You have to develop the ability to collaborate with different people. Join your host Michael Zipursky as he interviews Laura Kriska on integrated cultural experience and expanding consulting business to a global marketplace. Laura is the author of The Business of We: The Proven Three-Step Process for Closing the Gap Between Us and Them in Your Workplace. In this episode, she explains how you can bridge culture gaps and build trust across different people of different beliefs and cultures. She also discusses how you can leverage and reactivate relationships in growing your business. Learn how to foster connections among people to drive a more effective leadership in your workplace, increase productivity, and thrive in global markets.
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I am very excited to have Laura Kriska joining us. Laura, welcome. You are a consultant speaker author. You are an expert in the area of cross-cultural relations and bridging the gaps in diverse workplaces. Your clients include Fortune 500 companies across many continents. Your latest book is The Business of We, where you share your framework for how businesses can close the gap between different cultures and build a more collaborative workplace and environment.
I thought we could start our conversation with something that is quite striking about you and that is that you were the first woman to work in the Tokyo Headquarters of Honda Motor Company or as people know Honda Cars. Although Honda does much more than cars. I want to know from you how that happened and maybe it would be helpful to provide a bit of backstory.
Readers won’t know but you and I had a nice little conversation in Japanese when we first jumped on here which was fun because I don’t get to do that as much as I would like to anymore. Take us back to your time because you have a history in Japan, although you are American and in the US now. Set the stage for us. How did you get to the place where you ended up being the first woman to work in the Tokyo Headquarters of Honda?
I was born in Japan. My parents were missionaries. In fact, the United States considers me an alien. Officially, I’m an alien.
I remember in Japan getting my alien registration card. I remember taking a picture of it and sending it to people, although I don’t even know if I had a proper cell phone to do that at the time. I remember sharing it. I have a card and the government thinks I’m an alien. It’s such a weird concept.
I forgot about that card. Both the United States and Japan consider me an alien. At the age of two, I returned to the United States. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. I had a pretty average American life, except that our family loved Japan and still does love Japan. My mom would cook rice in the rice cooker. We would eat with chopsticks and there was always soy sauce on the table. It wasn’t like Japan night. It was how our family behaved. We like that kind of food. My parents were familiar with it having lived there.
This is the kind of integrated cultural experience that’s happening more and more around the world, whether you are in Canada, the United States or Mexico, it doesn’t matter where. There is more cultural diversity in individual people and families. In fact, in some of my consulting sessions. I have been asking people the question, “How many country-related identities do you feel closely related to?” I ask these questions anonymously. Have you ever heard of Mentimeter?
No.
It’s such a great tool for consultants who want to gather data from people, employees or customers. It’s real-time. It’s like polling but you can ask very specific questions. I asked this question, “How many identities do you feel strongly connected to?” It’s all self-identity. If I were to answer that question, I would say two. I am a US citizen. I’ve spent the majority of my life in America but I love Japan. I’ve spent years in Japan. I feel very connected to it. I would say two national cultures.
More and more people answer the question with 2, 3 or sometimes 4 different cultures. In my family, there was this strong affection for a country that I hadn’t experienced for myself. I was curious from a young age. At sixteen, my family had saved up enough money and we took our one and only international trip to Japan for a month. Sixteen is a pretty impressionable age and I was so intrigued. You probably had something similar.
Culture is so much more than a person's identity in terms of their nationality. A person's individual culture is made up of their gender, race, religion, and many more. Click To TweetVery similar. Yes.
Do you want to share what that was?
I remember feeling this way multiple times. I did a trip with my father and stepmother to Thailand when I was 14 or 15 and that was a huge culture shock shift. I spent years in the Middle East when I was younger and then Canada but when I was in Thailand, my brain exploded. I then ended up going back with some cousin and cofounder here to Vietnam when I was probably 15 or 16. I convinced my parents to let us go and that was also a life-changing experience
Without adults?
