Working across cultures: the most important sound in Finnish is silence.

A love refugee

Abda: In a globalised world, multicultural workplaces are the norm. My guest is a British professional who met a Finnish woman, learned the language fluently, built a career in Finland and has now retired for the third time to be a full-time grandfather. Tell us your story.

Craig: I'm from Middlesbrough in the north-east of England, an industrial town of steel and chemicals. I left school at 16 and did an apprenticeship at a steelworks. When I told my parents I was going to university, my mum said, "You don't want to do that, it doesn't mean you'll get a job." I did it anyway: an engineering degree, then work as a programmer, and I was sent to Finland in 1987. My colleagues joked: put your watch two hours ahead and your mind 30 years back. Finland was very different then, before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Craig: On what was supposed to be my last trip, I met a woman. She came to England, we drove around Britain, and I proposed over dinner on the banks of Loch Ness. We'd known each other less than three months. I didn't know whether to move. A school friend asked me: what's the worst that can happen if you go? It doesn't work out and I come back and start again. And if you don't go? I'll never know. He said, "I think you know what to do." I left the UK on 3 August 1988. The night before, I saw Prince at Wembley Arena.

Abda: A love refugee! And now you sound Finnish.

Craig: Finnish people know I'm not Finnish, and that's fine. Once someone heard me and asked, in Finnish, "Estonian?" A former colleague who'd moved to Germany for a job told me: "Craig, you left your job to go to Northern Finland with no job to marry someone you'd just met. You're the one who took the big step." We forget the other person's perspective. I love it here and have no plans to leave. I'm a dual citizen now. Just remember to take the right passport.

Culture is not nationality

Craig: There isn't a day I don't forget a word. Language is a muscle: if you don't use it, you lose it, and that doesn't make you any less who you are. But culture isn't nationality, and it isn't individual people. It's the dynamic of the group. I had bigger problems being from the north of England working in the south than I ever had as an Englishman in Finland, because of accent and snobbery. Everyone has the right to retain as much as possible of who they are, but everyone also has to compromise to fit in with the group. Compromise seems to be a bad word these days.

“Culture isn't nationality, and it isn't individual people. It's the dynamic of the group.”

Craig: The most important sound in the Finnish language is silence. If you don't have anything to say, you don't say anything. I worked for years with one of the brightest people I know, who thinks for about four seconds before answering. Your average British or American person can bear about three-quarters of a second of silence. In meetings people assumed he wasn't clever; once they knew him, they realised his answers were always measured and right. In negotiations, learning to use silence is incredibly powerful.

Abda: My father always told me to think before I speak, and I'm still working on it. In the US and UK you jump into any one-second gap.

Craig: When I taught English for a year in the early nineties, students wanted to learn small talk, and I struggled to teach the little sounds English speakers make to keep a conversation going. One young Finnish man said: "Craig, we can't do this in our own language. How do you expect us to do it in a foreign one?"

Aspirational culture

Craig: Growing up working class, I learned early to listen for the cues and decode what's going on. It made me an observer. In cross-cultural work you have to understand that how you think you are is aspirational; how you are is what other people experience.

Craig: For over 20 years I worked for a Finnish telecommunications company with a wonderful culture. At one point my team spanned Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, Bochum, the UK, Denmark, Finland, Dallas, Boston and San Diego. What was our culture? It depended on who was in the room. But we had a set of aspirational values. Every company says it has the best people; what they mean is they have values that let people perform better. One value was respect for the individual, and some people turned it on its head: "Where's the respect for the individual in asking me to do this?" You can't expect respect as an individual unless you respect the individuals around you. And it means different things in different countries.

Abda: Should everyone who moves somewhere be expected to speak the language?

Craig: I think of it on three levels. Society: you can ask it to change to your language, but you can't expect it to. Professional: if you were hired on the understanding that the working language is English, and then meetings and slides are in Finnish, take it up with whoever recruited you. Social: at coffee, people will drift into their own language, and you can't expect them to change their social life for you. If you sit in the corner unhappy about it, do something about it.

Craig: Early on, in a meeting in Oulu, my boss's boss said in Finnish, "I suppose we'll have to speak English now." I said we could do it in Finnish. Five minutes later he looked at me and said, "You sound like a peasant." I said, "Let's switch to English and hear what you sound like." We laughed, and I still know him today.

Leadership sets the tone

Craig: Most things come down to behaviour and the expectation of behaviour. If you lead a multicultural team, come out of your comfort zone and show people you expect the values you've said you hold. Be confident enough to be vulnerable: "I didn't understand that, can you explain again?" That creates psychological safety, or just being human with each other.

Craig: In difficult moments I use what I call the three I's: intent, implementation and interpretation. Take a breath. When you hear something you don't like, it doesn't mean the person is evil. Their intent may be good and their words clumsy, the way a 62-year-old's words might land differently with a 23-year-old. If you assume everything you disagree with is an attack, you'll be fighting all the time.

“Things are easy. People are difficult.”

Craig: Remember that books describe cultures generically. Don't assume every English person you meet conforms to them.