Multicultural teams fail on etiquette mismatches more often than on actual disagreements. The classic collisions: one member's respectful silence in meetings reads to another as disengagement; one's direct critique reads as aggression while another's diplomatic softness reads as evasion; punctuality codes clash over what a start time or deadline really means; and hierarchy expectations differ over whether the boss should be challenged openly, privately, or never. Each person is following their own culture's rules of good conduct, which is exactly why the friction feels so unfair to everyone.
The teams that work do one deliberate thing: they make norms explicit instead of assumed. Agreeing openly on how meetings run, how feedback is delivered, what deadline commitments mean, how decisions get made, and how disagreement is welcomed strips away the guessing. Some teams literally write these working agreements down, and it feels bureaucratic for a week and then pays off for years.