Crossing the Atlantic
French Business Culture for American Managers
Your French team is doing something reasonable. So are you. Neither of you can see the other’s reasoning, so you each read it as a character flaw.
For twenty years, part of my job has been to sit down separately with the American and the French people inside the same company, guarantee both of them anonymity, and ask what is actually going on. So I spend a lot of my life holding things one side said about the other and will never say to their face.
In thirty minutes, I will show you three of those places, what each side is protecting, and what the gap is costing you.
- What your French colleagues say about you when you are not in the room
- The three-layer read that turns “he is evasive” into something you can actually fix
- Why the fix is never making them less French, or you less American
- The one question to ask on Monday morning, and the wall you will hit
- Live Q&A after, and I stay on as long as there are questions
Save your seat
Free. No recording sent, so come live.
You will get the joining link by email, plus a reminder the day before. Unsubscribe any time.
What they say about you. Not to you. About you.
“He speaks loudly, and fast, and in his own language, and he takes up all the space at the table.”
“The decisions are brutal. We replace what isn’t working instead of trying to fix it.”
“He asked me how I was, and then didn’t wait for the answer.”
“He told me three things he liked about my work before he got to the real message. Now I don’t know which part was true.”
“He gave me his conclusion without the path to it. That isn’t an argument, it’s a claim.”
“He asked the team what we thought. Doesn’t he know? Why is he in charge?”
“With him it’s fine or it’s not fine, and there’s nothing in between. Almost everything real is in between.”
“They just focus on the US. No idea where Europe stands.”
Nobody said any of that to your face, and nobody is going to. In their frame, saying it to your face would be the rude choice.
In every one of those sentences, you were doing something reasonable. So were they.
Layer 3. The read
What you conclude about the other person’s character from watching how they work. He is evasive. She is negative. He does not trust me. This is where you live, this is what you act on, and it is almost always wrong.
Layer 2. The method
How each side protects what matters to them. Usually the exact opposite of yours. It is the only layer you can actually see, which is why you keep mistaking it for the person.
Layer 1. The value
What each side is protecting. Almost always the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic. Also completely invisible.
The move is to drop two layers. Stop asking what kind of person does that. Ask what they were protecting.
Three places it breaks
What a manager is for
How you build an argument
Optimism and scepticism
The fix is not making them less French, or you less American. That aims at who people are, and who people are is not the part that is broken. The method is what is broken, and methods are easy to change once you know what they are for.
Who this is for
Come if
- You are an American executive with a French subsidiary, team, or joint venture
- You manage French people, directly or through a country manager
- Your European entry is taking far longer than the plan said it would
- You are about to hire your first people in France
- You keep hearing that the market is difficult, and you suspect that is not the whole story
Skip it if
- You want a list of etiquette tips about greetings and lunch
- You want to be told the French are the problem
- You want a legal or tax briefing on setting up an entity
- You are looking for a country-by-country tour of Europe rather than a working read on France
Who is running it
I am American. I grew up in Mississippi, and I have spent more than twenty years living and working in France, in French, building two businesses here from nothing.
Most of that time I have been the American in the room: selling to French companies, working inside them, getting it wrong in public, and slowly working out why. Now I do it in the other direction too, on the French side of American companies’ business.
The useful thing about that position is not that I know both cultures. Plenty of people know both cultures, and some of them have written better books about it than I will. It is what I get told. When I sit down with the American, he talks to me the way he talks to another American, because I am one. Then I sit down with the French director, in French, and I get what she actually thinks about him.
So for a few weeks, I am the only person in that building holding both halves. This webinar is thirty minutes of what that sounds like.
How it works
plus Q&A
never recorded
Questions
Is this a sales pitch?
There is one offer at the end: a thirty-minute conversation, one to one, no charge and no deck. If it turns out you have a straightforward performance problem and no cultural component, I will tell you, and you will have saved yourself from paying me to solve something you do not have. The other twenty-eight minutes are the content.
Will it be recorded?
Come live. Half the value is in the Q&A, where people describe their own situation and I say what is probably happening in it. That part does not survive a recording, and people are franker when it is not being filmed.
Do I need to speak French?
No. The session is in English, and nothing in it requires French. If anything, the people who need it most are the ones running French operations in English.
Is this about France specifically, or Europe generally?
France specifically. The three-layer read travels, and people working in other European markets tell me it lands for them too, but the examples and the evidence are French. I would rather give you one country properly than five countries vaguely.
Can I bring my team?
Yes, and it works better that way. Register each person separately so everyone gets their own joining link. If you want to bring your French colleagues as well, do. The session is not unkind to either side, which is rather the point.
We have been in Europe for years. Is this too basic?
Time in the market is not the same as access to the second account. The longer you have been there and the more senior you are, the more carefully the information reaching you gets prepared. That is one of the things the session is about.
This is not about crossing a border. It is about moving yours.
Thirty minutes, live, in English. Three places American and French colleagues read each other wrong, and what to do on Monday morning.