Bridging the cultural divide

Transcript coming soon.

Speaker 1: I was gonna explain that, but I'm glad you did because it seems I have more time. So this picture here is actually my life the last two weeks before getting here. We just finished our NGINX, our our second year NGINX comp, and it was a a success. I'm gonna say success. And this is a lot of our our team.

Speaker 1: So we have a very unique office. Half of our office is in Moscow, and the other half is in San Francisco. Then we've got a couple people sprinkled all over. We've got an Australian CEO and a couple of people in The UK. My boss works in Seattle, so it's a little bit hectic, especially with time zones.

Speaker 1: So one thing that was really interesting about the conference was actually that as I was listening to the keynote, all the keynotes, I realized that we didn't have a single person with an American accent, which was pretty cool for a conference in San Francisco, I think. The only person with the American accent was actually the person that was an MC, so that was cool. So I'm Shannon, and before joining NGINX as a developer advocate, I was a software engineer for about a year, and then I missed people, so I'm here. And before that, actually have a bit of a strange background. I went to uni and studied recreation.

Speaker 1: And if you're wondering what somebody does when you study recreation, you're not alone. So the classes that I studied consisted of leadership theory, group dynamics in psychology, and business strategy, which is interesting blend of things. So enough about me. Let's talk about you. I'm assuming that you're here because you may have or you might anticipate having some problems with working with diverse communities or time shifted work as well.

Speaker 1: So does anybody have an example of some of the problems that are facing you working with a distributed team? Okay. You in the back. Shout out loud. Terrible audio visual connections, people writing on whiteboards, promising to send this light, making meetings at dinner time.

Speaker 1: Yes. All of those things. So I noticed after talking to a lot of people about their problems and hearing from, you know, my coworkers that a lot of these problems tend to boil down to two different types, logistic problems and strategic problems. And when I say logistic, I mean those sorts of things like, you Slacked me at midnight. What the f, man?

Speaker 1: Seriously? I'm not gonna respond. Or strategic problems such as the difference in the notion of time. And then there's two common themes as well, there's communication and time, and other stuff too, but mostly it boils down into this. And unfortunately since there is no app for managing cultural differences, I'm going to attempt in the next fifteen minutes to go over a bunch of different theories, leadership theories, motivational theories, communication theory, and play theory, and then explain some of the cultural differences of those theories so that we can then apply that to something that you can actually use.

Speaker 1: So let's do that. So the first thing that you want to think about is why. Why do people do the things that they do? And I'm sorry if I'm saying stuff that you all know already, but a lot of the or all of the motivation can be boiled down into intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. So while I'd like to think that all of you are here because you want to listen to me out of your own volition, I know that some of you are also here because I bribed you to be here, so that's an extrinsic sort of motivation.

Speaker 1: I will let you free eventually. So building off of that, or actually a precursor to that is this guy Maslow. Maslow recognized that a precursor to motivation is need, and he found that needs had a hierarchical nature, that you had to get your base needs met before you could move up the room to different needs. And any of you have been hungry, right, like you've been hungry before, but then you needed to look on your phone to find somewhere to eat. So obviously, Maz forgetting a few things because we all need WiFi.

Speaker 1: It's a big need. Otherwise known as Maslow is wrong. And it's actually well known that Maslow is wrong, but he's still taught, his stuff is still relied on because his theory, even though it's incorrect, is valuable. It's a good place to start to think about what are the needs of your community and your group. So you should start to challenge or think of all these theories or any social science theories.

Speaker 1: Don't take them all as facts, but think about how you can actually use them and accept that they're imperfect. There's a couple of other theories here that are newer and a little bit more interesting in my opinion. Perceived organizational support, which is that the idea that intrinsic motivation goes up with the belief that your company values you. So not whether or not they do value you, but whether you think they value you, which is interesting. And then organizational citizenship behavior, which is the precursor to advocacy programs, and this is when or the idea that intrinsic motivation will go up if your company does something above and beyond the required or perceived requirement to make you feel special or make you feel that they're being thoughtful.

Speaker 1: So since I've talked to you for a little while and you're probably really exhausted from lunch and having to listen to a bunch of people talk, I'm gonna have you do something obnoxious. So at the conference, at the NEXT Conf, we had been in training for about six hours, technical training, and it was exhausting, and it was really cold that day, and also all of these people, bless their heart, they tried to pay attention, but you can only pay attention for for so long. So I wanted to come up with something on the fly to get people reengaged and awake after six hours of being in the cold and listening to somebody drumming on about technical stuff. So I'm gonna try to recreate some of that here. But first, I need somebody I need your help.

Speaker 1: Can you raise your hand if you are an introvert? Anybody an introvert? Okay. Perfect. Can k.

Speaker 1: Keep keep keep your hands raised, please. Thank you. Okay. Who of you is willing to do something outside your comfort zone? Go ahead.

Speaker 1: Sweet. You have been volunteered. Come on up here, please. Now the rest of you, I need two other volunteers, people that are hands. Sweet.

