Working effectively across cultures: lessons from a year in Mumbai

Executive overview

Most professionals working cross-culturally underestimate how different business norms, trust dynamics, and daily expectations will be. Visiting a country is not the same as living and working in it. Nathan Czubaj spent a year in Mumbai working for Dale Carnegie and discovered that effectiveness abroad requires shedding assumptions about sales, leadership, communication, and even basic needs.

The core shift is not learning new tactics — it's abandoning the belief that your home culture's defaults are universal.

Preparing to work abroad

• Talk to people who have lived there, not just visited — books and travel guides teach backpacking, not working
• Learn basic greetings in the local language; even imperfect attempts signal respect and change how people treat you
• Research specific practical realities: Mumbai's 60% informal housing rate, or that most of the population is vegetarian
• Watch films to build visual familiarity, but know they can't convey smell, scale, or daily friction
• Build mental preparation time — the more you've processed the reality in advance, the stronger your resolve when challenges hit
• Don't overanalyse; there is no substitute for showing up

Business norms that don't transfer

• Needs-based selling is largely a Western concept — in many cultures, the buyer has already decided; the meeting is purely negotiation
• Negotiations often start at 1.5x the expected price and converge slowly over days or weeks to a number both parties already knew
• Efficiency-focused Westerners find this frustrating, but it is the norm — imposing a different process damages trust
• The question "how much value did we add?" is less common; gross-profit percentages dominate internal conversations instead

Leadership and trust across cultures

• Distrust of Westerners can be structural, not personal — colonial history creates an undercurrent of "what do they really want?"
• Colleagues may speak critically about you in another language in front of you; body language will tell you what you need to know
• Trust, once built, produces unusually deep loyalty — people who initially resisted became the strongest advocates
• Flexibility in leadership style is non-negotiable; a directive style that works at home may simply not land in a different cultural context
• "Yes" does not always mean yes — in many Asian cultures, agreement in the moment is a politeness norm, not confirmation of understanding

Reading non-verbal communication

• Head movements carry different meanings across cultures — side-to-side head movement in India can signal agreement, not disagreement
• Checking for comprehension with "does that make sense?" may produce misleading signals if you rely only on head nods
• Trust your gut by watching for genuine engagement in people's eyes and energy, not just surface-level compliance
• Adjust in real time rather than assuming your read of the room is accurate

The mindset shift that actually works

• Stop trying to be a visitor and commit to thinking like a local — taxi drivers responded to this shift immediately, turning meters on unprompted
• Start each day with the frame: "I will learn more today than I would in a typical month at home"
• Embrace daily friction — food, language barriers, unfamiliar systems — as the actual content of the experience
• Resentment that things aren't your way is visible; it triggers a matching negative response from others
• Genuine curiosity and a smile are not soft skills — they are the primary mechanism for building trust across cultures

Unexpected benefits of cross-cultural experience

• The biggest return is not what you gain abroad but how it changes relationships at home — people read cross-cultural experience as courage and openness
• Meeting someone from the country you lived in creates instant rapport and trust, often faster than years of domestic relationship-building
• Living with scarcity resets the distinction between wants and needs — this mental shift persists and sharpens daily decision-making long after returning
• The ability to genuinely take another person's perspective — not as a concept but as a practiced skill — compounds across every subsequent leadership context

Advice for leaders working cross-culturally

• If you can't live abroad, travel to cultures outside your comfort zone — even short trips recalibrate assumptions
• Companies with international offices make transfer easier; use that infrastructure if it exists
• Kids and family are not disqualifiers — bringing children to different cultures is one of the highest-leverage things a parent can do
• Interact with people from other cultures locally — the principles of genuine interest and respect transfer whether you're in Mumbai or a meeting room at home