PM Quote of the Day — Francis Bacon

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

“Fools rush in” should be the motto for anyone leading a global, matrixed, or virtual team.  While many projects and firms are going to English as a common language, many colleagues simply won’t have the background to know how to express nuances or translate cognates.  Sometimes the results are funny — in Singapore, I had a French counterpart spend ten minutes grilling me about the meaning and derivation of middlebrow. 

Too often, however, the results are time consuming at best and disastrous at worst.  Having a sense for when a colleague is struggling to express an idea is essential for cross-cultural communication.  One of the benefits of learning a foreign language as a youth is a sensitivity to translation problems, especially when trying to express complex ideas.  Here are three approaches that have worked for me:

1. Now, when my counterparts say something that sounds “off” or awkward, I ask a clarifying question about the phrase or word — often they’re trying to translate an idiom from their native tongue. 
2. If a clarifying question doesn’t work, then I try to re-state their position myself and highlight where I am unclear about their intent. 
3. Finally, sometimes the misunderstanding is driven by a literal translation.  I’ll ask straight out — How do you say “fill in English word in question”? — in their native language.

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