Speaker 1: One more. Somebody you're gonna you can come hang out here with me up on the stage. One more person that is really excited and definitely an extrovert and sweet. Come on up. Okay.

Speaker 1: So we're gonna play a game. It's called Zip Zap Soft. Have you ever heard this game before? Haven't. You wanna swap me out?

Speaker 1: No. No. That's perfect. Come on. It's it's better if you know how to play it.

Speaker 1: Come on. You guys take care. Okay. So those of you I want that are not playing, just watch for a minute, and you wanna get kind of facing each other in a circle. So the way that we play this game is zip, zap, zob, is that you say zip and you point to the person on your side.

Speaker 1: What side is that? Left side. I'm not dyslexic. Left side. Okay.

Speaker 1: Zip. And then the other side is zap. Oh, sorry. Zip, zap, zap. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You said you played it. Okay.

Speaker 1: Zip, zap, zap. Wait. There's no one in front. Like, there's no one in front? Zap.

Speaker 1: Andrew, come up here. I can't math today, guys. Sorry. Okay. There you go.

Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. Cool. Okay. So and then you're gonna get slowly faster and faster and faster and faster until the the universe explodes.

Speaker 1: Okay. So I want you to start. Okay. Okay. Ready?

Speaker 1: One two three go. Stop. Stop. What's out? Out.

Speaker 1: Way too long. Try it again. That was a practice round, Practice round. All of you around. Okay.

Speaker 1: Let's play it again. Why don't you Yeah. One, two, three, stars. Really? Okay.

Speaker 1: Good. That's enough. So, actually, before I have you go, who how how did you feel when I called you? Need you for craps. Were you feeling anxious And did any of you guys have fun and enjoy it?

Speaker 1: Did you feel goofy? There were giggles. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody had one yet.

Speaker 1: Okay. What what about you guys in the audience? Did anybody get excited and want to come up and play? No. No.

Speaker 1: Way too cool for that. So you guys can go down. So you can learn a lot about somebody when you engage them in play. So I wanted to bring up one of my favorite theories of play flow. So if you look at this doctor who I'm not even gonna try to butcher his name in theory, you can read it.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Got it. He found this this pattern, if you can map the challenge level with the skill level of an activity, so the challenge of the individual, the skill of the activity, you can see this apparent kind of pattern here that if you have a low skill level and a low challenge, people are apathetic. If you have a high challenge but a low skill level, people get anxious. And if you can get kind of a high skill level and a high challenge, you can get people into flow or in it, you know, like when you're coding and then it's ten hours later and you forgot that you should eat food because you're a human, that's flow, which is great, it's where we wanna go.

Speaker 1: And then there's this other model that is drafted on top of it called the flow channel, and the the idea about the flow channel is this kind of boundary of flow that's acceptable, and that people cycle through it, and you can do that cycling to by increasing increasing the the challenge challenge of of the the the the activity activity or or decreasing decreasing or sorry, or sorry, increasing the skill. So as you get better, the skill becomes or the challenge becomes easier, and you have to change the challenge, and then you become more skilled. So knowing that, we can use that as a tool. But how does that play into a world that is so varied? One thing that might make some people uncomfortable might make other people not uncomfortable.

Speaker 1: So I'm gonna go over a couple of theories, or one theory actually, about cultural communication, and it's the Lewis model. Has anybody heard of Lewis model, cultural communication? Sweet one person. Okay. So this guy Lewis, he speaks 11 languages and he's lived all over the world, studied a lot of different cultures, and he noticed a pattern, and he picked out these three groups of cultures that had a lot of similarities and he grouped them together, linear active cultures, multi active cultures, and reactive cultures.

Speaker 1: Linear active cultures are let's see. A good example of a linear active culture is Brazil. I'm sorry. Germany, definitely not. Okay.

Speaker 1: So Germany is linear active, multi active is Brazil, and a reactive example would be Japan. And Doctor. Lewis would argue that by learning about these major groups and the traits that they share in common, you can actually become more adaptable to the cultures of those groups rather than trying to adopt a culture. So the focus is about adaptation, not about adoption. And one of the things that he talks about is the difference between concepts and notions.

Speaker 1: So concepts are universals, things like time or truth or the need for prioritization, but notions are the ways that cultures think about that universal thing. So some cultures will view time in a different way. So I've done business in Spain before and tried to go to a meeting on time only to find people two hours late and be told that's not atypical, it's normal, just handle it, but it's very different. And as you can see from the problem slide earlier on, it explains some of the problems we run into. So let's move on.

Speaker 1: So this is something that I poorly sketched out myself. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to make this into an actual three d model, but something I've done just for myself to conceptualize is to take the flow chart, so challenge and skill, and add a layer of cultural adaptation. So how well is this person aligned with the culture of the group or adapted to the culture of the group? And when you do that it creates this three d model where you can actually kind of point out types, right, and that is helpful for you in identifying symptoms of problems. So somebody that has high challenge, high skill, and high adaptation would be the yellow one that's all the way out in the front, and that's somebody that's an engaged leader.