Correct. It sounds like a few years older.
Super responsible, I hope.
We were pretty good. There’s a lot that goes into that story. Let’s say they didn’t know all the details but it influenced a lot of our future. I remember feeling that way. I love that question about where you connect in terms of different countries because I certainly feel I have that connection with more than one country, for sure. I often describe myself as feeling more like an international citizen than a Canadian citizen, so I could see that.
Which countries would you say are the ones that you feel a strong connection with if you had to list?
I was born in Canada, so there’s a connection to Canada there. I spent from 2 to 6 and a half years old in Israel, so I feel a connection to Israel. It’s interesting because I feel much closer to Japan than I do to Israel. Even though my first language is Hebrew and when I came back to Canada, I had to learn to speak English. That influenced me in many ways. A big one is my appreciation for different cultures, languages, and religions. I love the world. Those three for sure. The international mindset and being a citizen of the world for me is a signs that I value a lot.
What you said is so great. I love the world. What a wonderful tagline. That should be your tagline.
Let’s turn this back over to you. I want to shine a spotlight on you. You went to Japan at sixteen. It made a big impression on you. Fast forward us a little bit because I want to dive into a lot more. How did you end up working at Honda as the first woman or first non-Japanese woman?
It had to do with my college experience and Honda being based in Ohio. I was on my way to Japan for a year as an exchange student, junior year abroad, approached Honda, and I made some connections. I was a welcome lady in their showroom as a college student. I did it on the weekends, a part-time job but it was these relationships that I built.
When it was time to get a real job, I went back to these folks in Marysville, Ohio. By then I was much more clear about what I wanted and what I wanted was to be in Japan. I said, “I want to work in Japan.” At that time, a very senior Japanese executive had returned to Japan from several years managing Honda in Los Angeles and he wanted a bilingual assistant. It was a stretch to call me bilingual then but I was tasked with being his assistant in the executive secretary on the tenth floor of Honda Motor Company in Aoyama, Tokyo. That became one of the most influential experiences of my life.
When you say that you stretched yourself in that role because you weren’t bilingual, he wanted bilingual. Was that a bit of a stretch?
It was so far beyond my capacities. It’s shocking. I was 22. I had never had a real job. I was both going through the culture shock of being a young person going out into the real workforce. I was doing that in Japan. I was doing it when I thought I knew everything I needed to know. I had the hubris of many young people because I had lived in Japan. I spoke pretty good Japanese then but I was in so far over my head. I had no idea what I was getting into.
I asked that because I have a very similar experience of putting myself in a place where I probably shouldn’t have been but the stars aligned. The lesson that resonates with me here and I want to put forward for everybody who’s reading this is the importance of asking. For you to end up in Japan was a big step. For you to be accepted as a non-Japanese essentially landing your “dream job,” or at least in your dream place, that wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t take several steps to connect with people, and most importantly to ask.
Many consultants now know that they want to get more work or generate some additional business or create relationships with certain people but they are not willing to take that extra step or to push themselves a bit beyond their zone of comfort. Much of the success that we all have in our lives comes when we are not doing the things that we are comfortable doing, we stretch. Coming back to what you do, you stretch, I stretch, and a lot of that that growth and improvement come when we get beyond or go beyond what it feels comfortable.
I completely agree. I do want to ask you a question but I stretched out of ignorance. I was naive. Many of us have that naivete worked to my advantage when I was 22 or 23 but I feel in some cases, people lose that as they get older. Do you feel that?
That’s a good point. In my case, I was naïve in so many things. I also brought a lot of what I would call confidence or naive confidence. We are going to make things happen. “I’m going to be successful in doing this,” but I got knocked down and questioned myself many times. That was all part of the process but you are right. Look at children, if they try to walk and fall down, they don’t even know that they can’t do it, so they keep doing it. That’s what gets them to the place where they can do it.
