In Singapore, "We'll Try" Means No. In Canada, No Means No. Learn the Difference Fast.

🇨🇦 Canada · 🇸🇬 Singapore

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

A Canadian manager pitches an idea in a Singapore boardroom, gets a room full of nods and a polite "we'll try," and leaves the meeting believing they have a green light. Three weeks later, nothing has moved, and nobody can quite explain why. Nothing was hidden. It just wasn't said out loud, and in Singapore's meeting culture, that was the point.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇦 Canada

🇸🇬 Singapore

Canada's Hofstede profile — a power-distance score of 39 against a global average of 55, and an individualism score of 80, its highest dimension — produces meetings where hierarchy is present but rarely load-bearing. According to comparative cultural research, Canadian managers and subordinates are expected to discuss operational decisions relatively openly, and disagreement, delivered with the right amount of cushioning, is treated as useful input rather than insubordination. The stereotype of excessive Canadian politeness is real, but it operates alongside a genuine premium on saying what you actually think — the politeness is the delivery mechanism, not a substitute for the message.

Singapore inverts both dimensions: a power-distance score of 74 and a far more collectivist orientation than Canada's, according to Hofstede Insights, shaped by Confucian values that also run through much of the rest of East and Southeast Asia's business culture. Singapore's Ministry of Manpower and multiple cross-cultural management guides describe meetings there as formal and structured, with agendas prepared in advance and hierarchy determining who speaks first and how directly feedback gets delivered. Disagreement, when it exists, more often surfaces in private conversations after the meeting than inside it — a structural feature that outsiders frequently misread as either total consensus or passive-aggressive stonewalling, when it's really neither.

The reckoning is that both cultures value harmony — they just define where the friction is allowed to happen. Canadians tend to have the difficult conversation inside the meeting, cushioned in softeners, and consider it resolved once it's said. Singaporeans tend to keep the meeting itself frictionless and have the difficult conversation afterward, privately, precisely so nobody loses face in front of the group. A Canadian who reads Singaporean silence as agreement will be blindsided when a "yes" in the room turns into inaction after it. A Singaporean colleague dropped into a blunt Canadian meeting may find the open sparring, even when good-natured, uncomfortably confrontational — mistaking directness for hostility it was never meant to convey.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone describing their biggest culture shock moving to Singapore said it took months of missed deadlines to realize that "we will try our best" from a junior colleague in a meeting was, functionally, a no — and that pushing for a firmer yes in the room would have been read as putting that colleague on the spot.

Quora — A respondent describing Singaporean work culture called it relentlessly outcome-driven — meetings ran short and efficient, but the real negotiating happened in one-on-one conversations before and after, with the meeting itself mostly there to formalize what had already been agreed privately.

teamblind.com — An engineer who had worked at both a Singapore-based team and a North American one described the gap less as laziness and more as risk tolerance: in Singapore meetings, floating a half-formed idea out loud felt like a bigger social risk than it did back home, so people waited far longer to speak until they were sure.

teamblind.com — Someone comparing tech company culture in Singapore to the US noted that staying late wasn't always about workload — one team stayed until 9pm most nights largely because a manager set the tone by not leaving, and nobody wanted to be the first out the door in a meeting-adjacent culture built on visible presence.

Quora — An expat working in a Singapore government-adjacent sector described meetings as impressively punctual and well-documented, but said getting genuine dissent on the record required building enough personal trust with colleagues that they'd tell you privately what they'd never say in the room.

Conclusion

If you're running meetings in Singapore, the skill to build isn't patience with silence — it's learning to read what's not being said, and doing your real negotiating in the hallway, not the boardroom. If you're running them in Canada, the skill is trusting that directness, properly cushioned, won't blow anything up, and that a quiet room is more likely confusion than consensus. Bring a notebook either way: in one country you'll need it to track what was actually agreed, and in the other, what was actually meant.