Leading Across Cultures: Themes and Questions

A few days ago, I facilitated a discussion with a group of senior executive coaches in the Genesis Advisers Global Leadership Consultant (GLC) network. The topic was cross-cultural leadership, and I explored it with a group of practitioners who had spent decades coaching leaders across geographies.

It was a rich conversation. The coaches surfaced patterns that the standard cross-cultural literature tends to miss and four themes stood out. Here are the key themes.

Theme 1: Context shapes behavior as much as personality does

The opening story set the tone. One coach talked about becoming friends with a group of people from an Asian country during their extended stay in the West. The friendships were real, built through the kinds of interactions that were typical in his own culture. Then he moved to their country and quickly got clear signals that the rules concerning how they could interact had completely changed. Same people, different context.

Situations exert far more force on behavior than most observers credit. Decades of social-psychological research keep finding the same thing. When we watch other people, we attribute their behavior to who they are. When we watch ourselves, we attribute our behavior to the situation we’re in. The asymmetry is so reliable it has a name: the fundamental attribution error.

Across cultures, the error is even easier to make. You see a colleague behave in a way that surprises you. You form a quick conclusion about their character. They’re evasive. They’re deferential. They’re aggressive. The context that produced the behavior is invisible to you, so it doesn’t enter the explanation.

The implication is that when a colleague’s behavior surprises you, you should slow down before reaching for an explanation. Ask: what is their context demanding of them that I can’t see?

Questions worth considering:

•      When a colleague’s behavior surprises you, what’s your default explanation? Something about them, or something about their context? Which would they offer?

•      How much of what you read as “personality” in your team is actually the residue of contexts you can’t see?

•      What would it take, practically, to slow down the move from observation to attribution?

Theme 2: Differences in the interpretation of language matter a lot

The group raised the example of efficiency. It’s an oft-used term in business that means different things in different cultures. In some settings, efficiency means minimizing the time it takes for trucks to make deliveries. In others, it means spending a few hours drinking tea with a factory manager so that your goods, rather than someone else’s, end up on that truck at all. Both definitions are internally coherent. A leader who employs the first definition in a context that interprets the word the other way will be experienced as transactional and, so may get less done.

The same applies to accountability, transparency, direct, professional, urgent. These feel like neutral descriptions of good practice. They are in fact cultural artifacts that encode assumptions about time, hierarchy, relationship, and trust.

The conversation also turned to language itself. Several coaches noted what’s lost when leaders operate in a second language. Nuance and humor are reduced. So is the ability to disagree gracefully. One coach observed that with a smaller working vocabulary, you default to yes or no and then may have to walk your answer back later. You feel less powerful in the room because you are. Another coach told of an IT company conference where native English speakers were convinced they were being clear, and half the room pushed back: you’re not speaking Globish. This is a global meeting. You have to speak Globish.

The asymmetry is often not sufficiently taken into account. Native speakers may mistake fluency for intelligence and accent for confidence. The colleague struggling to find a word in English likely isn’t slower than the one speaking effortlessly. Silence after a question may not be hesitation. It may be the need for more mental processing.

It’s a good practice to audit meetings with native speakers of different languages. If you’re a native English speaker, count the percentage of meeting time you and other native speakers occupy. Then look at the contribution from non-native-speaker colleagues.

Questions worth considering:

•      Which words do you use most confidently in cross-cultural settings? Have you ever checked what they mean to the people listening?

•      What proportion of meeting airtime do native speakers occupy in your team? Is that proportion telling you something about contribution, or about language?

•      What would it look like to develop a shared vocabulary deliberately, rather than assuming you already have one?

Theme 3: Frameworks can be gifts or prisons

The conversation turned to an experience I had teaching at IMD. I had introduced the STARS model, a framework I’ve used for more than two decades to help leaders diagnose situations they inherit. A Saudi executive raised his hand and said, with great courtesy, that he wasn’t sure he wanted to use it. He was concerned that it could constrain how he thought about his situation.

Frameworks are valuable when they reduce complexity. That’s also their hazard. They smuggle in assumptions about what matters and what can be ignored. In a familiar setting, those assumptions are usually fine. In an unfamiliar one, they can quietly steer you wrong.

One coach offered that she had learned to name the freedom inside any framework. She’d be explicit about which parts were non-negotiable structure and which parts were open to local adaptation. Sometimes the ratio was 70 percent open and 30 percent fixed. Sometimes the reverse. The point was that the ratio was named, not assumed.

This applies more broadly than to leadership models. Performance management systems, decision-making rituals, feedback norms, even meeting structures: all are frameworks that translate imperfectly across culture. The question is rarely whether to use them, but how openly to acknowledge what they assume.

The implication is that before you deploy a framework with a cross-cultural team, write down two lists. What is non-negotiable. What is open to adaptation. Share both lists with the team. Invite them to push back on the second list. You may be surprised how often that conversation produces better results than the framework would have on its own.

Questions worth considering:

•      For each major framework your organization relies on, what assumptions does it import? Which of those assumptions are universal, and which are local?

•      When you introduce a framework to a cross-cultural team, do you name what’s non-negotiable and what’s flexible? Or do you leave that implicit?

•      Was the Saudi executive being difficult, or was he seeing something the rest of the room missed? How would you tell the difference?

Theme 4: Curiosity is the underlying skill

Stepping back from the stories, what struck the group was how little of the conversation was actually about culture in the usual sense of culture models. Nobody reached for the standard cultural dimensions.

Instead, the coaches highlighted a different discipline. Notice when something is off and resist the urge to explain it too quickly. One coach put it like this: when you sense a disconnect, the work isn’t to figure out who’s wrong, it’s to ask what story you’re constructing about the other person, what story they may be constructing about you, and whether either of you has actually checked. Another coach framed it as prioritizing awareness over autopilot. A third quoted the Dalai Lama: when you’re talking, you’re repeating something you already know. When you listen, you may learn something new.

Now, in many ways this is the same advice good coaches have always given. What the cross-cultural setting does is make the cost of ignoring it more visible. In your home culture, you can run on autopilot for years and it’s OK. The signals that something is off are subtle and the misreadings are forgiven. Across cultures, misreadings are more damaging, sometimes because they aren’t even recognized as misreadings but perceived as evidence about who you are.

The group agreed that the leaders who do this well cultivate curiosity. When something surprises them, they get curious before they make judgement. That’s really all that is required, but of course it’s not easy .

Also, curiosity itself is culturally expressed. In some cultures, asking direct questions is a sign of engagement and respect. In others, it could read as a challenge or even rudeness. So the meta-skill isn’t just be curious. It’s be curious in a way that lands well in this context.

Questions worth considering:

•      When you notice something surprising in a cross-cultural interaction, how quickly do you reach for an explanation? Could you wait longer?

•      What does curiosity look like in the cultures you most often work across? Is it questions, silence, observation, indirect approaches, or something else?

•      Where in your current work are you running on autopilot in ways that wouldn’t survive contact with a different culture?

In conclusion, the coaches who participated in the discussion had learned, over decades of practice, that cross-cultural work is less about acquiring knowledge of other cultures than about loosening the grip of your own.