Dealing With Career Culture Shocks

In my past life as a faculty member, when I was regularly taking students abroad for nearly monthlong language and culture courses, I learned that culture shock has a predictable pattern. I also realized that understanding that pattern can help you acclimate to and succeed in different environments over the course of your career—whether you’re learning a new academic institution, a new organization or a new sector.

The first week in France, students were delighted by the wonderful new experiences and attitudes that surrounded them. They were on their best behavior, accommodating and polite. During the second week, in contrast, unwritten rules were broken, written rules were stretched, nerves were frayed and everyone struggled in their own way. In the third week, realizing their time in France was coming to a rapid close, students rediscovered their best selves, having grown from the challenges they’d experienced and with a greater appreciation for the aspects of the new culture that they wanted to integrate and those that they were happy to leave behind.

I, too, grew from these challenges once I noticed the pattern—or, more accurately, received the wise counsel of a study abroad colleague who had seen the same scenarios play out endlessly. I learned to better prepare students for the normal cycle of three and a half weeks in a new place with new norms. I learned how to respond when weird things inevitably happened, to help my students process their emotional responses to cultural discomfort, to recognize what actions I needed to take when their reactions started to overwhelm me and to identify the quietest and coolest corner of the Louvre, where I could sit in peace and stare at nothing.

If you are navigating the transition into a new culture, you should be prepared for the stages of culture shock that you will encounter, no matter how exciting the transition, how prepared you are for the work, how eager you are to join the new culture, how compatible the fit. As a midcareer professional who joined a new institution just over a year ago, I can confirm that this phenomenon has little to do with how experienced or well trained you are. It is a lifelong challenge—one that you can learn to anticipate and manage.

Honeymoon Phase

The first days in a new environment may feel very special. They chose you! You chose them! Perhaps the salary and benefits you just negotiated represent a high point in your career. Perhaps the opportunity demonstrates how far you have come on your journey. You are excited to work with new people, discover new places and tackle new challenges. You are probably feeling a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism.

Recommended actions:

• Meet with everyone you can whose work intersects with your own. Ask questions with a curious and open mind. Take copious notes. Organize your notes systematically so that you can refer to them easily. (Applying styles in your preferred word-processing software can help.) You will forget much of what you hear during this time of intense onboarding.
• When you don’t have meetings to attend or concrete tasks to complete, spend time creating processes that will help you later on. Decide how you want to organize your email. Create a framework for your calendar. Figure out when you are most productive and plan your days accordingly. Develop good habits now before they become a crucial necessity.
• Find ways to engage with your new community. On a university campus, you’ll have more opportunities than time: myriad affinity groups to join, volunteer initiatives to support, performances to attend. If your work benefits from strong relationships (spoiler alert: most knowledge work does), the time you spend building relationships across your new environment is time well spent.
• That said, be careful not to overcommit in the earliest days. From the vantage point of your first week, it can be hard to know what will prove strategically important at the one-year mark. Pace yourself.

Frustration and Rejection

Like my students in their second week abroad, at some point, you will need to contend with the realities of life in your new environment. You are no longer the tourist who engages superficially with an unfamiliar culture; you are now expected to operate within it—and that transition is rarely smooth. Maybe you cope by idealizing your previous environment. Maybe you find yourself ranting about the pitfalls of the new one. Either way, the honeymoon’s over.

Recommended actions:

• Think back to all the people you met with during the honeymoon phase. With whom did you establish rapport? Whose work or professional demeanor particularly resonated with you? As you run into challenges, ask those people, all of whom have greater institutional knowledge than you, for their advice. When a system or institution is overwhelming, reconnecting with individuals can help make it feel more manageable and human.
• Resist the urge to vent and complain to your new colleagues. Lean on trusted mentors, friends and loved ones outside your workplace. Sometimes it’s enough to be validated in your woe, but it’s also important to talk to those who can help you maintain a balanced perspective on your situation.
• Remind yourself that this phase is a normal part of cultural adjustment and, unless your new environment is toxic or a bad fit, it will pass. You’re in survival mode now—but with patience and persistence, you can learn to thrive.

Adjustment and Adaptation

The things that frustrated you before are not so upsetting now, because you know how to handle them. You’ve gathered your data: you know what the norm is in this new setting and when something is a deviation. In other words, you’ve internalized a new risk calculus. You are now responding to the realities and idiosyncrasies of your environment in a culturally appropriate way.

Recommended actions:

• While you still remember what it was like to be new to this culture, help those who were hired after you. Do you know a hack for making a process more efficient? Do you have advice on how to communicate with other teams or units? Can you facilitate someone else’s work by making an introduction? Sharing your knowledge solidifies it and creates goodwill.
• Create documents or other assets that capture the necessary steps to navigate major tasks and processes in your workflow. Note areas where you can make improvements. You are in a privileged position right now, straddling the line between newcomer and native. Take advantage of this double vision while it lasts.
• Refer to your original job description and make sure that your day-to-day work aligns with the scope of the role for which you were hired. In other words, resist the temptation to prioritize tasks that are immediately gratifying if they interfere with your longer-term strategic goals. This is a good time to make sure that you and your supervisor continue to share the same vision for your role and how you are executing it.

Acceptance and Integration

You have reached a stage of cultural immersion where you can acknowledge the positive and negative aspects of your past environments while also seeing the strengths and challenges of this one. Congratulations: you have achieved a level of cultural belonging and participation that probably seemed inconceivable when you first started your role.

Recommended actions:

• Do your job. I’m only being slightly facetious—with this level of cultural knowledge and personal insight, you can now be fully effective in the role you were hired for. Take ownership of your area and reflect on how you can lead and inspire others instead of simply hitting targets.
• Draw on your past experiences, your knowledge of other work environments and your understanding of your present environment and use your hard-won professional capital to improve this culture that you’ve come to care about deeply.

In French, “culture” doesn’t just describe a context in which people collectively exercise a common set of practices, beliefs and values. It also refers to the practice of sowing, raising and reaping the living products of a given environment. Once you belong to a culture as an active participant, it is your privilege and your responsibility to help it grow and flourish. This is your culture, your community, your common ground. In the words of Voltaire’s Candide, “Let us cultivate our garden.”