Communicating Across Teams & Org Types

None of that is written down anywhere. It's why good designers spend their first six months in a new job being less effective than they were at the last one. They're communicating perfectly well for a place they no longer work.

This module is about reading the room at the level of the whole organization. What the local rules are, how they change as a company outgrows the number of people anybody can track, and what survives when nobody shares a building.

Reading a Communication Culture

Every organization has a communication culture, and almost none of it is written down anywhere you can find it.

It's the set of unspoken rules about how things really get said and decided here. Break them and you're marked as somebody who doesn't get it, usually long before anybody could tell you which rule you broke. Most of it is readable in your first month if you know what to look at.

The Four Axes

Four questions tell you most of what you need.

• Formal or informal: considered emails, or fast messages with emoji? There's a dress code for writing, and nobody will state it.
• Sync or async: does work happen in meetings, or in documents and threads people answer when they get to them?
• Hierarchical or flat: can you message a VP directly, or does everything route through your manager?
• Fast or deliberate: are decisions made in the room, or do they need a doc, a review and three sign-offs?

None of these is right or wrong. They're the local weather, and you dress for it.

The Cultural Layer Underneath

Some of what looks like company culture is national culture arriving at work. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall named the distinction in Beyond Culture in 1976, splitting communication into high context and low context.

In a low-context culture, meaning sits in the words. Say what you mean, put it in writing, and directness reads as clarity. Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the US are usually placed at this end.

In a high-context culture, much of the meaning sits in the relationship, the setting and what goes unsaid. Japan, China, Korea and much of the Middle East and Latin America sit here. A direct written "no" that feels efficient at one end reads as rude at the other.

Because of that gap, the same behaviors get misread in both directions. Four differences cause most of it:

• Directness: a Dutch colleague's blunt critique is respect for your time. A Japanese colleague's "that would be difficult" is a no.
• Formality: first names and jokes are normal in some places and presumptuous in others, especially upward.
• Yes: in some cultures yes means "I heard you" rather than "I agree", so check for a commitment rather than an acknowledgment.
• Time: a deadline is a firm commitment in some places and a strong intention in others, which is Hall's monochronic and polychronic split from The Silent Language.

Hall's own caution applies. These are tendencies across populations, and the person in front of you is an individual who may sit anywhere.

Find Where Decisions Actually Get Made

This is the most valuable thing to learn and rarely the official answer.

A decision might happen in the meeting, or it might be settled in a hallway, a DM, or a pre-meeting, with the official meeting acting as a rubber stamp. Make your case only in the official forum and you may be arguing after the decision was made somewhere you weren't.

So watch who talks before the big calls, whose opinion visibly moves a room, and where the actual yes comes from. Then make your case there, early.

Decode It Fast When You're New

You don't have to absorb this by osmosis over a year.

• Watch the senior people you respect. How they communicate and with whom, because they've already worked it out.
• Ask directly. "How do decisions usually get made here?" is a sharp question rather than a naive one, and people enjoy answering it.
• Notice what gets rewarded. The thorough doc everybody reads, or the quick demo that wins the room, tells you what this place actually values.

Pro tip: In your first month, ask three different people how a specific recent decision got made. Where the three accounts disagree, you've found the gap between the official process and the real one, which is the thing worth knowing.