Business leaders attempting to manage Thais for the first time are inevitably smart, experienced, and well-intentioned. They arrive eager to raise the bar, build accountability, and drive business growth. But over time, their teams can grow quiet and dysfunctional, even passive-aggressive.
What’s going on? Often, just a slow retreat of trust.
In my coaching, I’ve seen a pattern. Leaders aren’t undone by incompetence, but by habits that clash with local cultural dynamics. Here are five rookie miscues that quietly smother performance and what to do instead.
1. Interpreting Silence as Agreement
When you first arrive, you give yourself time to settle in and become acclimated before introducing changes. (Good move.) You get to know your people a little. You demonstrate your business saavy by making some smaller decisions.
Then it’s time to introduce badly-needed strategic shifts. Your Thai team members listen during group discussions, politely, nod, and even smile. You ask them to suggest creative adjustments, but they don’t have much to say. You ask, “Is everyone on board, then?” Yeses all the way around the table.
It feels like alignment but often it isn’t. In Thai culture, silence is rarely consent. It’s a way of avoiding confrontation and a potential loss of face.
When leaders assume silence means buy-in, it doesn’t even occur to them that the real conversations happen after the meeting when team members compare notes privately and feel the freedom to say what they really think.
Better: Get to know your Thai team members one on one. Develop trust. Then if you’re unsure about buy-in, check in with each of them individually. Tease out their feedback with open, non-threatening questions. This gives them an opportunity to speak ‘their truth’ without worrying as much what you or others will think.
2. Over-Communicating Verbally
Western expats in Asia often tighten control and increase their volume of words when they sense hesitation. Most of them are from low-context communicating cultures so they think that giving detailed instructions and saying the same thing over and over in many different ways is what is needed. But this “helpful control” quietly communicates, “I don’t trust you to think.”
In high-context cultures like Thailand, workers are looking to be motivated by non-verbal signals, not just words.
Better: When a mistake happens or the team hesitates to do the things you’ve asked, first state in clear terms what you need them to do. Then, use heavy doses of non-verbal signals, like smiling or stopping by to give them a thumbs up. If you must speak, use open-ended questions to get them to understand and refocus.
3. Giving Feedback Too Directly
In many European and North American cultures, direct feedback (especially negative feedback) can feel like someone is doing you a professional favor —“Here’s the truth so you can improve.” In Thailand, direct feedback can feel more like an ambush. If you deliver a blunt evaluation in public, it is likely to trigger embarrassment and a quiet resentment that lingers long after the words fade.
This doesn’t mean Thai employees can’t handle honesty. It just means that it has to be wrapped differently.
Better: Remember, “Less is usually more.” Keep your goal in mind. You want them to receive your words and be motivated to keep growing. That usually means monitoring the prosody of your voice to keep it calm and then using linguistic ‘downgraders’ to soften the blow.
4. Ignoring Hierarchy Out of Principle
Many Western leaders pride themselves on being “flat” and approachable. They invite first-name familiarity and open debate. But in Thailand, hierarchy is not oppression — it’s social order. When leaders ignore it completely, they create anxiety rather than equality.
Thais are comfortable with hierarchy when it’s benevolent. What they resent is arrogance, not authority.
Better: Lead with humility through hierarchy, not around it. Show respect for seniority where it matters, but make sure junior members feel seen. A kind word or small act of inclusion from the boss can carry far more weight here than a grand speech about “openness.”
5. Building Trust in All the Wrong Ways
Most Western leaders practice competence-based or ‘cognitive’ trust in the workplace. “If you prove to me that you’re competent, I will quickly trust you.” But most Asians practice something called ‘affective’ trust. They appreciate your competence, but competence alone will not win their trust; they want to see your character. And they need experiences with you outside of the office to begin to gauge what kind of person you are.
Better: Certainly prove your competence and expect competence from them, but pursue ‘relationship-based trust’ with them by hosting frequent meals together, off-site team-building, karaoke nights, or evenings out at mini-golf or the bowling alley. And don’t forget to smile a lot.
These five miscues are a matter of good intentions filtered through the wrong cultural lens. You’ve got to be culturally smart about it. What are the specific cultural gaps between you and your team members? How can you stretch yourself to be closer to the appropriate zones of behavior?
This isn’t about turning Westerners into Thais or vice versa. It’s about building cross-cultural bridges, respecting the invisible dynamics that have everything to do with building trust in Thai workplaces.
