Even if you’re in an Anglophone country, you’ll need to be “bilingual” between local and tech-startup norms. At Wave, our internal culture emphasizes honesty, transparency and autonomy, which is very different from a typical, say, Senegalese work environment.
I’m curious to hear more about this. Can you give some examples of how the norms differ?
More generally, how feasible is it to export Silicon Valley’s high product standards?
Examples (mostly from Senegal since that’s where I have the most experience, caveat that these are generalizations, all of them could be confounded by other stuff, the world is complicated, etc.):
Most Senegalese companies seem to place a much stronger emphasis on bureaucracy and paperwork.
When interacting with potential business partners in East Africa, we eventually realized that when we told them our user/transaction numbers, they often assumed that we were lying unless the claim was endorsed by someone they had a trusted connection to.
In the US, we have fully transparent salaries (everyone at the company can look up anyone else’s salary in a spreadsheet). We weren’t able to extend this norm to our Senegalese subsidiary because it caused too much interpersonal conflict. (This was at least partly the result of us not putting enough investment into making the salary scale work for everyone, but my understanding is that my Senegalese coworkers were pessimistic about bringing back salary transparency even if we fixed that.)
In Senegal people seem less comfortable by default expressing disagreement with someone above them in the hierarchy. (As a funny example, I’ve had a few colleagues who I would ask yes-or-no questions and they would answer “Yes” followed by an explanation of why the answer is no.)
Exporting different norms is quite hard at scale. You need to hire people who are the closest to the norms that you want, but they’ll still probably be fare away so you’ll also have to invest a lot in propagating the norms you want, which only really works well 1-on-1. When we needed to scale our local Senegal team quickly we ended up having to compromise on some norms to do so (e.g. salary transparency, amount of paperwork).
The book The Culture Map explores these sorts of problems, comparing many cultures’ norms and advising on how to bridge the differences.
In Senegal people seem less comfortable by default expressing disagreement with someone above them in the hierarchy. (As a funny example, I’ve had a few colleagues who I would ask yes-or-no questions and they would answer “Yes” followed by an explanation of why the answer is no.)
Some advice it gives for this particular example (at least in several ‘strong hierarchy’ cultures), is instead of a higher-ranking asking direct questions of lower-ranking people, the boss can ask a team of lower-ranked people to work together to submit a proposal, where “who exactly criticized which thing” is a bit obfuscated.
When interacting with potential business partners in East Africa, we eventually realized that when we told them our user/transaction numbers, they often assumed that we were lying unless the claim was endorsed by someone they had a trusted connection to.
This is confusing. Did they just think you were scammers, not a real business at all? Or did they think of you as a business that was suspiciously quick to share this information, and trying to… I don’t know, make a power play? Something else?
I’m guessing that they assumed we were exaggerating the numbers in order to make them more interested in working with us. The fact that you’re so ready to call anyone who lies about user numbers a “scammer” may itself be part of the cultural difference here :)
Oh, I see that I was confused: I was thinking of a “user number” and a “transaction number” as things related to Wave’s bank account—as though you were trying to share information for something like direct deposit and being accused of lying. The quote makes much more sense if it’s “number of users” and “number of transactions”.
I’m curious to hear more about this. Can you give some examples of how the norms differ?
More generally, how feasible is it to export Silicon Valley’s high product standards?
Examples (mostly from Senegal since that’s where I have the most experience, caveat that these are generalizations, all of them could be confounded by other stuff, the world is complicated, etc.):
Most Senegalese companies seem to place a much stronger emphasis on bureaucracy and paperwork.
When interacting with potential business partners in East Africa, we eventually realized that when we told them our user/transaction numbers, they often assumed that we were lying unless the claim was endorsed by someone they had a trusted connection to.
In the US, we have fully transparent salaries (everyone at the company can look up anyone else’s salary in a spreadsheet). We weren’t able to extend this norm to our Senegalese subsidiary because it caused too much interpersonal conflict. (This was at least partly the result of us not putting enough investment into making the salary scale work for everyone, but my understanding is that my Senegalese coworkers were pessimistic about bringing back salary transparency even if we fixed that.)
In Senegal people seem less comfortable by default expressing disagreement with someone above them in the hierarchy. (As a funny example, I’ve had a few colleagues who I would ask yes-or-no questions and they would answer “Yes” followed by an explanation of why the answer is no.)
Exporting different norms is quite hard at scale. You need to hire people who are the closest to the norms that you want, but they’ll still probably be fare away so you’ll also have to invest a lot in propagating the norms you want, which only really works well 1-on-1. When we needed to scale our local Senegal team quickly we ended up having to compromise on some norms to do so (e.g. salary transparency, amount of paperwork).
The book The Culture Map explores these sorts of problems, comparing many cultures’ norms and advising on how to bridge the differences.
Some advice it gives for this particular example (at least in several ‘strong hierarchy’ cultures), is instead of a higher-ranking asking direct questions of lower-ranking people, the boss can ask a team of lower-ranked people to work together to submit a proposal, where “who exactly criticized which thing” is a bit obfuscated.
This is confusing. Did they just think you were scammers, not a real business at all? Or did they think of you as a business that was suspiciously quick to share this information, and trying to… I don’t know, make a power play? Something else?
I’m guessing that they assumed we were exaggerating the numbers in order to make them more interested in working with us. The fact that you’re so ready to call anyone who lies about user numbers a “scammer” may itself be part of the cultural difference here :)
Oh, I see that I was confused: I was thinking of a “user number” and a “transaction number” as things related to Wave’s bank account—as though you were trying to share information for something like direct deposit and being accused of lying. The quote makes much more sense if it’s “number of users” and “number of transactions”.