Leaders of diverse teams often meet friction that looks personal: one person seems blunt, another evasive, one keeps deferring to the supervisor, another challenges decisions in public. Research on multicultural teams suggests that many of these moments have cultural and structural roots. In a widely cited study, Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar and Mary Kern identified four recurring challenges: direct versus indirect communication, trouble with accents and fluency, differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority, and conflicting norms for decision-making. They found that effective managers intervened early, set norms, tried to engage everyone, and helped teams see challenges as stemming from culture rather than personality.
Erin Meyer's Culture Map offers a vocabulary for the same territory. It plots working styles along eight behavior scales: communicating, evaluating (how negative feedback is given), persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling. Meyer stresses that what matters is relative position. A person who seems very direct to one colleague may seem careful to another. Two people from different backgrounds may clash not because either is extreme but because they sit at different points on the same scale. This is a helpful correction to the common habit of treating one's own style as neutral and everyone else's as a deviation.
These frameworks come with the same cautions as any cluster research. Meyer's scales place national cultures by general tendency; Brett and colleagues describe patterns observed across many teams. None of it predicts an individual. On a DHS team, working styles are also shaped by profession, years in state service, disability and access needs, union and management roles, generation, and the organizational culture of the department itself. A leader who says "she is from that region, so she must be indirect" has turned a useful map into a stereotype.
The leadership move is to analyze the system before judging the person. When friction shows up, ask: which scale might this sit on, whose style is the team's current default, and what in our structure, such as meeting format, decision rules or feedback practices, rewards that default? A team where fast verbal debate is the unspoken norm will read quieter members as disengaged. A team where decisions happen informally after meetings will frustrate people who expect the meeting to decide. Naming the default is the first step toward designing practices where no single style is automatically the right one.