Whereas with adults, as we develop, if we don’t see success quickly, it’s very common for people to give up and go to something that is more comfortable and says, “I can’t do that.” To me, that is a good distinction to make. If you understand it, you can embrace it and go, “I’m feeling some resistance now,” in saying that I want to accomplish but that’s normal. It doesn’t mean that I should not do it. It means I need to keep pushing harder or talk to somebody that’s done it before, so I can get some input on what I need to do to accelerate my success.
There's an invisible message to what you can actually hear. There are so many examples of invisible data impacting people's day-to-day lives. Click To TweetThat’s great advice.
This is a show I want to interview people like you do to get your experience to share with everybody. You are very good at turning this around on me.
It’s your fault for being interesting. I’m putting that on the record. Stop being so interesting.
You are in Japan. You are getting that experience. You are back in the US now and have done business with your clients and for your clients all across the world, in Europe and other places. When you think about the consultant or the firm owner that also is looking to expand globally, or maybe they are in the US or Europe but they work with people of many different cultures, backgrounds, religions, and beliefs, what stands out to you? What do you think people need to be aware of? Where do you see people often making mistakes or having some shortfalls? How can people improve that or view things differently so that they can create more successful relationships and the outcomes that they desire?
The number one mistake people make is thinking that culture only relates to countries or nationalities. Culture is so much more than a person’s identity in terms of their nationality or what passport they have. A person’s individual culture is made up of their gender, race, religion, and also things like life, experience, education, socioeconomic class, physical ability, hobby, there are so many things.
My life’s work is helping people bridge culture gaps. Help them build trust across any us versus them culture gap but that idea of culture can be so many different things. Let me give you an example of that. I live in a house with three teenagers. There is a generational culture gap. Teenagers literally use a different language. They are like, “I got a dip. That’s suss. Lit,” and I’m like, “What are these words?” I don’t know what is dip. Dip means I got to leave.
There are social references. Their values are technology. If I have a problem, I look for somebody under the age of twenty to solve my technology problems. They are digital natives. These are predictable inevitable differences that happen in generational gaps. It’s not just nationality gaps. If you can think very broadly about gaps being related to all these aspects of a person’s or a group’s identity, the number one thing is it taking a wide or broad approach to culture. The second big problem people make is that they don’t understand that some cultural values are invisible.
Things are visible. The way people speak a different language. Let’s use an example, both of us know. In Japanese, when you say the word difficult, “Muzukashi.” “Muzukashi desu ne,” you say, “That’s difficult.” It seems like that’s pretty clear but you and I both know that in Japanese culture saying that’s difficult doesn’t mean what an English speaker might assume it means.
If I hear Michael say to Laura, “Laura, that’s difficult.” Laura will say, “I got to work harder. I’ve got to get help to make this successful,” but in Japanese, it’s a polite way of saying, “No way. This is not happening.” There’s an invisible message to what you can hear. There are so many examples of invisible data impacting people’s day-to-day lives.
Let me make this more applicable to a consultant. Let’s say you are working with a certain group of people. If you don’t share a lot of the cultural identity with that group, then you are more likely to make mistakes in your interactions with people. Those are often unintentional mistakes. It’s simply your lack of knowledge that you might unintentionally offend someone, for example.
Let’s use an example of a race in the United States. I grew up in a very colorblind era and June 19th had no meaning to me. Juneteenth was not a thing I had ever heard of until when it was much too late. It never occurred to me. I wasn’t taught. Juneteenth is an important historical day in the United States, where the last slaves were finally informed about a few years after emancipation. It was in Galveston, Texas.
This was a big deal. Juneteenth is celebrated in many places and it’s grown in its importance but it was something I had never heard of and now it is. Now in some places, it’s an important day for people to recognize. That’s an example of a date. You can use many dates, September 11th or December 7th in terms of World War II. These are random dates but they are not random dates. There’s an invisible meaning.
