How culture, generational differences, and fear influence the way you communicate in everyday life and in a team. and what is trauma-informed communication.

You have this guy on your team who is quiet in meetings, and you have probably decided he is disengaged. Maybe a little arrogant, or just not a team player? You just don’t see him as a communication type.

What you see as disengagement is hypervigilance. And that difference is costing you and your company more than you think.

The other day, I was talking to a client, and she asked why the training they already had (mostly provided by corporate training agencies) did not solve the problem of miscommunication in their teams.

When I asked about the team, she told me they have 3 different generations and diverse cultures. I could hear the generation gap and the culture speaking when I listened to her story. I could also imagine some of the answers to her dilemma would be from her team with a different cultural background.

When we talk about communication, we focus on language, words, tone of voice, and nonverbal communication. And it’s good that we do that. What we are not yet taught to do is keep the nervous system in mind when we communicate with each other.

Nervous system in practice

Our nervous system reacts to every real or perceived threat. Think of the following situation:

Manager: “ Joanne, can I see you in my office? We need to discuss something.”

Joanne: “Yes, boss, I’ll be there right away.”

Silently shaking, nervous, and most probably feeling the rolls of sweat on her back, Joanne walks into the office and fights the urge to tell her boss she did not do anything wrong.

What happened was that Joanne’s nervous system perceived a threat in her boss’s words or tone and immediately put her in fight, flight, or freeze mode. Now, everything she says comes from fear, and as a result, she might range from defensive to withdrawn and be a people-pleaser. 

At the same time, her boss’s nervous system will pick up on every cue from a stressed Joanne and react. If there is fear of being undermined, it will react by becoming domineering or even threatening. If there is fear of being misunderstood, the reaction will be to over-explain, which will make Joanne feel incompetent and likely make her defensive or withdraw from the conversation.

All these reactions are survival strategies. Old ones. Ones that worked once, somewhere else, a long time ago, while each of the two grew up, and never got the memo that things had changed.

Now add culture to that.

Every culture has its own communication style, rules, and non-negotiables. I know what you are thinking: “If you are in a country, you should adapt.” You are right and wrong at the same time. 

We do live in the most globalized time ever, and countries are not a thing when it comes to work. We work online, remotely, and in person, with people from all over the globe, and we’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t even notice until we have a hard conversation.

That direct feedback that Joanne got feels like a conversation to one person and an attack to another. Some of your colleagues grew up in places where authority figures were genuinely dangerous (for example, Romania under communism), and your management style, however well-intentioned, lands on their nervous system like a warning shot.

Add the fact that migration is a trauma. 

Displacement, starting over, the tiring work to rebuild an identity in a language that is not theirs, does not disappear when someone shows up to work on Monday morning. It enters the room and sits with your people. It types along their fingers, speaks along their words and body language, and it is exhausting. 

The experience of migration shapes every conversation you think is about the project deadline, but is actually about their constant battle between who they were back home and who they become here in this country.

Your job as a manager is to keep in mind that what you say might not be what your team hears. And not because they are less smart, or incapable of hearing you. Their nervous system filters your words through their culture and constantly tries to adjust them to make sense for them in the context they are in. So give them space to ask questions or think longer about what you say.

Now add generations.

Recently, I gave a training session to a group of Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. It was informative and refreshing to see that what I knew intuitively and from research held true in practice. We could hear the echoes of each generation. From not trusting institutions and changes that come from the top (Gen X), to the anxiety that comes with constantly being on (Millennials), and the “it’s not my business, so I stay away from it” of Gen Z.

Every generation has different wounds and different rules about what you are allowed to feel at work. All of them are in the same meeting, trying to collaborate as the company’s leadership changes. 

No wonder it is hard.

And the part that makes it hard is that most organizations respond to all of this by booking a half-day workshop and calling it done. They label it a communication problem because communication problems have solutions that fit neatly into a Thursday afternoon and a catered lunch.

But what you actually have is a room full of people whose nervous systems have probably never felt safe enough to be honest with each other. People who have been misreading the same signals for years and have gotten so good at it that they think that is just how work feels.

What we see in those cases is not a communication problem; it has to do with a lack of trust and safety within a team. A we-have-never-actually-understood-each-other problem dressed up in the language of KPIs and quarterly reviews.

And no half-day workshop fixes that.

What does fix the problem

A slower, more deliberate, and more human approach than today’s organizations are used to, because we live in a world where quick fixes are what we want. A good fix means giving people a shared language for what is actually happening between them. 

It starts with training managers to read the room beyond the words said, to understand what is not said but is clearly expressed through silence. Creating the conditions, in a consistent way, where the quiet colleague in the corner finds the courage to speak. Where the Dutch directness does not land as an attack, and the body, which has been keeping score of all the tension this whole time, whether you asked it to or not, feels safe enough to think. 

When our brain perceives a threat, the thinking part of the brain shuts down to make sure we do what it takes to stay alive. At the same time, when we feel safe, our thinking brain turns back on.

Trauma-informed communication means one thing in practice. That’s when the hard conversation happens, nobody’s nervous system sounds the alarm. The thinking brain stays on, and everyone contributes to the conversation in an open and honest way.

What I want you to take away from this article is that your differences across cultural diversity, generations, and the way your nervous system reacts to what happens in the team are not liabilities.

Without that, your multicultural, multigenerational team will keep having the same conversations. Keep misreading the same signals and losing the same people.

That is the real work

Not fixing people, turning the office into a therapy room, or making everyone share their childhood on a Thursday afternoon. Just the simple act of building a team where people’s differences do not cost you, but work together for the good of the team.

If you are a leader who suspects your team is one of these rooms where people misunderstand each other (and if you have read this far, you probably know it is), we should talk.

Not a sales call, just a real conversation. Imagine a conversation over a cup of tea where we actually listen to what is happening in your team before we suggest anything at all. We believe that is where it starts. And it starts here →

Until next time,

Cristina Popescu