relationships. People in other cultures don't manage conflict the way our culture does. Add to that an imbalance in power that is common between the partners in such relationships, and it gets even more challenging. Not only do different personality types have different styles of conflict management, but each culture has its own unspoken rules for how conflict should be managed. What is considered honest and kind in one culture can be seen as deceptive or cruel in another culture.
ICS Inventory, LLC has developed an Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory which is very helpful, and you may want to have them help you learn your preferred style of conflict management. However, I want to share some of the core concepts on which it is based that can help us avoid misreading the signals of people who bring different understandings and values to the unavoidable problem of conflict. There is way more depth to these issues than I can capture here, but I want to draw on a few things that I think could be helpful.
Cultural differences in conflict management can be primarily captured on two sliding scales: Direct to Indirectand Emotionally Restrained to Emotionally Expressive. Overall, the business culture and majority culture in America prefer to be direct and emotionally restrained when we express disagreement. However, this varies some by regions and sub-cultures in the U.S. (My wife comes from Southern Mississippi, and I'm from West Texas. She grew up with a less direct style of conflict than I did).
The majority conflict style of Americans calls for people to say what they mean but keep their cool. We think this is the best way to preserve good relationships. This is not typical of many other cultures, especially outside of the western nations. Most of the world's population lives in cultures that tend more to the indirect end of the scale. To such people, Americans often come across as rude, distrusting, and needlessly disrespectful of the dignity and emotions of other people.
Because many cultures express conflict indirectly, Americans often miss the attempts of our cross-cultural partners to communicate when they disagree with us. In other cultures, "yes" may mean yes, and "yes" may mean a respectful no. It all depends on how or when the yes is said. Context and tone are everything. But people who don't follow the context clues and don't catch intonation differences miss what is being said yet is unspoken. It is easy for people from direct cultures to accuse people from indirect cultures of being evasive, deceptive, or even dishonest when they may be telling us exactly what we want to know indirectly. We just miss it because we don't understand how they communicate.
Also, direct but more emotionally expressive cultures may come across as hot-headed and dangerous to many Americans' direct but cool style. It may appear that they are about to get violent when they are just expressing differences of opinion in ways that are natural and unthreatening in their culture. Again, we easily misread the context and tone. Our preference for emotional restraint can come across as cold, calculating, and uncaring in such cultures.
There is no simple solution to these cultural differences. However, the first step is to become aware that substantial cultural differences in how we communicate dramatically impact how we manage conflict. Second, it is essential that we know our own preferred conflict resolution style. Being self-aware is not a simple step. It varies significantly from person to person and among regions and subcultures in the U.S. It can be hard for us to see that we have a personality- and culture-shaped conflict style instead of just wanting to "do things the right way," as if our preferences set the standard. This is one of the logs that can get in our eye and obstruct our vision. The third step is allowing people to be themselves and not demand they adopt our preferred conflict management style for us to treat them as honest and honorable partners. We need to learn how to listen to them just as much as they need to learn to speak to us and vice versa. We should never expect others to make all the cultural adaptations. That is an expression of superiority that goes counter to the gospel.
If we work in other cultures, we need to learn how people there think, express themselves, and deal with differences of opinion. It is unfair to accuse people of being dishonest when they have been telling us something we can't hear because we don't understand how they communicate. Understanding each other is much more complicated than translating words. The gospel calls on all of us to cross the cultural gap and enter other people's worlds for the mission's sake, just as Jesus took on human form, language, customs, and communication styles.
One thing we can always trust to help in any cross-cultural situation: Humility. Humility is patient, kind, long-suffering, respectful, and sacrificial. It is one of the core traits of love modeled by the Almighty God himself. If Jesus can humble himself, enter our world, and adapt to us, surely, we can be humble enough to adapt ourselves to our global kingdom partners. and We need to do the hard work of learning to communicate in and through conflict in ways that make sense to others and honor them as people equally made in the image of our common Father.