I want to dig a little bit deeper into that because if somebody is saying, “I’m building my consulting business, I want to expand globally. I want to work with large companies around me and they are not all the same as I am in terms of cultural background.” One way to look at it would be to understand, in our case, the Japanese culture and the way that things are done in a place like Japan. It takes years or can take years to understand all the nuances.
What if somebody doesn’t want to commit to that level of deep thought and understanding of every little nuance? Maybe they want to do business with more companies in India but they don’t want to learn Hindi and all about history. If somebody is in the meeting or in a situation where it’s not going to be long-term but they still want to approach it where the outcome can be beneficial and a great outcome for both sides. Is there anything from your experience that people should be thinking about or can do in those situations where they are not going to commit long-term to go deep but they still want to be respectful and to have the outcome that they desire?
There are ways to fast-track your understanding. In fact, I use a series of ten questions. It’s called the Us versus Them Self-Assessment. There are ten yes or no questions. Anybody can access these questions for free on my website, which is LauraKriska.com. These ten questions ask basically how much interaction and knowledge you have about this other cultural group. The other cultural group can be as big as a country or as small as a single person.
If you answer these questions honestly, you will get a score. If your score is low, you got to do some work and put in some time. It doesn’t mean you have to invest years. The way to fast-track your understanding is through three categories of action. There are safe, challenging, and radical actions. Safe actions are things like going on YouTube and googling, “Doing business in India. Learning how to introduce yourself in Hindi.”
You don’t have to become fluent in another language but learning one word or how to introduce yourself is a reasonable investment. Maybe 10 minutes or 30 minutes at the most, if you struggling. If you are trying to show respect for another group of people and do business with them, I feel like it’s the least you can do to demonstrate your willingness to connect and make it more equitable, and not expect everybody to play on your field, if that makes sense.
It makes complete sense. Two things that you mentioned stand out to me, the first is by even thinking about asking that question, whether someone is going to go through your ten questions, it’s just the idea of asking yourself a few questions like, “How much do I know about this person or their background or where they come from?” It gets your mind to start recognizing that, “Maybe there’s something that you don’t know and something that you can do to get a little bit closer.”
On the language one, that’s so huge. In Japan, people come in and lived there for many years and they didn’t speak Japanese. I was like, “How can you live in a country where you are surrounded by a different culture and language and made no attempt to learn it?” I’m not saying they are wrong. It didn’t make sense to me.
Even if you are going to do business in any country or with a different person, it’s such a great way to build a bond or to show that you care. It’s like, “I’ve spent a few minutes to learn how to say hello or introduce myself in your language.” That’s so different because most people don’t do it but it can create an advantage for you.
You don't have to become fluent in another language, but really learning one word or how to introduce yourself is a reasonable investment. Click To TweetHuge advantage. The two other categories are challenging and radical. Radical is more like you dive in. You go to that country and are learning. That usually takes more time and is expensive. The challenging actions are face-to-face interactions of increasing depth. I will give you a real example. I had an invitation to work in Brazil several years ago. I had never worked in Brazil. I don’t know anything about Brazil. I took my own advice and the ten questions and my score was very low. I looked in my network for someone who knew more than I do. I did my own research. That’s safe but you’ve got to interact with humans.
Challenging actions require some vulnerability. You might mess up. It’s a little risky but in my network, one of my husband’s friends, his wife is from Brazil. I wrote to her and said, “I’m going to work there. I’ve studied some things but I would like to learn from you.” In my entire career in my life, whenever I’ve approached somebody from another cultural group, no matter what it has been, when I have said with respect and genuine curiosity, “I want to learn from you.” I have never once been rejected.
If we take our example of, let’s say doing business with somebody from India, you could look at your network and see who you know who’s from India or who you spend time there and ask them some questions. Are there certain things that I should be looking for? Is there a certain way that people make decisions?
