As a French native who moved to New York in 2016, I’ve had the privilege of working extensively with both European and US markets and teams. My experience navigating both the European and US work cultures began at a French startup in 2014, collaborating with our US CEO on a US launch. Initially, my French colleagues and I viewed the American style — full of entertaining and inspiring communication — as mere showmanship and had a lot of fun gossiping about it. Fast forward ten years - after immersing myself in the US market, and recognizing their obvious marketing and communication superiority — I now find myself slightly unsettled by the hyper-analytical and direct French communication style I once practiced.

The primary barrier between US and French teams lies in our fundamentally different approaches to decision-making.

As French professionals, we rely heavily on measurable insights and detailed analyses, focusing on measurable KPIs such as cost, revenue, addressable audience, engagement rate, and feasibility. Our risk-averse nature drives this analytical approach, ensuring we minimize investment loss. In France, marketing typically comes at the end of the decision-making process: once the business decision is made, the next step is determining how to market it.

In contrast, in the US, marketing is baked in the solution from the start: if an idea is cool enough to inspire a team, it has potential. If it can’t even be sold internally, there’s no point in pursuing it further. American teams incorporate a primordial but intuitive factor into their decision-making: “Is it cool?”,“Is it inspiring?” This cool factor acts as a gatekeeper in their decision-making process. Only if this intuitive factor is satisfied do American teams consider the detailed analytics French teams tend to rush into.

This difference in decision-making approaches significantly impacts communication styles across US and French teams.

French teams, using almost exclusively measurable KPIs to assess business decisions, tend to assume there is a single best answer. Our business culture often features a more top-down hierarchy, which reinforces this idea. Naturally, we then provide straightforward feedback that is meant as a pure analysis of the proposed solution’s impact against the target KPIs. Our feedback is direct and to the point — logical — and phrases like “that’s not bad” actually mean “the proposal seems quite good since i don’t see any red flags so far”.

On the other hand, American professionals, relying more on intuitive reasoning at first, may find it challenging to provide concrete criticism for proposals without hurting the team’s spirit. Because at the early stages of a project, “cool” ideas are encouraged and often presented with less analytical support, criticism feels like a personal attack on the individual’s creativity. This is why, in the US, phrases like “it’s interesting” often mean “let’s not pursue that idea.”

US and French teams should consider simple solutions to bridge these gaps.

The French don’t need to learn how to be cool, especially not from the US. But, as a French team in an international environment, we should leverage our natural intuition and taste for cool to influence better decision-making. By adding the “cool factor” as a qualitative KPI to our decision-making process, we will ensure our proposals inspire and engage teams across cultures and drive high-performing go-to-market strategies from the start. Highlighting our intuition and cool vibes will help bridge the communication gap and foster better collaboration with our US counterparts. And, next time we are about to call BS on a US teammate, let’s instead explain to them that French execs need a way to assess their idea’s impact against target KPIs.

Americans don’t need help for selling or marketing their ideas, especially not from the French. As a US team in an international environment, we must leverage our customer-centricity even further by backing up our intuitions and inspiring ideas with proper risk assessments, which is crucial for risk-averse cultures to hear us out. We can quantify our cool intuitions using KPIs such as engagement rates per audience, product-market fit with early adopters, brand differentiation, and PR risks/opportunities. And, next time we find ourselves drowning in French analytical details before we even know if we even their idea, let’s instead remind them that US execs won’t care about the details if they do not love the value proposition at first glance.

By combining the best elements of both decision-making styles: embracing both our intuition and analytical skills, we will work on cooler projects, with better risk management, and way smoother international teamwork.