Saying the Difficult Things

That is beautiful haha

They had your best interests at heart even if it might not have come across that way. I'm glad you figured that out back then and the relation didn't turn sour!

I personally haven't met many Russians, but many Romanians seem to share this trait as well

That's an interesting observation, that russians and dutch share this trait. I agree but think the russians often deliver their insults in a bit more veiled manner. They will use irony and sarcasm, making you have to figure out if you were just insulted or not. The dutch are more brute-force insulting. I enjoy being roasted by both ;)

Haha, what's wrong with Dutch staircases?

I guess it promotes CEOs that are actually right more often than not

Not Dutch, but I imagine the CEO directly tells the 500 people who disagree to piss off.

It depends on the subject, how the CEO is known to react (perhaps the CEO is not from here), a trainee might hold back a little bit more, and more such factors do of course play a role.

Our organisational structures are generally just as flat as our landscape, which might help promote more opportunities for people to speak their minds to upper management. I don't have data on this though.

A distant relative of mine always said his business would have never started making money if it weren't for the Polish ladies who worked in his factory complaining so much about their work areas. He had his lunch in the general cafeteria together with everyone else whenever he could, and that is not uncommon here.

Edit: We also have a concept called "medezeggenschapsraad" or "ondernemingsraad" (depending on context), which is a kind of employee panel with decision making power that businesses of 50 employees and up are required to have. Unsure if this is unique to the Netherlands though.

There are nuances to it. The criticism needs to be constructive and concrete. Saying “the new plan is stupid” without a coherent argument for why it is stupid won’t be listened to. If you have a credible, coherent argument you will be taken seriously by the CEO. However, offsetting this is the reality that in many parts of Europe that work like this there is a class consciousness — what will be taken seriously often needs to be on matters deemed appropriate to your perceived knowledge and ability. They don’t automatically trust that you have any idea of what you are talking about. It generally isn’t like voting on “rightness” or “wrongness”, it is about building a consensus on the true state of the world.

Lastly, you need to moderate your feedback because sometimes the CEO can take you too seriously! If you just lay out a coherent argument that something is stupid, it can look very dire to the CEO. Offering a thoughtful and slightly more optimistic alternative perspective can help a lot. I had to learn that I was unduly stressing CEOs in these situations, because they took the negative feedback seriously without proactively offering a counter-balancing optimistic scenario when that existed. The best approach is “this is won’t work but I have an idea”.

Even in cultures where this is considered normal, most people don’t do it, or don’t do it well. Constructive no-bullshit feedback is genuinely valued by CEOs at large companies. Being that person, which I naturally am, has been very high leverage across many large companies in my experience.

Being free to say what you think does not mean CEO will submissively follow all suggestions.

If 1000 people want to tell the CEO he is wrong, he'd better listen.

If there is a choice to be made, he should make it, explain it, and live it.

Agreed. West coast snowflakes get bent out of shape at the least hint of directness, honesty (esp. about their shit startup ideas) and criticism.

I've also found Germans to be pretty straight shooters. On a scale of Duty to Californian, their def. closer to Dutch.

Couldn't agree more. In my experience, self-proclaimed direct people are often just violent communicators.

George Carlin said, "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?".

I think this thought applies to directedness as well.

I don't like your alternatives, because they are not the same thing. They also use too many words and assume you have mythical improvement.

But also, "this is dumb" is insulting. It is not direct, it it's just insult with 0 information.

"This won't work" or "this will cause issues" or "this is complicated" would be better equivalents, because they actuality hint to what your issue is and wont insult. The management, if it listens and have good reasons is then fully able to modify their own plan or stick with it while noting objections. They are also fully able to explain why they are doing it is objection seem to miss the mark.

Floor-level employees voicing discontent in only a few words to a director who just happened to walk past their station, is still infinitely more information than when they had kept their mouths shut and eyes down.

It's then up to that director to hear them out and find out what their concerns are really all about. Perhaps they should be given a bit more information, so they can also see the bigger picture and how it'll benefit them too.

Some really high leverage opportunities can come out of this.

The book The Culture Map goes through that and lot of other "Culture X is more Y than Z" in a readable level of detail.

This isn't a pissing contest, it's simply the social standard here which sometimes accidentally leaks out to people who do not appreciate it, or wrongly interpret it as rudeness.

For us as practitioners of this behaviour, intended rudeness is actually easy enough to spot.

Are you sure you were in the proper position to define rude, mature, or productive? I don't mean this as a diss but those are all defined by either implicit or explicit standards or goals.

There are linguists who quantify and measure this, of whom the most prominent is Deborah Tannen:

http://www.deborahtannen.com/scholarly-articles

("Prominent" here meaning "writes popular books as well as academic ones".)

One of the things that jumps out is that "culture X" is rarely as broad as an entire country (except perhaps a microscopic one). There are always cultures within the country, defined by gender, age, religion, wealth, location, ethnic heritage, etc etc etc.