Exposing yourself to that can teach you so much and give you an advantage but make it so much more successful overall. I appreciate that advice. I want to then take us a little bit further down the path. You struggled on your own to become a consultant. At what point did you do that and what was that transition like in terms of you going from working for somebody else to then working for yourself?
I was working for Honda for a couple of years and realized that I don’t like cars that much. I don’t like to drive them. People in Honda love cars. It’s like their dream job to do that. I wasn’t part of the business. I wasn’t part of what was important in that organization. I wanted to be at the center of whatever organization I was part of. It seemed more fun.
After publishing my first book, The Accidental Office Lady, it provided a platform for me to be the center of that because my work is helping people navigate these different cultural groups and I had done that, so I helped other people do that. With the new book, I’m helping all kinds of different us versus them silos and gaps get closed. It was that wish to be at the center and it was publishing the book that provided that opportunity.
Did you launch your business as a consultant in Japan or did that happen when you came back to the US?
It happened slowly. I left Honda and taught Japanese for a couple of years. I was working on my book but I was not confident that it would ever become a book. I didn’t think about becoming an author. I was still very young but I had a lot of data. Basically, it all came from letters that would never exist now. I used to type letters to my parents once a week. They were full of the details and anecdotes of life in Honda Motor Company, and the uniforms that we wore. Did I mention the women-only uniforms?
I’ve seen it for the first time.
Not my favorite.
It’s pretty shocking and very different.
All those details, the failures and successes, and because I was writing to my parents, there was no filter, especially the failures. When I came back, my mother had put all of these letters in a folder or a notebook. It looked like a book. It had this weight. That’s when I realized, “Maybe I can write a book.” I still didn’t have the confidence. I was working at Honda in Ohio and writing on the weekends and evenings. I would go straight from Honda to the library. I would eat my dinner in the car, and I was so inspired. It was an exhausting schedule but it was invigorating because I was doing something that excited me.
I then spent a few years at Columbia University in New York and that’s what brought me to New York. That’s where I polished the writing. I had a story written but I didn’t know how to write it. I hadn’t studied that before. Those few years at Columbia helped me understand how much I like writing and putting my experiences and other people’s stories into a book. The book gave me the platform. You probably experienced this as well having that document to share with others and offer some credibility that if you don’t have it, it’s much harder.
Walk me through what did you do to get your first client. You have your first book and you are back in the US. You have been in the US at that time for several years. How did you go about getting your first clients and building the business? What did you do?
There was first another consulting company that I worked for. They had started building up a business and I wrote to them. I was like, “I could be your New York person.” They were like, “Great.” I did that for many years. This was also when I was starting a family and balancing all of that. Several years ago, I decided that I wanted to go out on my own. That was a little bit scary but I was also, again, invigorated by the experience of having success with clients and having a lot of relationships by then that had been built up.
When you launched that business after working at this other consulting firm and then decided you were going to start your own consulting business, how did you launch it? Did you send emails to the people that you had relationships with and said, “Here’s what I’m doing?” You are doing a lot of cross-cultural work. There’s still a connection to companies in Japan, especially contacts in Japan.
For those who also have had these careers where they’ve built relationships with people over the years but now they want to benefit from that in their new business. What do you learn during that process? What would be the best practices? What did you do if there were any things that you did that worked exceptionally well or anything that you feel didn’t work at all? What would your advice be on leveraging and reactivating those relationships to grow your business?
I was in the tricky position that some people might also be in where I had to take a year off. I had a noncompete written into my contract with the other agency and that was scary. It was also 2008 when things fell apart. I had my third child and went about it much the same way I went about going to be the first American woman in Honda. I went into it naively. The thing that I did well is that I built up good relationships with the people before I left. For a whole year, I was unavailable by agreement.
