Wait. Whose Etiquette?

I was having a conversation with Renata Takacura, a global career consultant, when a topic came up that I turned into a dog chewing on a bone.

The suggestion was that Brazilians are not educated in the etiquette expected in global corporate environments.

And my brain immediately went: Wait. Whose etiquette?

I bet if you were in that conversation you would have thought the same thing.

That is my two cents upfront. And honestly a lot of Renata's, because she is the brain and I am the tendinitis. Everything that follows is the argument.

Whose Etiquette, Exactly?

I have spent a large part of my adult life learning professional rules that nobody officially calls rules.

I grew up in Brazil. I studied in Australia. I lived there for almost a decade. I lived in Portugal. I lived in Ireland. Now I live in Switzerland.

At some point, you stop knowing whether you are adapting or simply collecting different versions of yourself.

The way you introduce yourself, how much eye contact is appropriate, whether saying exactly what you think makes you confident or rude, whether talking about your achievements makes you competent or obnoxious, whether you should call someone by their first name, whether silence in a meeting means agreement or disagreement or politeness or that everyone has mentally gone home.

I have learned some of these things the hard way. And I have also learned that something can be completely normal in one professional environment and strangely interpreted in another.

That is why the phrase global professionalism makes me curious. Because there is no global meeting room floating somewhere above the planet where everyone agreed on the correct way to behave. There are cultures, industries, companies, bosses, personalities. And there are people who have spent twenty years learning one particular version of professional behaviour and then suddenly find themselves being evaluated according to another.

This is what the inherited scorecard does in professional life. It tells you the rules without telling you which room those rules were written for.

Take Communication

A person from a more relational culture may think: let me get to know you first.

Someone from a more direct professional culture may think: why are we wasting time, just tell me what you need.

Neither person necessarily has a problem with communication. They may simply have different ideas about what effective communication looks like.

The same thing happens with teamwork.

A person raised in a more collectivist environment may have learned to pay close attention to the group, maintain relationships and avoid unnecessary confrontation. Someone raised in a more individualistic environment may have learned that speaking up, asserting an opinion and making your individual contribution visible are signs of initiative.

Put them in the same meeting and watch the fun begin.

One person thinks: why is she constantly talking about herself. The other thinks: why is he not saying anything. Both may leave the meeting thinking the other person lacks professionalism.

And this is where international careers get interesting. Because when you move countries you do not just learn a new language. Sometimes you have to learn a new professional language, even when everyone is technically speaking English.

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The Funny Thing About “Normal”

I have experienced versions of this across countries.

Brazil taught me one set of social rules. Australia gave me another, Portugal another, Ireland another. Switzerland is still teaching me things.

Some of these rules contradict each other. And yet each place can make its own version feel completely obvious.

That is why I think there is an important distinction between not knowing the rules of a particular professional environment and not being professionally prepared. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

A Brazilian professional entering a multinational company may genuinely need to learn conventions that are unfamiliar to them. That is normal. But if we describe unfamiliarity with those conventions as a lack of preparation for the global workplace, we should at least ask what we mean by global.

Because perhaps what we are calling global professionalism is sometimes just the professional culture of the people who got to write the rulebook first.

That does not mean every corporate convention is oppressive, culturally biased or secretly designed to exclude Brazilians. Sometimes a convention is simply a convention. Sometimes a company really does require a certain communication style. Sometimes you need to adapt.

I have adapted plenty. But adaptation is not the same thing as discovering that everything you brought with you was wrong. And that distinction matters to anyone who has built a career across borders.

The Calculation We Do

Immigrants and internationally mobile professionals are constantly doing a strange little calculation: what do I need to change, and what do I actually want to keep?

That question is not limited to the workplace. It follows you into friendships, parenting, dating, raising children, speaking another language, even deciding whether being five minutes late is a character flaw or simply something everyone needs to calm down about.

Living across cultures has made me much more suspicious of the word normal. And now, apparently, also of the word professional.

Renata put it clearly:

“Most multinationals in the world were created in the Global North. So corporate culture became Global North culture. That made Global North etiquette the default standard. But that does not mean professionals from the Global South are less prepared. It means they face a competitive disadvantage in spaces built around norms that did not originate where they did. And that disadvantage cannot be turned into a criticism of their origins. Because if the corporate norm had been built in the Global South, it would be Global North professionals scrambling to catch up.”

And as Renata put it most precisely:

“competitive disadvantage is different from a hierarchy of values.”

So I keep coming back to the question that started all of this: when a culturally specific corporate norm becomes the benchmark for global professionalism, what happens to people whose professional socialisation happened somewhere else?

Maybe sometimes they really do need to learn the rules.

But maybe we should be more careful about confusing learning a new code with proving that the old one was wrong.

Jessica Gabrielzyk