Here is an excerpt from an article written by Andy Molinsky for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The workplace has never been more global than today. But despite that, I often find the last thing on people’s minds when doing international work is the global element. Instead, and often for good reason, people focus on concrete and pressing work details: finishing that PowerPoint deck, running the financials one more time, or planning the logistical elements of foreign travel. As a result, they tend to follow “gut” theories — what they assume to be true about adapting behavior across cultures.

The problem is that these gut instincts are often false, misleading, and difficult to apply. In studying this topic for the past decade and working with hundreds of professionals from across the globe learning to adapt behavior, I’ve identified three such “myths” of global adaptation.

[Here’s the first.]

Myth #1: The only thing you need to do is learn about cultural differences.

Seems obvious, right? To be effective overseas, you need to learn about how cultures are different. How the Germans give feedback differently from the Chinese. How Americans tend to self-promote more than Brits, and so on. However, learning about cultural differences in theory does not necessarily translate into successful behavior in practice. In fact, it’s often quite difficult to perform behaviors you aren’t used to, even if you have an intellectual understanding of what these behaviors are supposed to be. The real key to crossing cultures isn’t learning about differences: it’s being able to adjust your behavior to actually take the differences into account.

I’ll illustrate with a personal example. When I first started in this field in the early 1990’s, I was working at a resettlement agency in Boston helping former professionals from the Soviet Union learn to interview for jobs in the United States. The clients I worked with were able to quickly learn about cultural differences — that, for example, in the United States, you had to smile, make eye contact, and answer questions in a friendly, upbeat manner about the weather or the commute to the office. But they struggled taking what they knew and translating it into actual behavior. One woman I worked with told me that if you smile in make eye contact in Russia like you do in the U.S., you’ll look like a fool (and, I presume, feel like a fool). I’ve found the same essential challenge to be true across a multitude of cultures and situations. Learning about cultural differences is clearly important, but it’s only the first step towards developing real cultural intelligence.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Andy Molinsky is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Brandeis International Business School. He is the author of the book Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process (HBR Press, 2013). Follow Andy on twitter at @andymolinsky. To check out his HBR articles, please click here.