After that year passed, I was permitted. I had met my agreement, contacted everybody and said, “I’m available. This is what I will be offering.” Every single client with one exception returned to me. That felt good and this was 2009. I had no idea if anybody would come back if I have any type of business at all. During that year, they had continued with the other agency with someone else and decided they wanted to work with me. If there’s anything I didn’t do deliberately but had good relationships and did a good job when I was working for the other agency so that when it was my turn to be on my own, I was blessed to have almost all of those clients return.
When you started offering your services, how do they look different now compared to when you first launched the business and engaged with clients? Is there anything that you’ve changed in how you deliver services and how you work with clients? We have been going through the pandemic and so a lot more virtual but is there anything in terms of your core service offerings that you’ve shifted over the years? If so, I’m very interested to know why.
Build good relationships with people to grow your business. Click To TweetThe core offering was Japan versus the United States. Now, it’s any us versus them. My services have changed because of COVID. I did a lot of virtual things during the past few years but I have found some things are better virtually. For example, I mentioned a tool called Mentimeter, which is this polling app and it’s free. I can ask the participants when I’m working with them questions and people use their phones individually to give anonymous answers. I will incorporate that into my live training sessions moving forward.
Another key part that’s changed is I do an exercise called the Team Machine. It’s a simulation exercise that gets people excited about collaborating inside one organization, which is hard. It’s hard to get sales and marketing to work together, legal and audit, Houston and New York or Tokyo and São Paulo. This simulation activity, which I’ve done sporadically over many years is a big focus now because it gets people excited and engaged. After a few years of people not being in the workplace, it’s a great fast track to excitement and engagement. That’s something I’m looking forward to doing again in person.
I want to ask you before wrapping up here, in terms of the work that you do because you have clients in different time zones, three kids, a new book, and all that stuff. You have a lot going on. Is there anything that you do in terms of a habit or ritual that you find is critical to your productivity, performance, and being able to be successful in your business?
I do TM meditation.
Is that transcendental meditation?
Yes.
When do you do it?
Ideally, you do it twice a day. I’m very dedicated to once a day at 6:00.
AM or PM?
PM. The man I learned from is Bob Roth. He’s an influential TM teacher here in New York. He has a free call. He has a live meditation every day. My husband and I are pretty dedicated. We are pretty loyal. We will both be working and we are like, “Are you going to meditate?” It’s nice to have a partner to meditate with because we keep each other accountable. We meditate almost every day at 6:00 together in this virtual group. We call in and Bob Roth will share some thoughts and then you do your twenty minutes and share some more thoughts. It’s a lovely totally free practice for people.
I love asking this question because it’s nice to assemble the best practices, performance, hacks, habits, and mindsets that people have that contribute to their success. Meditation is certainly come up more than once but for you specifically, what do you find that helps? What’s the reason to continue doing it as a habit?
Two main things. One is that it’s stress relief. Any stress that I have built up during the day. I miss things, deadlines or whatever it is can be managed with that twenty minutes for me. The other thing is I get some of my best ideas. It’s uncanny. I will be mulling over a problem and letting go of your thoughts but not every day, maybe once a week. Something surfaces during that meditation.
Sometimes when I’m struggling with a problem, usually something that requires a lot of thought like something creative but I want something practical out of it. I will go meditate sometimes with that problem on my mind. Those are the two reasons. Before meditation, that end of the day stress was met with a glass of wine. I don’t drink wine like that almost ever.
Another question for you, in the last six months, what’s the best book that you read or listen to, it can be fiction or nonfiction that you would recommend to others?
There are so many books. I have been on a journey myself to learn more about the us versus them racial gap in the United States. I’ve learned a lot from many authors.
One that comes to mind.
I would say The Wake Up by Michelle Kim. I don’t know if you are familiar with her work. She is an activist, a teacher, and a writer who digs into diversity issues and tries to educate people. I’ve learned a lot from her. Her book, The Wake Up is an important book that I read in the past months.
Laura Kriska, thank you so much for joining us and coming on here. If people want to learn more about your work or book, is LauraKriska.com the best place for them to go?
Yes.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you, Michael.
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