5.3Facing culture in consulting assignments

The consultant’s behaviour

A great deal of useful guidance is available on how consultants should behave when operating in other cultures. Most of it concerns interpersonal relations and manners. For example, it is good to get advice on:

●how to dress;

●how to deal with people;

●punctuality;

●when and how to start discussing business;

●written and/or oral communication with the client;

●formal and informal interpersonal relations;

●the use of go-betweens;

●display or restraint of emotions;

●what language and terms to use;

●taboos.

Such things are relatively easy to learn and remember. Also, these days it is helpful that more and more clients are becoming tolerant of other cultures. Your client may know that a first contact with an American consultant will be quite different from a contact with a Japanese consultant. However, there is no guarantee that your particular client is “culturally literate” and culture-tolerant. It is therefore wise to find out beforehand how he or she expects a professional adviser to behave.

However important, questions such as whether to use first names and what topics must not be openly discussed represent only the tip of the iceberg in the cross-cultural consultant–client relationship. The less visible and more profound aspects of this relationship concern such issues as power and role distribution, decision-making, confrontation and consensus in problem-solving,