Erik Michielsen: What has working internationally taught you about communicating across cultures?

Hammans Stallings: I'd say one, the need to go and normalize yourself a little bit. So, that's -- a big mistake I could have made would be to go some place to work with clients in say the Ukraine or Germany, even Australia, and just go straight from the airport to a client site would be really dangerous, and so I think -- you kind of go back to Margaret Mead and necessity to go and spend time just sitting in a culture and waiting until there are no big surprises and so I'd say that working internationally, working on site internationally for, say, six to eight weeks, gives me more time to truly start soaking up the situation and how the culture, the current state of it so that during my conversations with those clients, I’d be able to reflect the reality of that as opposed to kind of bringing a, you know, these -- these sort of American biases to things.
And secondly, I would say that I can rely on the fact that we're all ultimately human and you -- a lot of communication isn't necessarily done purely through a cultural lens, so it can really appeal to, I'd say the more general kind of human conditions and needs. So, you can kind of have conversations. It's not framed in ways that is largely culturally dependent. So, I think that's kind of another trick, and then I'd say three, the language of business in some ways tries, you know, depending on the field to depersonalize and sort of decontextualize things at times and so you can do that, but of course you have to be able to eventually go back into an applied kind of human user centered language at some point. So, business itself has its own culture and language that while it's kind of -- it's – there are lenses on that from the local culture, it still allows you to kind of have communication between, you know, across cultures within that kind of third space, that business space.