Leadership & Lessons on Working Across Different Cultures
Hyundai: Kia Design Innovation Internship Reflections
I spent the past two months interning for Hyundai’s Kia Design Innovation Group in Seoul, Korea. The experience was as professionally enriching as it was personally eye-opening.
Leaders who value their people
Among the various lessons I learned at Kia, I saw firsthand, how powerful leaders lead with empathy, humility, and integrity.
At Kia, the team leaders I worked with were proactive in listening to and helping their team members. They take each member’s obstacle as their own. The executives were empathetic and responsive. They treat their teams with respect and look at personal results holistically, considering the constraints, resources, and players involved in the process. With them, gratitude for others’ efforts was a constant mention, and taking credit for the self was a rare occurrence if ever.
I often read about great leadership practices and to see them operate in person was both inspiring and exhilarating. In that environment, I felt energized to give back to the team and worked diligently to craft meaningful results. When leaders respect and care for their teams generously, trust, loyalty, and commitment are naturally cultivated. I left Korea feeling something stirring in me. After experiencing such a collaborative culture, my appetite for synergetic teams and leaders only grew and I am eager for a chance to return to Kia for more.
Working across different cultures
I recommend everyone to take the chance if they can to work in a different culture for a period of time. Visiting Korea as a worker rather than a tourist allowed me to experience the nuances in day-to-day language, behaviors, and mindsets that I would not have otherwise been exposed to. The adaptations I had to make to better respond to the environment I was in became valuable assets in my professional toolbox. One amazing resource I encountered while searching for answers in Korea was Eric Meyer’s The Culture Map. In the book, Meyer provides perspectives and guides to help decode work cultures across the globe as well as field-tested frameworks on how to work internationally.
Some tools from the book that helped me were the guidelines on how different cultures express opinions and provide negative feedback. I first encountered them after I received a mid-term review that I couldn’t entirely decipher. In America, I was used to clear and exaggerated expressions and speech during critiques. Words such as “absolutely” and “strongly disagree” were frequently used in conversation. In contrast, when showing my mid-term work in Korea, I found most of my co-workers’ expressions to be composed and their languages neutral. I couldn’t tell how people were feeling about my work during and after the discussion. Having rarely experienced this, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. When I read Meyer’s book, the reasons for my impression of the review became clear.
Meyer points out that different cultures have different ideas of what constitutes good communication. “The United States is the lowest-context culture in the world…” In America, good communication is defined as “precise, simple, and clear, ” it is the communicator’s job to make sure the listener understands the message. Whereas in high-context cultures like Korea, Japan, and Indonesia, “good communication is nuanced and layered. Messages are both spoken and read between the lines,” they are “often implied but not plainly expressed”. In these cultures, the listener is as important as the communicator, they have to listen carefully to interpret the message. Below is a graph that positions different countries on the high context vs low context communication scale. Importantly, the scales have to be viewed with the viewer’s relative positions in mind (for an American, UK’s communication style may come across as high-context, while for a Chinese, it is extremely low-context).
Each culture also gives negative feedback differently and independent of their high or low context culture. While the USA may be direct and clear in communication, it is less comfortable with confrontations than countries like France, Germany, and Russia. Therefore while Americans are open to giving negative feedback at work, they often apply the rule of three positives first following one negative when it comes to criticism. At the same time, Korea is low context and low confrontation and therefore people do not often provide negative or positive feedback explicitly in public. This may still differ in circumstances as Korea is also more hierarchical in the “egalitarian vs hierarchical” leading scale, which will affect the perception of negative feedback depending on the organizational hierarchy it comes from (more on this can be found in the book).
While there are personality factors at play, culture plays a bigger role in how we communicate in the workplace. Having a base understanding of how these scales and cultural backgrounds work together allowed me to form a clearer picture of how I communicate and see things, as well as how I can better interpret the responses to my presentation. I took the book’s recommendation and used the scales as a reference when trying to interpret the feedback given to me, and shared with my co-workers the different communication styles we may have. The team leaders and members were extremely responsive and kind. I was touched when, for my final presentation to the team, they tailored their responses to the communication style I was used to and offered me especially clear feedback filled with direct constructive criticisms. Their generosity helped me improve my final result tremendously.
This story alone is one example of how working in another culture helped me grow professionally. I recommend reading The Culture Map if you find yourself on an international team!
Thank You!
A HUGE thank you to the amazing people I worked with at Kia Design Innovation and to the various friends I made at Hyundai at large. Without them, this experience would not have been as fruitful and enjoyable as it had been. Thank you to my mentor Kyungmin Lee and sub-mentor Jieun Bae for guiding me throughout the project.
Thank you to Won-Kyu Kang for inviting me to join the team and for the amazing support offered throughout my internship. Thank you to Karim Habib for the engaging conversations and for introducing me to meaningful opportunities. Thank you both for cultivating such an enjoyable culture for me to grow in for the past 2 months! It was truly a blast!
