Culture and small talk

Are you a coconut or a peach? No, we’re not talking about your colour or your size — we’re talking about your culture. Bob Dignen, regular author of our Business Skills section in Business Spotlight magazine and director of York Associates, explains why it’s important to know the difference, in particular when you want to improve your small-talk skills.

Watch the first Business with Bob video on the topic of socializing.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Bob Dignen and a very warm welcome to our new business communication video series.

Today, I’d like to look at small talk and begin by asking you a question: What exactly is small talk? Because I think it means different things to different people.

Susanne Zaninelli, an interculturalist, has made a very interesting comparison between German and American small-talk styles using the metaphors of coconuts and peach.

Now she describes the German style as very “coconutty”, very task-oriented. As you can see. only a very thin layer of private self is exposed at work. Work is work and personal is personal and the two are not mixed. It’s much more professional to remain reserved, focused and serious, and not spend too much time enquiring into people’s lives with small talk. Of course, over time you’ll be able to crack through the hard “coconutty” shell and enter the truly personal world, which is very nice and very milky, but not on first contacts. It takes time.

So with coconuts, with these kind of individuals, small talk is usually devalued in favour of work. In fact, if you spend too much time small-talking you are not professional.

Now, by contrast, you have the more peach-like American style. At first meetings you dive straight into the soft personal area, ask lots of questions — “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “Do you have any children?” “Are you married?” — and you show lots of enthusiasm and explicit engagement with other people. What they say to you is really interesting. It’s important to show them that you have an interest in them, to show them that you like them, to show other people that you value them.

So you see, coconuts and peaches, these two small-talk styles, are very, very different and they reveal important differences, culturally and interpersonally.

And sometimes the two styles don’t go very well together. The coconut might feel that the peach is a little superficial, over-optimistic, over-positive and the peach might feel that the coconut is rather distant, rather cold, sometimes a little bit impolite, even arrogant.

And I know that these are stereotypes but I think they are interesting stereotypes because it creates a moment for you to think. Am I a coconut or a peach? What are my values? What is my small-talk style? And there is no right and no wrong, the critical thing for you to do is to think strategically. You need to know yourself, know your own style, know the style of the other person and create a strategy to bridge across the two styles and if you do that you can be a successful international small-talker.

So good luck!