A German engineer said this about his American colleagues. Not in anger. In bewilderment.
“Our American colleagues are such hotheads. Hardly do we have some kind of disagreement and they want to run to our team-lead in order to get resolution. We’re adults, not children. We can work these things out among ourselves.”
His American counterpart, same company, same team, saw it very differently.
“Our German colleagues are very reluctant to get our boss involved in resolving internal problems. Do they not trust management? Weird.”
Same conflict. Two completely opposite instincts about what to do with it.
Here is what is happening beneath the surface.
For Germans, conflict is fundamentally negative. It signals that something has gone wrong. And escalating it — bringing it to the boss — makes it worse, not better. Because effective leadership, in the German logic, means preventing conflicts from reaching that level in the first place. A conflict that “becomes public” is a sign of failure. Not just yours. Your leader’s.
And there is another aspect. Germans have a figure of speech for it: “Gehe nicht zu Deinem Fürst, wenn Du nicht gerufen wirst.” Do not go to your nobleman unless you are summoned. The logic is old and deeply rooted: those with power can do unpredictable things. Once you hand a problem upward, you lose control of the outcome. As one German manager put it: “You never know what the boss will come up with. We may not like it.”
For Americans, the logic runs in the opposite direction. Conflicts of interest are a fact of life. Escalation is not a failure — it is a right. The individual is entitled to “have his day in court.” And management exists, in part, to resolve disputes that the working level cannot. “Why shouldn’t we escalate to management? Don’t they get paid to settle disagreements in the team?”
An American manager of a global team described the frustration from the leadership side: “I sense time and again that there are problems within the team among the Germans and Americans, but for some reason they are wary of coming to me. Do they not trust me or like me or think I can help?”
They trust you. They just believe the problem is theirs to solve. And that bringing it to you would embarrass everyone involved — including you.
This collision plays out in teams every day. Americans escalate and Germans are horrified. Germans hold back and Americans conclude that something is being hidden. Neither side is wrong. They are operating from fundamentally different assumptions about what conflict means, what management is for, and what competent professionals are expected to handle on their own.
If you lead Americans, get ready to resolve conflicts regularly. If you push them back down, you risk being seen as a weak leader who avoids the hard conversations. If you lead Germans, don’t mistake their silence for the absence of conflict. They are working it out. They don’t want to burden you. Give them the space, but stay alert.
If you’re a German in a transatlantic team, be prepared: your American colleague will escalate sooner than you think is reasonable. If you’re an American, think twice. In the German logic, early escalation doesn’t signal decisiveness. It signals that you couldn’t handle it yourself.