Cultural Friction is a podcast for CEOs, managers, team leads and executives who lead international, global and culturally diverse teams — and want fewer miscommunications, misunderstandings, and conflict getting in the way of good work.
Each episode breaks down a real workplace friction point: what's really going on beneath the surface, why it happens across cultures, and what to do about it. No theory for its own sake — practical fixes you can use with your team today.
Hosted by Brendan Thomas Quinn, a cross-cultural consultant based in Barcelona with 25+ years of intercultural experience, including eight years as a CEO leading organisations in Ghana. Brendan helps international organisations reduce cultural friction through cross-cultural training, workshops, coaching, and advisory, and lectures in Cross-Cultural Communication at SBS Swiss Business School and in Business Communication for Global Teams at Harbour.Space University in Bangkok and Barcelona.
If your teams span cultures, time zones, or both, this show is for you.
Learn more, read the show notes, or work with Brendan: https://brendanthomasquinn.com (https://brendanthomasquinn.com)
You can watch this episode in our YouTube channel here Why do talented people from non-Western backgrounds get overlooked in Western-led organisations – even when they're doing great work? In this episode of Cultural Friction, I talk with Biljana Tasetovikj, founder of Invisible Rules. Biljana spent 18 years in international education, including running a U.S. State Department cultural programme, and helped Macedonian students secure more than $5.1M in scholarships. Then, five years into he...
22 Oct 2026
What is Cultural Friction
What Is Cultural Friction? (And Why Nationality Is Only the Start) A manager gives quick, clear feedback, and the person who gets it goes quiet for two weeks. A team leaves a meeting, and half of them think a decision was made. Nobody did anything wrong, and something still got lost. That’s cultural friction. Nine episodes in, Brendan Thomas Quinn explains the idea behind the show. Brendan is a cross-cultural consultant and trainer based in Barcelona. He runs cross-cultural communication work...
13 Oct 2026
Promotion Bias
You have two strong candidates for one team lead role. You promote the one who speaks up and asks for it. Eight months later, the other one resigns. Mark speaks in every meeting, talks about his results and has asked twice about the next step. Sofia speaks less, notices what everyone else missed, and is the person her colleagues go to when they’re stuck. She has never asked about promotion. We promote Mark. It feels like an easy decision. In this episode, Brendan Thomas Quinn explains promoti...
2 Oct 2026
The Local Team Knew
The Local Team Knew the Deal Wouldn't Work Head office makes a confident decision. A new market, a price and a partner. The regional team can see straight away that it won't work in their market. Either nobody asks them, or they say so once and nothing changes. Five months later the launch has failed, and it turns out the people in that market knew from the start. Meet Daniel, a commercial director at head office who's good at his job, and Ana, who has run the regional office for six years. A...
3 Sept 2026
The Local Hire Quits
Why Our Best Regional Hire Leaves Sooner Than We Think We hired well. It took them the best part of a year to find their feet — and then, just as they got good, they resigned. The exit interview said "a better opportunity," so it went in the file under money. It usually wasn't money. This episode is about the person every international team has: the one who ends up as the bridge between head office and the local team. They're the one we ring before a difficult call. The one who explains each ...
31 Jul 2026
One Merger, Two Cultures
Two Companies Merged. Two Cultures Didn't. The deal closed. The org chart was redrawn. On paper, two companies became one. So why, eighteen months on, are there still two of everything — two systems, two chat channels, two sets of people who quietly stick to their own side? In this episode we look at why so many mergers stall without anyone noticing, and why "we're one company now" so often isn't true. A merger isn't one team with a mix of people in it — it's two whole teams pushed together, ...
27 Jul 2026
Sophisticated Stereotypes
Cultural stereotypes at work rarely arrive as prejudice. They arrive as preparation — and that's exactly what makes them so hard to spot. You did the reading. A new colleague was joining from a region you hadn't worked with much, so you learned what to expect and adjusted: softened your delivery, slowed the meeting down, held back the direct question. Then you met them, and none of it fit. The careful accommodation you'd built landed as hesitancy, and it took weeks to work out what had gone w...
20 Jul 2026
Rules or Suggestions
You wrote the process down. Everyone agreed to it. And still — half your team follows it to the letter while the other half treats it as a helpful suggestion, and both sides are quietly deciding the other lot are the problem. This episode is about why. Meet Claire and two of her best people: Kenji in Osaka, who follows every step every time, and Rafa in São Paulo, who skips the review to rescue a client in a panic. Both are doing their honest best. Both are certain they're the sensible one — ...
13 Jul 2026
You Said Your Door Was Open
You say your door is always open. You ask "any concerns?" at the end of every meeting. And still, the bad news reaches you late — from the very people who smiled and said "all good." This episode is about why. Meet Priya, a project lead in Singapore who warned her London manager about a doomed deadline three weeks early — and watched him miss it completely, because her warning didn't sound like a warning to him. Neither of them did anything wrong. The project failed anyway. We unpack the two ...
6 Jul 2026
Your Team Trusted Each Other on Day One. Here's Why That Won't Last.
New international teams often feel easy at first — warm, generous, quick to assume good intent. That goodwill is called "swift trust," and it's provisional by nature. If it isn't reinforced, it quietly decays, usually around month two or three. In this episode: what swift trust is, why dispersed and multicultural teams are especially vulnerable to losing it, and four concrete things you can do to actively reinforce it before it drains away. IN THIS EPISODE (1:00) The friction: why the warmth ...
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