Business over Turkish Coffee : Tips for Doing Business in Turkey (9781620956571) by Parlar Zafer

Author:Parlar, Zafer [Parlar, Zafer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620956571
Publisher: Bookbaby
Published: 2012-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

HAND GESTURES

One of my instructors at university in Holland used hand gestures a lot. When pointing at something in a book, she would put her thumb between her index finger and her middle finger. I can already see the smile on Turkish readers’ faces! We do not have the “middle finger” gesture in Turkey, but in its place we have exactly what I described above. Imagine yourself in a meeting discussing a report and the guy sitting next to you keeps on doing this (or for non-Turkish readers, he is constantly showing something in the report with his middle finger). How long could you stand this?

Let’s give some more examples of hand gestures. Put your hand next to your face and shake it up and down. In Holland, this means the food is delicious. In Turkey, it means if you continue like that I am going to slap you in the face! The gesture scuba-divers use underwater to indicate that everything is okay is swearing in Venezuela and, if you tweak it a bit, a certain sexual tendency in Turkey.

Like Italians, we Turks talk with our hands - especially when we get emotional. It can even go so far that, when combined with a loud voice, the competition from a different culture can see this as a threat. It is actually totally normal. The best thing you can do at that moment is to stay calm and not react in the same way. However, when the heated moment subsides, you can do the same on another (or even the same) issue. The trick is not to be influenced and change the course of your negotiation because of this behavior. If you believe you are being influenced or it bothers you, ask for a time out. Things will be back to normal when you return to the negotiation table.

The next area of using hands is for touching. Americans and Asians hate touching, other than a hand shake, during a meeting. Northern Europeans can live with it. Southern Europeans, Arabs and Latin Americans love to touch, seeing it as a friendly gesture. They do not consider this the invasion of personal space that other cultures might. Many foreigners find it odd when they see Turks holding the arm of someone they are talking to, or see two men who know each other well walking hand in hand to a meeting. I can very well picture that for some of the readers this is hard to imagine, yet it is true and it indicates a good friendship.

A close friend of mine who was raised in Turkey got his undergraduate degree in the USA and his graduate degree in Germany, and then returned to Turkey to work for a foreign investment company selling trucks. Their sales procedure was to first visit the truck drivers/owners at their offices to introduce their trucks, and then invite the customers to their offices. When the drivers/owners arrived, they were first taken to a large meeting room for video and slide shows of the truck and its technical capabilities.

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