How do you get job candidates as well as leaders transferring to a different company location to fully grasp the culture they’ll experience in their new job? A company culture is intangible, not something you can see or touch. It’s something you feel based on how you can others act and respond to each other and the environment.

The impetus for this question was related to a recent workshop I conducted for a group of expats from China and Sweden who had arrived in the Charleston area over the past few months. The group included employees assigned to the local manufacturing plant and their spouses. My role was to share with them the mindset of what it’s like to live and work in this region, which I’ve called home for 10 years now.

Thanks to their familiarity with TV, social media, movies and other American cultural artifacts, everyone was already acclimating to American culture in their new neighborhoods. They were still puzzled about a few things, especially understanding how much to tip and how to decipher restaurant credit card fees. (You’re not alone, I told them. Many of us who’ve lived here for years are still trying to figure out how these guidelines keep evolving.)

Work was different, especially considering their paycheck was coming from the same global company. The expats expressed surprised by the attitudes and statements from some of the hourly workers: “That’s not my job.” “I don’t want to learn anything new.” “You’re not the boss of me.”

These expats were seeing up close and personally the major differences in mindsets that orient how individuals think about learning and intelligence. Growth mindset is about believing you can “improve” yourself. (You’re a work in progress focused on learning and growing.) Fixed is about believing you need to “prove” yourself. (You’re proud of what you know.)

Expats who come to Charleston tend to have a growth mindset, I explained. It may not be an explicit job requirement, but it’s certainly a prerequisite to be open to new experiences, new people, and new ideas. You also often have diverse life and work experiences. And it’s likely you’ll be more diverse in your demographics, analytical skills and other skill sets than the individuals you’ll be working with here.

By contrast, I continued, large companies just started coming to this region about a decade ago. So there’s not much experience working for global companies. Plus, those for whom the Charleston area is their lifelong home, they are often more focused on protecting and preserving their way of life than doing something different. They tend to be more fixed and go with the flow to support friends and families, especially those who share their backgrounds, experiences, and lifestyles. For them, it’s often harder to change and easier to get stuck, especially when feeling fearful or uncertain.

This difference in mindsets and work experiences permeates the work culture, which is why you’re finding the US work culture so different than your home country culture, I continued. The workshop  is giving you more context to understand what you’re observing; however, you may still have a challenge adjusting due to the differences. (For tips on how to work with their new team members, I suggested reading my latest Forbes Coaches Council article, 10 ways to work with senior leaders with a fixed mindset.)

Because each of us has our unique response to the environment around us based on our lived experiences to date, it can be hard to agree on a shared understanding of a company culture, but it makes sense to try. According to the Barrett Values Centre, one of the leading firms for measuring culture, an organization’s culture is a reflection of the values, beliefs and behaviors of the current leaders, and the institutional legacy of the values and beliefs of past leaders that have been institutionalized into the organization’s structures, policies and procedures. (Full disclosure: I’m a Barrett Certified Consultant.)

Thinking about this experience reminded me of a cultural experience when I transferred from New York City to Los Angeles with the HR consulting firm Towers Perrin many years ago. To adjust and meet people outside of work, I enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Southern California (USC). During the class Ed Lawler taught, we often talked about how hard it can be for leaders to convey their organization’s culture and all its idiosyncrasies to potential candidates they’re recruiting. As a result, the culture the candidates observe may feel different from the culture employees experience, similar to what the expats I work with face between their home country and the Charleston area plant.

In class at USC, we also discussed how popular culture had an impact on company culture. Back then, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, was not yet ready to give up his day job at the Pacific Bell Telephone Company. He had worked there for years, made a decent salary with excellent benefits, and was exposed to terrific material five days a week to use for Dilbert.

Several of my colleagues in the Towers Perrin compensation practice helped inspire the topics for a number of strips about compensation changes at Dilbert’s “fictious” company. About one or two weeks after a project meeting at the phone company, a Dilbert cartoon about some aspect of the upcoming compensation changes would appear in the LA Times. My colleagues would brag (Yes!) about their cultural contributions, clip the cartoon out of the newspaper, and tape it to their office door for all of their officemates to see. (Yes, how times have changed!)

These Dilbert cartoons exaggerated the telephone company’s culture, according to class members who had friends and family working there. But the cartoons hit a cultural nerve as well as funny bone….

The cultural schisms that existed back then also seemed weird yet in a different way than the ones I observed a few weeks ago. No wonder it’s so time and energy intensive to bridge all these culture clashes….