Two Ways to Hear "You're Not Doing This Right"

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇹🇷 Türkiye

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Bogotá, a manager delivering hard feedback will often spend more time on the framing than the substance, softening criticism until it barely resembles criticism at all. In Istanbul, a manager might tell you directly and with real feeling that something is wrong — and consider that directness a form of respect. Both countries are hierarchical by Hofstede's measures; both expect deference to authority. But how the authority actually talks to you when you've made a mistake could not be more different, and getting it wrong in either direction reads as either weak or brutal to the wrong audience.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇹🇷 Türkiye

Colombia: Feedback Wrapped in Relationship

Colombia is a strongly collectivist culture, and Hofstede-based analysis of the country consistently flags this as the dominant force shaping workplace communication: group harmony and personal relationships outrank blunt efficiency as organizing values. That shows up most visibly in performance reviews, where criticism tends to arrive cushioned in context, personal warmth, and often several minutes of unrelated conversation before the actual point. A Colombian manager isn't being evasive when they do this — they're doing the necessary relational work that, in their framework, makes the criticism actually land without damaging the working relationship it depends on.

For an employee raised in a blunt-feedback culture, this softness can be genuinely disorienting: reviews can feel vague, and it's easy to walk out of one thinking everything's fine when your manager was in fact signaling real concern. The workaround experienced expats describe is learning to read tone, hesitation, and what doesn't get said, rather than waiting for a direct verdict that may never come in so many words.

Türkiye: Feedback as Honesty

Turkish business culture runs on a different theory of respect entirely. Commisceo Global's management guide describes Turkish workplaces as hierarchical and often autocratic, with decisions concentrated at the top rather than built through consensus — and crucially, direct and expressive communication is treated as a marker of sincerity, not aggression. A manager who tells you plainly, even forcefully, that something is wrong is not violating workplace norms; they're following them. The Cultural Atlas notes that this directness coexists with intense relationship-building — tea, personal conversation, football talk — that happens around the edges of the actual business, meaning Turkish workplaces combine emotional bluntness with real interpersonal warmth rather than treating the two as opposites.

The hierarchy piece matters too: because Turkish managers tend to take personal responsibility for team outcomes rather than diffusing it through group process, feedback often comes from a single, clearly accountable person, and it can carry real emotional weight because that person's own standing is on the line alongside yours.

The Reckoning

The counterintuitive twist is that Turkey's directness is arguably more relationship-based, not less, than Colombia's softness — it's just that the relationship gets expressed through candor rather than cushioning. Meanwhile Colombia's gentleness isn't an absence of hierarchy; it's hierarchy expressed through careful management of face, where a boss's job includes protecting your dignity even while correcting your work. An employee who reads Colombian softness as "no real feedback is happening" will miss real signals. An employee who reads Turkish bluntness as "my manager is upset with me personally" will misjudge what's actually a fairly standard, even respectful, exchange.

Both systems require the same skill in the end: learning to separate the delivery mechanism from the message. In Colombia, that means listening past the warmth for the substance. In Turkey, it means listening past the intensity for the substance. The substance, once you find it, is often not that different.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone comparing feedback norms across Chile, Mexico, and Colombia noted that Colombian colleagues were the most likely to soften criticism into near-invisibility, to the point that outside hires sometimes needed a local colleague to "translate" what a review had actually meant.

r/expats — A manager who relocated from the US to Bogotá described sitting through what she thought was a positive review, only to realize weeks later — after a second, blunter conversation — that her manager had actually been flagging a serious performance concern the entire time, just too gently for her to register it as one.

Blind (teamblind.com) — An engineer who joined a Turkish tech company's Istanbul office wrote that getting told bluntly, in front of the team, that a solution "wasn't good enough" felt harsh at first, but colleagues later explained it was actually a sign the manager respected him enough to be honest rather than polite.

Internations Bogotá — A finance professional who moved from Germany noted that Colombian colleagues seemed to take even mild criticism personally when it was delivered too directly, and that softening her own communication style, uncomfortable as it initially felt, dramatically improved how her feedback was received.

r/AskALatina — One respondent explained that in Colombian offices, a boss inviting you for coffee before a review is itself a signal worth reading — it usually means something serious is coming, dressed in enough warmth that it won't feel like an ambush.

Conclusion

If you're moving into either system, the operating question is the same: what does this culture's version of "care" sound like when someone is telling you you're wrong? In Colombia, care sounds like softness, and you have to listen for the real message underneath it. In Turkey, care sounds like honesty, sometimes delivered with real heat, and you have to trust that the heat isn't personal.

Here's what I'd tell a friend heading into either job: don't grade the feedback culture against your last one. Grade it against what it's actually trying to protect — in Bogotá, your dignity; in Istanbul, your ability to trust what you're told. Both are worth having. You just have to know which one you're getting.