When dealing with large or international projects, multiple nationalities, culture and behaviours start to play a role. And we, as a Project Manager, need to take these differences into account, else the risk of failure will increase dramatically. We all know or heard of projects that failed to limited communication, misalignment, unknown behaviour and habits.

In one of our last assignments, we came across the importance of keeping your eyes and ears open for behaviours not familiar to your own. The customer, a large, international organisation operating in the sustainability business, has different operational plants around the world. Supply of raw material as well as customers of the end products are located around the world. The company, head office located in the Nordics and partly owned by the government, has established a sound and profitable business model and is growing.

In international assignments we tend to start to do it our way, which can be helpful if the customer is not completely sure on the what, how and when. But in our (Dutch) culture, we tend to be quite blunt and straightforward. Which does not help to bring across the message or the impact we want to achieve. In this case, the customer needed to get acquainted to our way of communication. The level of trust, which needs to be established over time, was lacking due to the way we communicated. Up till the moment we started to produce the deliverables in time and according to the specifications….over a longer period of time. So, trust can be gained when you start to deliver even though from a communication level, both parties did not align.

This Nordics’ customer had also ways of working we needed to get familiar with. Most of the employees ‘took the afternoon off’ as we Dutch would say, when the customer was unavailable late afternoon. Furthermore, the less open and direct communication was difficult. In meetings everyone was fine and happy, but afterwards we received feedback via management of all things not going well in their opinion. Instead of directing the communication to us, people started to complain to their line managers, from a cultural aspect pretty normal behaviour to them.

Several more differences became visible during the project. Could we have foreseen most of them? Yes. There are plenty of books, (online) articles and websites available. One of my favourites is Hofstede’s Insights — Country Comparison (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/). Easy to use and gives a first indication of the possible differences that need project attention. Select two countries to compare and see the differences.

Is it a mistake that we did not see these differences in advance? Not necessarily, we can never foresee all differences upfront and estimate the impact. Cultural differences, for example, will never be homogeneous across a group of people. The actual impact needs to be experienced in each and any (new) interaction. As a project manager, we always need to be flexible and adjust according to the situation.

For this project, after a rough start but putting in the hard work and effort, it turned out we found a way to work together. How? We established a more open way of communicating, started to structurally collect (un)solicited feedback, checked the ‘mood’ of project members using regular surveys and started to connect face to face once COVID-19 restrictions lifted. Several small adjustments turned out to have a great impact. Is it possible to create a standard way of working out of this for future projects? No, but it will be added to my expertise toolkit that I can use for future projects. Situational awareness and the ability to react to it is one of the greatest assets of people working in the business transformation area.