Speaker 1: Whether or not they're intending to be a leader, the group is looking toward them, they respect them, and they seem to be excited about what they're doing. Those are people that actually make really excellent advocates. So those are people that you can connect with and then later on enlist for help. And then also, if you look at the other ones, there's different two major types that are outliers, the outsiders and then influencers. And on the other side of the spectrum, they can either be anxious, apathetic, or engaged or bored.

Speaker 1: And if you understand where, what problems people are having, where they fit on this, you can actually pair them with people that are complementary to them, and they'll be able to help each other provided they actually get along. So, yeah, so if you pair an engaged outsider, somebody that's got high skill level and high challenge but isn't well accepted or respond like I'm expected in the group, With somebody that's not very well challenged but is well respected in the group, then the outsider then gains the recognition or sorry, the the reputation from the person that's inside, and the person who isn't challenged enough, or sorry, isn't skilled enough can gain skill from the outsider. So how do we take this information and use it and make it helpful to you? So solving some of the easy problems, I use quotations because they're never actually easy problems, is that you can the first thing you need to do is build a frame, set rules together. You can do this unconsciously, but I would argue that you should try to have the awkward conversations and set things that are say things that are obvious or should be obvious.

Speaker 1: Isn't it interesting that common sense isn't common? What do you think is polite? Is it okay to do this? What should we do and what should we not do? And do that as painfully awkwardly as possible because awkwardness brings everyone together.

Speaker 1: And then pick the tools that you wanna use. So at NGNS, we use Slack, and it's known that Slack is asynchronous, so you're not always gonna get me immediately. So so it's okay to Slack me at midnight. We also use Asana, and there's some other debate about a couple of other tools that we're using. But I would so if you can pick the tools that you wanna use and then use them consistently, and that will definitely help solve a lot of these logistic problems, Stop trying to plan, like, the perfect system of how to have the perfect culture and start paying attention to what your culture actually looks like.

Speaker 1: It's really important to focus on becoming aware rather than what you think the future should look like, because that's how you can get there. And then find help. So this is the internal advocacy piece. Try to identify those people that are hubs in your community, the people that are well connected to the different, like, subgroups that you've got, and bring them under your wing. Start recognizing them and make them feel appreciated, and ask them for your help.

Speaker 1: So the strategic problems, solving them, is a little difficult, but you do have some tools, so I'll go over the tools that you have. One is to increase the skill level of the people that are anxious. So once you recognize those issues, you can you can do things like mentor them or give them more training or help, you know, coach them if they need or increase the challenge for somebody that's bored. So that's a really great option if you have two people on the other end of the spectrum to link people for peer mentorship. This gives the other person more responsibility and then helps the other person learn.

Speaker 1: And then this recognition piece is the advocacy piece as well. So using that original theory, the OCP theory, you can build out an internal advocacy program. I would argue it may be best in some situations to not do it, like, overtly, Just very subtly build your army of advocates within your organization. Make those connections that you're all really great at making, and get people on your side, and then connect them with other people. So and say thank you.

Speaker 1: That's that's the base thing. So so some of the things that we do at NGINX, I think we do really well, and I think we do them well by accident. So I'd like to just kind of point out those things so we can become more conscious and aware of that. One of the best things we do is stewardship of our culture. So I used to call it calling each other out culture.

Speaker 1: So when things go wrong or when something gets threatened in our culture, it seems like every person in the group actually feels comfortable enough to say, you know what? I'm not okay with that, or I don't like the way that you did that, and they're not afraid of injuring the rest of the group, which I think is a really great quality. It helps us to improve a lot. And then piggybacking on that is the commitment to quality. Everybody that comes to Oregon NGINX is really committed to doing a great job, and that's awesome to have.

Speaker 1: And we do a really good job about transparency as well, although that's something that you can always improve on, so I've also got at all the things that we can improve. And we're starting to develop a learning culture, and that's challenging, but very, very helpful. And a lot of the things that we can improve on are cultural awareness related, and one of them is a big tolerance for change. So understanding Moscow culture has been a really difficult thing for me not being in Moscow and not getting to see all of the office every day. But taking the initiative to understand what politeness is in Moscow culture and how it's different from the politeness in San Francisco Francisco has been really helpful for me understanding how people work together in the in the company, and I think that's something we can improve on as a company as well.

Speaker 1: And then the the last thing I'll note is that we were doing a company retreat on Friday before I left for here, and the people that were organizing it said, you know, something that we notice every time we do this activity, particularly with your company, is that the first question you have is how can I help you? And that's definitely part of the culture at NGINX, and I put it as things we can improve on actually because we're really bad at recognizing when we need things. So I think we need to improve a lot on self care. So those are some of the things that we're doing and a bunch of different theories. If you'd like to talk to me more, please do.

Speaker 1: I'm a nerd about this stuff, so come up to me or shame me on Twitter if you like.