There genuinely are cultural groups who will speak less directly ("Would you mind passing the salt?") and those who will speak more directly ("Pass the salt.") It's not just more-and-less; you still have to hit the correct level for the specific instance.

Tannen is perhaps most famous for writing about the different styles that men and women use (in different groups; it's very much taught by culture, not biology). I found it immensely helpful for understanding not just what women say but also what I say. I highly recommend her books.

I'm sorry I don't have direct links to scholarly articles that provide exactly what you're looking for, but that's where I'd start looking for them. It's entirely possible that they exist -- but they almost certainly don't come down to "The Dutch are more direct."

it's only rude if you're rubbing it in their face, rather than trying to inform them in a down to earth way.

Between Royal Dutch Shell (one of the world's biggest oil companies), LyondellBasell (one of the biggest petrochemical companies), and LDC (one of the biggest agriculture trading companies) you're almost certainly driving a car made with Dutch materials and sitting on a sofa made with Dutch-traded cotton fabric.

This is such a weird question, surely you’re aware of the absolutely staggering amount of confounding factors that must exist at this scale which means the usefulness this trait might not be easily measured despite having utility? Particularly with such simplistic measures of “successful society”.

Some aspects:

1. The Dutch were the pre-eminent traders in Asia after England.

2. Today, there are globally recognized Dutch brands like Shell, Philips, Unilever, and so on.

3. Dutch computer science has contributed to the advancement of technology in both theory and practice. Two representatives of those sides are Edsger W. Dijkstra and Guido Van Rossum. You may not be sitting on a Dutch sofa, but my money is on the that you do code in Python, which was developed at the Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, now CWI.

4. Even in art, Netherlands has contributed a huge number of painters like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, etc

For perspective : the population of Netherlands is 17 million, which is 1/20th that of the US.

Despite such stereotypes as "going Dutch" etc., the Dutch have contributed enormously to the modern world.

I disagree that your alternative is assertive, and that the former is inherently rude. It's only rude depending on each person's social communication expectations. Otherwise, it's an assertive statement, and like any other, it could seem rude. I find it rude when people are passive aggressive, but they might feel like it's polite.

> Are these people you'd consider yourself very close with?

The recent incident, no, not at all. But I had an abusive ascendant as a child, who would encourage us to "speak our mind" and then punish us for it. I can spot the type for quite a long way away.

Unfortunately, being able to spot them doesn't prevent one from falling victim yet again. We tell ourselves it will be better this time -- well, it usually isn't.

> Most of the time I can moderate my response, sometimes not. But I think getting better at this comes with practise, and without inviting those kinds of conversations, I'll never get better.

The intent of some mindfulness and meditation exercises is to become more attuned to one's lower-level physical responses as a grounding point for being able to more readily identify one's higher-level emotional responses.

In the moment, it might be difficult to recognize and moderate the higher-level reaction without first becoming adept at recognizing the lower ones (e.g., sweaty palms or tense muscles).

> you being by default direct can give some people the opposite impression

Definitely rings true.

> Make it into a cooperative discussion so they don't feel like they're the only one criticizing the subject

If these are people I have time to have regular 1:1s with, then what you're saying does make sense. But there are a lot of people I work with where the benefits from saying the difficult thing would be large that I don't work closely enough with to be able to spend that kind of time. I guess what I'm really asking is how to translate that into a culture; either raise the average trust level or lower the required trust level for difficult conversations.

That's exactly the problem: assuming that the only valid reason to talk about an awkward situation is to convince the other person that they are wrong or change their behaviour.

We can talk about about awkward things, nobody has to convince anyone of anything. You can listen to the other person and just come to understand how they feel and why. You don't need to feel the same way, just have a better understanding of why they feel how they feel.

If more people did this the world would be a much better place. It'd accomplish a lot, I think.

There are people who will make any excuse not to talk about the exact thing they want to avoid and it's more trouble than it's worth pulling teeth trying to find a way to talk about the issue. They just don't want to face it at all.

If the person is to blame, focusing on the mistake rather than the person may just be misdirection.

I think the big difference in the US is not (just) that people may have fragile egos, but that (pos related) the consequences are more serious - don't match up and you'll be fired.

Yup, this is what I was getting at. Wielding the truth as a blunt tool isn't productive. I'm looking to strengthen my relationships and build trust through honesty, not fool around with 'radical honesty' for the sake of it.

Everyone does. That's what's amazing about the poem. On a first read, it's a life-changing message about positivity so strong that it's endlessly requoted worldwide. Do you know how hard it is to write a poem that good? There are perhaps not even 100 of them in all of history.

And yet on a second or third or tenth reading, you start to realize that he was also writing a much more cynical poem with the opposite message. I can't even imagine how hard it is to wrap a meaning like that into the first kind of poem.

Robert Frost is frickin' amazing.