I would rather spend months learning Spanish than spend my time in Latin America expecting everyone to speak English. English isn’t my first language either, I had to learn it, get comfortable using it, make mistakes and adapt to the people I was speaking to. So I find it a little strange when someone travels to another part of the world and gets frustrated because the locals don’t speak their language. Specially when that a grown man, who is definetely from the US throwing a tantrum in a coffee in the middle of Santiago de Chile.
Mate, we the visitors, we are the ones who decided to come here, why should everyone else adapt to you? I’m not suggesting you need to become fluent before boarding a plane, but learning enough Spanish to order food, ask for directions, have a basic conversation or understand what’s going on around you is hardly an unreasonable expectation. It makes travelling easier and it usually makes the experience more interesting.
More importantly, it shows that you’re making an effort and that effort matters. I think the same principle applies far beyond travelling and in fact, some of the situations where I’ve found it most useful had nothing to do with speaking another language.
It’s not anyone’s responsibility to understand you
One of the simplest things about communication is also one of the easiest to forget: understanding someone is not just about what you say, it’s about how you say it, who you’re saying it to and whether the other person can actually make sense of it. You might know exactly what you’re talking about and you might be completely right, but none of that guarantees the other person will understand you and life does not work this way. This is where I think common sense and empathy come in. If I’m in Mexico, Peru or Chile, I can’t reasonably expect everyone I meet to speak English just because I do. I can either get frustrated, rely on translation apps and hand gestures, or make an effort to learn some Spanish. The responsibility to make the interaction work is partly mine. The same applies when you’re dealing with people whose professional backgrounds, experience or priorities are different from yours. You can’t expect them to understand your world simply because you understand it yourself.
Same problems happen in corporate, when you educate people, they will understand you
I’ve encountered this repeatedly in my professional life, particularly when trying to introduce digital marketing concepts to people who have spent years working in very different environments.
At Amplifon, for example, I had to convince sales managers who had been doing things a certain way for a long time that digital marketing could make a real difference to their work. Their response was often some variation of: “That’s how we’ve always done it.” I could have responded with marketing terminology, talked about funnels, conversion rates, attribution models and campaign optimisation and explained why the numbers supported my approach, but that wouldn’t necessarily have changed anyone’s mind. These people knew their business, they understood their customers, their sales processes and the practical challenges of selling hearing aids. They didn’t necessarily need to understand every detail of digital advertising, what they needed to understand was how it could help them attract customers, support their sales activity and make their jobs easier. So I had to explain it from their perspective, not mine.
The same challenge came up at MSD, although in a very different environment. Working in pharmaceutical marketing means dealing with Medical, Legal and Regulatory colleagues who have an entirely different area of expertise and responsibility. I often had to explain how digital advertising actually works, why a particular ad appears to someone, where and when it can appear, how targeting works, what happens when someone interacts with it and what data is collected along the way. Sometimes that meant going through the details of an individual ad and explaining exactly how it would be displayed and delivered. The MLR team weren’t digital advertising specialists, and they weren’t supposed to be, their job was to assess the content and make sure it met the relevant requirements. My job was to make sure they had enough context to understand what they were reviewing. That distinction matters. I couldn’t expect them to know the technical details simply because I knew them. If I wanted them to understand a campaign, I had to explain it in a way that made sense within their own area of expertise.
I faced a similar situation while working with my clinic in the Emirates. The people there knew their patients, services and business inside out, but digital marketing wasn’t necessarily their speciality. Explaining why a campaign should focus on a different type of patient, why not every lead was equally valuable or how advertising could support the clinic’s commercial objectives required a different approach.
Again, I could have spent an hour explaining advertising mechanics, but the more useful conversation was about the patients they wanted to attract, the services they wanted to grow and the business outcomes they were trying to achieve.
Three different environments, three different audiences and essentially the same challenge: translating something I understand into something that matters to someone else. The greatest compliment I got? This guy is able to talk about super complicated technical stuff like he is doing a grocery run. Thank you, Ahmad.
Knowing your subject is not equal to being able to explain it
I think people sometimes confuse expertise with the ability to communicate. Being good at something doesn’t automatically make you good at explaining it and knowing more about a subject doesn’t mean the other person should be expected to follow every detail of your reasoning. This is particularly noticeable in specialist roles, digital marketers speak in terms of impressions, clicks, conversions, attribution and optimisation, while finance teams think about budgets, costs and returns, sales teams think about customers and closing deals and medical and regulatory teams have their own priorities and responsibilities.
None of these perspectives is inherently better than another, they’re simply different. The mistake is assuming that your own terminology, priorities and way of thinking should be the starting point for every conversation. Sometimes you need to simplify, you need to explain the background before getting into the details and sometimes you need to forget the terminology altogether and use an example the other person can relate to.
But most importantly you need to listen first, because you might be trying to solve a problem that the other person doesn’t actually have. Please note, by these I don’t mean talking down to people or watering down your expertise, it means understanding your audience well enough to communicate the relevant parts of it.
Never be a tourist from the US throwing a tantrum
It does not matter if I’m trying to order dinner in South America or explain a digital advertising campaign to a regulatory colleague, I don’t think the underlying principle changes much. If I want someone to understand me, I have to make an effort to communicate in a way they can understand. That might mean learning Spanish before travelling, might mean explaining a digital campaign without relying on marketing jargon, or it might mean taking the time to understand why an experienced sales manager is sceptical about changing a process that has worked for years. It’s easy to get frustrated when people don’t immediately understand what you’re saying. It’s harder, but considerably more useful, to ask yourself whether you’ve explained it in a way that makes sense to them.
So please, don’t be like a grown ass US tourist in my new favourite coffee shop in Santiago de Chile and try to grow some empathy. Thank you.
