French and German speakers in the same team: when language changes the meeting

A project meeting brings together four people from Lausanne and three from Zurich. It is held in French, out of courtesy to the French speakers and because the project manager is from Geneva. The Zurich colleagues follow, answer when asked, and the next day send a long email in German that calls half the decisions into question.

The French speakers see it as a lack of candour. The German speakers simply waited until they could express themselves in a language in which they felt precise.

Language before mentality

This kind of scene is readily explained by differences in character between the regions. That is rarely the right track. The first difference is linguistic, and it is subtler than it looks.

In German-speaking Switzerland, the everyday spoken language is Swiss German, in its regional variants, while writing is done in Standard German. Many French speakers learned Standard German at school; very few understand the dialect easily. Conversely, the French a German speaker has learned is often enough to follow a meeting, much less so to counter a well-built argument.

So the language of a meeting does not only decide who understands. It decides who can object.

Choosing the language consciously

No solution is perfect, but three options work, provided they are chosen rather than drifted into:

• one language per channel: spoken exchanges in one language, writing in the other, which gives everyone a moment in which they are at ease;
• alternating, by meeting or by topic, announced in advance;
• English as neutral ground, which only works if nobody finds themselves in their third language facing colleagues in their first.

In every case, short written minutes sent the same day recover most of what was lost in the spoken exchange. Meeting facilitation techniques take on particular importance here.

Beware of regional grids

Generalisations — Swiss Germans more direct and more formal, French speakers more diplomatic — contain some observation. They become harmful as soon as they are applied to a person. An engineer from Basel can be far more indirect than a saleswoman from Vaud.

It is better to work on each person’s actual preferences. DISC provides a shared vocabulary for this, which we use in DISC and Driving Forces.

Coordinating without shared authority

These teams are often cross-functional: members report to different managers, at different sites. The language difficulty then adds to the lack of a reporting line, and every misunderstanding costs more to put right. That is the territory of cross-functional management, where you learn to secure commitment without being able to impose it.

A bilingual team is not a problem team. It is a team whose working rules cannot stay implicit.