You’ve got teams on both sides of the Atlantic.
Let’s make the cultural differences work for you, not against you.
I’m Christina Rebuffet-Broadus, an American intercultural expert who has lived and worked in France for more than 20 years.
Whether your teams have worked together for years or you’re building the transatlantic side from scratch, I help both sides understand what the other is doing, and turn that into how they actually work. Start with 15 minutes and tell me where yours are.
between the US and France
across the Atlantic
in France
If you’ve thought any of this, we should talk
Whether you’re defusing tensions that have crept in over time, trying to help your team understand each other better, or anticipating the creation of your international dream team, the mechanisms underneath are the same. Each side is running the cultural operating system they grew up in, and both of those systems work perfectly well at home.
But put both sides in the same meeting and the arguments that persuade at home fall flat for the other side. One side feels things move too fast, the other side feels things move too slow. One side thinks in decades, the other in quarters.
Neither side is better, but neither sees where their own system collides with the other.
That’s what I make visible.
Where cultural operating systems collide
Intercultural issues rarely show up as major meltdowns. But unspoken friction left unchecked creates tension that slows business and drives teams apart.
Here are just a few examples:
Most of the companies I work with are functioning, profitable, and full of people who appreciate each other. The collision costs them anyway, and nobody thinks to blame it on culture. But intercultural issues always show up on the bottom line.
What I bring to the room
I learned it the slow way, on the front lines of intercultural business
I didn’t study cross-cultural business and then start advising on it. I’m American, built 2 companies in France, managed 16 people across 12 countries, and advised more than 100 transatlantic companies on how to work together.
For over 15 years, I worked with French companies to get their international communication right. Speaking better English, but also understanding how Americans hear and interpret what they say and how they say it. The words, the behaviors, the reactions.
I grew up in Mississippi, always fascinated by other countries and cultures. I studied history and French, and have now been living and working in France since 2004, working at the intersection of business, intercultural issues and how history surprisingly shapes business practices today.
When a French director wants the whole argument finished before he’ll commit to a pilot, that’s not caution as a personality trait. That’s what centuries of land you couldn’t replace does to a culture’s relationship with risk. When an American VP says let’s run it and see, that’s a country that spent a hundred years believing the next valley was better than this one.
Understanding what’s happening on the other side of your transatlantic team, and knowing how to bring teams together when cultural differences risk driving them apart… that’s where I come in.
Crossing the Atlantic
How history shapes culture, and how culture shapes business, between the US and Europe. It runs from something you can listen to on the way to work to something I run inside your company and with your team.
20 years of watching the same misunderstandings, what they cost, and how to fix them, built into one session that runs anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, in person or virtual.
Perfect for off-sites, leadership summits, all-hands meetings, and board meetings.
Half-day or full-day workshops with the people who work together, built around your specific situations and needs, not generic case studies on intercultural issues.
Everyone leaves with frameworks, techniques, and concrete ways to improve how they work together.
Your questions, my real answers
Nothing feels broken in my team. Is this still worth doing?
Most of the companies I work with are functioning perfectly well. Nobody is in crisis and the people involved generally like each other. What they’ve noticed is that things take longer than they should, or that a certain kind of conversation never quite lands, and nobody can say why. That’s a much cheaper moment to work on than the one 18 months later, when both sides have built a story about the other that’s hard to undo.
We’ve worked together for years and everyone gets along. Isn’t this sorted by now?
Getting along and understanding each other are two different things, and the first one hides the absence of the second for a long time. Everyone’s polite, everyone’s professional, and both sides are still running their own assumptions about what silence means, what a deadline means, and what agreement in a meeting means. Time on its own doesn’t surface that. Somebody has to name it.
Is this a diversity or unconscious-bias session?
No, and I’ll say so on the call if that’s what you’re after, because other people do that work better than I do. This is about two business cultures that built opposite methods for protecting the same things, and what that does to your Tuesday meeting.
We’ve done cultural training before and it didn’t change anything.
Most of it is country profiles and dimension charts. Interesting for an afternoon, impossible to act on. I work from your situations, so the examples in the room are your examples, and everything lands on something specific that somebody says or does, and what to do differently. If nobody changed anything after your last session, that’s why.
Do you work in English or French?
Both. I can deliver keynotes, workshops, and consulting in either, and we settle which when we scope the project. I’m American and I’ve worked in French for more than 20 years, so neither one is the version where something gets lost.
We’re the European side, working with Americans. Is this for us too?
Yes. I work in both directions, and about half of what I do runs the other way: European companies expanding into the US, European teams inside American-owned groups, and mergers and acquisitions going both ways. If you’d rather read all of this in French, my French site is here.
We also need help selling in France. Can you do that?
Yes, through GoExport, where I’m US Affiliate Director. Market entry, distributor search, and commercial execution on the ground are real work with a real team behind them, and I stay involved rather than handing you off to a stranger. The two layers tend to need each other anyway: the commercial plan works better when your people and your buyers understand each other, and the intercultural work has somewhere to land when there’s a plan.
Who do you work with, and who don’t you?
American companies working with European colleagues, and European companies working with American colleagues: a subsidiary, an acquisition, a joint venture, a mixed board, an engineering or manufacturing team. Also companies heading that way who want to understand what they’re walking into before they get there.
The US and Europe corridor is what I know all the way down, and it’s the only thing I claim. If your friction sits somewhere else, in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, that’s someone else’s expertise and I’ll be happy to refer you to them.
Let’s book a discovery call
