Chapter 2: Making a Good Impression

Overview

So, what happens after the introductions ? Whether you engage in social pleasantries or get right down to business, you will spend a lot of time observing your new acquaintances , and they will be observing you too. We may or may not be conscious that we are doing this ”that is just the way we are. This ability to observe each other evolved so we could make vital decisions on which our survival depended. Is the new member of the tribe going to be an asset in the next mammoth hunt or is he going to club me when my back s turned so he can be the new chief?

Even when we are on our home turf, we tend to keep a close eye on new people until we feel we know them. Because the parameters are familiar, we are better able to judge if someone is being friendly or unfriendly, or whether our new acquaintance s colorful Hawaiian shirt marks him as a free-thinking, creative type with the sort of individuality that our company is looking for or a dangerous freak with an ego problem. When we meet people from another culture the process of assessment is even more complicated because we don t share the same background, and if we use the same standards to make judgments , we run the risk of coming to the wrong conclusion.

Essentially, after the introductions we are trying to establish the basis for a relationship, and to do that we need to be aware of what we have in common and what we don t. We use external clues like dress, manners, and body language to decide whether we can get along. We also ask ourselves questions like these: Is he reliable? Is she generous? Is he interested in my way of looking at things, or is he sloppy , lacking in respect for my culture and me, and interested only in the next deal and the bottom line? And, because we re only human, we sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion and are misjudged in our turn .

One of my friends told me the following story. An Englishwoman she knew had returned from a couple of years in the Middle East with an Iranian husband. Back home, her girlfriends thought her choice of husband rather exciting and romantic and did their best to make the new arrival feel at home in his wife s country. They were friendly and open and treated him from the first like one of the gang. But my friend, Carol, never liked him. She found him arrogant and snobbish and couldn t understand what had possessed her friend to marry the man. As a result, she hardly ever spoke to him.

As the months passed and the young couple moved from the honeymoon phase to the more mundane phases of marriage , they started to have the occasional quarrel. In the course of one of these, the husband said he thought that his wife s friends were loose women of bad moral character. They had flirted shamelessly with him, and they would obviously have gone further if he had made a move. The only respectable one among them was Carol, who had behaved toward him in an appropriately modest manner.

Seen through a different cultural filter, behavior intended to be warm and friendly was seen as dangerously provocative. And as a final irony, Carol s unfriendliness had created a favorable impression, because it had been interpreted as showing the appropriate degree of reserve and respect that should mark relations between the genders in the husband s culture.

Then there is the case of a foreign visitor who made a hit in Argentina. When he met his potential customer for the first time, he greeted him in Spanish, gave him a quick firm handshake, and looked him in the eye. He got quite close to his listeners to deliver his sales pitch, and spoke expressively and with great enthusiasm about his product. During the coffee break, he answered questions about his family and children and made similar inquiries himself. He even joined in the discussion about soccer and asked a few questions about the local team, which got him invited to the next match.

This man behaved in the same way during his visit to Japan, but he made a very negative impression there. He was perceived as loud, brash, and arrogant, and as attempting to dominate his Japanese counterparts. The same behavior was judged according to different standards.

There are many ways of making cultural faux pas, of creating the wrong impression. However, in the very first stages of a relationship there are some easy guidelines to follow that can help you get off on the right foot .

• MORAL We don t always create the impression we are striving for, but being conscious of some of the unwritten rules of behavior of another culture can help us do just that.