We had a seminar on intercultural competence this week, to help us at the registration office better understand where certain baffling or irritating behaviors from certain groups of international students may come from and help us deal with them better.
It wasn't about "x culture does y thing so you react in z way" and more about "this is how every person internalizes their culture, what aspects make up a person's culture, and how everyone expresses that cultural understanding differently - and thus also perceives other behaviors through that lens".
It was very interesting, to be honest, because some things, as obvious as they seem once we heard them, we never quite... considered before.
And though the teacher didn't go "x culture does y thing", she did give us some broader examples of "many cultures handle this in that way".
One thing she pointed out in particular is that Germans stand out and are an outlier with our direct and blunt behavior. This is something I have noticed a little startled before, particularly watching American cooking competitions with German participants, because what was completely normal behavior from the German participant to me was often read as incredibly rude by the American participants.
The teacher gave some examples of how things are handled in other cultures - that criticizing something/someone is often handled through eye-contact, body-language, facial expressions and what I call fluff words, i.e. instead of directly saying "this was bad/wrong and this is how it could be improved", you fill that sentence up with empty nice words to soften the blow, to the point of making the critic near impossible to spot, and a heavy overlap between interpersonal relationships and the work one does (i.e. criticizing someone's work being taken as a critic on the person themselves).
And while we were told not to judge other cultures, I can't help but think of that as an absolute nightmare. If that works for other people, especially on a grand social scale as a country's culture, that is wonderful for them, but I think having to do an elaborate social cue dance to get my point across and having to decipher multiple levels of non-direct non-verbal cues to understand what someone is trying to convey would absolutely be a circle of hell to me, personally.
I'd rather go up to my colleague and say "Hey, the way you handled that wasn't great, let's try doing it this other way next time" and they will nod and they will understand both what I wanted and they will also understand that this ain't personal, it's purely about work.
But I suppose I do understand why Germans are seen as "rude" then by people who do come from a culture that requires critic to be delivered in subtle, indirect and dressed-up-nice ways. Being direct is more harsh than that and harshness is easily read as rudeness.
