Essay: Global Dexterity: The Art of Leadership Across Cultures

Global Dexterity: The Art of Leadership Across Cultures
We literally only have to reach into our pockets to feel the world at our fingertips. Take the iPhone for example: designed in California, batteries from South Korea, chipset from Taiwan, flash memory and camera from Japan, screen from the US and finally, assembled in China (Minasians, 2017). Components and resources flow freely across the world, allowing us to interact with the smartest products. Talent and expertise soar around the globe, assembling the brightest teams to tackle the toughest challenges. Yet unlike phone parts, people never come with standardized manuals detailing their properties or preferences; they may originate from different cultural backgrounds, but today they are converging in offices, meeting rooms and conference halls.
Assembling the brightest minds into effective cross-cultural teams, however, has always posed as a challenge for even the most brilliant managers. While domestic collaboration would click within the snap of a finger, international partnerships may often crumple from elusive reasons. The art of cross-cultural leadership thereby emerged as a critical set of skills that could catalyze continuous organizational expansion in a global context. It builds upon traditional management strategies with emphasis on cultural awareness, personal adjustment and trust building to better serve the extraordinary diversity in the workforce today. Leaders that possess an additional cross-cultural perspective are highly effective at operating on an international stage and driving monumental growth.
In this essay, I shall first attempt to illustrate the core challenges in cross-cultural leadership through three aspects adopted from The Culture Map (2013) by Erwin Meyer. In the book Meyer presents a total of 8 factors that enable cross-cultural leaders to systematically identify the leadership style in each culture. In part two, I will present the strategies to overcome these challenges and argue that effective leaders are those that can reach out beyond their innate cultural preferences while preserving their authenticity.
Part I: Plotting the Map
Communicating
With the advent of smart voice based translators upon a tap on our phones, communication barriers should cease to exist, at least ideally. However, countless managers of cross-cultural managers today still moan in frustration by the ubiquity of miscommunication between their international teams. It seems that some cultures are extraordinarily fond of probing between the lines, and even more baffling, speak against their intentions.
Just several weeks ago when my family was picked up by a local friend Tom in Paris, the intricacies of Chinese communication caught my eye. The plane was delayed for two hours, so we were quite famished. On the way to our accommodation, Tom asked if we wanted something to eat at his home.
“No, thank you.” My Mom politely replied.
“We dooo” I mouthed at her in my silent protest. But she turned her head the other way.
“My wife has got it all ready. You all must be starving.” Tom insisted.
Dad chimed in, “It’s alright Tom, we’re really fine.”
“But seriously”, Tom looked back from the driver’s seat, “Do you want to grab a quick bite?”
They went back and forth several times more, and of course, we got our dinner in the end. Tom knew we wanted it from the very beginning. If Mom really wanted to turn him down, she would have told him that we ate elsewhere already. Her implicit affirmation and the subsequent courtesies were the epitome of the windedness when Asian cultures communicate. Witnessing it all from the back seat, I shook my head. Couldn’t they just say what they want? Isn’t it absurdly inefficient this way?
The style of indirect communication many Asian cultures practice is known as high-context. While the style I was used to at school in the States is the opposite low-context form. In Asia, high-context communication evolved through generations of interactions in a homogenous population. People generally acknowledged each other’s desires without the need to speak them out loud. And the ability to tease out layers of meaning from generic responses builds trust and shows intimacy. On the opposite end, the melting pot culture in the US demands everyone to articulate themselves as clearly as possible to avoid miscommunications.
Things are not absolute, of course. Erwin Meyer classified UK communication as low-context in general, but much higher context than the literal Americans (2013). This is perhaps one of the reasons many Americans have trouble enjoying British straight-faced irony. It may be obvious to a fellow Brit that they didn’t mean it seriously, but we’re so used to adding facial expression or “just kidding” to our humor that British irony often take us by surprise.
Persuasion
Many cultures not only differ in how they convey what they mean, but also fundamentally in how they think. Principle-first reasoning derives a conclusion only after illustrating the assumptions, methodology and a rigorous line of reasoning. If one were to jump straight to the conclusions and work backwards in a presentation to audiences in a principle-first culture, they would certainly find the argument unconvincing without establishing the parameters first. Contrastingly, applications-first thinking (best represented by Americans) value observation based results, and they often illustrate their point using examples rather than abstract generalizations. Translated to the manner in which mathematics is taught, a principle-first instructor will first prove that a certain concept exists in a general case, then get down to the nitty-gritty; while an applications-first instructor will first take students through examples to show that the concept is valid and useful, then attempt to explain how it really works.
In my personal experience, principle-first reasoning is exemplified by academics. They sometimes spend so much time framing every step in their reasoning that the audience loses interest when they finally reveal their exciting results. Presenters from an applications-first background would often drop the punch line towards the beginning to attract interest and save the reasoning later for the attentive ones who follow them that far.
Grounded in philosophy, the distinction in basis of reasoning has profoundly influenced many defining features of Anglo-Saxon cultures. British (including its commonwealth) and American legal systems are grounded in common law, a prime example of applications-first reasoning. It’s a system where precedents or applications of legal statutes reign. Whereas in other civil law counties, a general set of principles are applied on a case by case basis.
As if the dichotomy in persuasion styles is not challenging enough for intercultural management, East Asian thinking appears to operate on yet another scale. Extended from their awareness from high-context conversations, they tend to better capture ideas when they’re presented holistically as opposed to those in isolation. When they try to illustrate a point, they often make a gigantic leap to a larger context (that often could be regarded as peripheral to unfamiliar listeners), culminating to the present matter only after a whirling cascade from macro to micro. A seminal study by Nisbett and Masuda (2003) illustrates that Japanese observers tend to pay more attention to the still background whereas Americans primarily described large, fast moving objects in the foreground when they were presented the same underwater animation. The holistic approach, as the study suggested, profoundly impacts the underlying categorization, focus of attention, aesthetics and perception of everyday events for those with an Asian cultural background.
Leading
Whether in Stockholm or in Shanghai all organizations have a well-kept documentation of their management structure, with detailed lines chaining the echelons together, converging to the chair. The dynamics of leaderships in between the layers, however, tend to vary significantly. Many leaders in egalitarian cultures try their very best to flatten the organization structure. That is, to work and act just like every other member of the team. They exchange their top floor corner office for a cubicle among everyone else, or their executive style Chrysler for a durable bike. Egalitarian leaders keenly seek input from every member of the team, perhaps even the janitor. And employees in this culture find it natural to openly disagree with their boss key issues to facilitate reconsideration.
Yet a seasoned leader from this culture could be regarded as utterly indecisive and incompetent if the style is transcribed directly into a hierarchical environment like China. There, leaders take pride in being patriarchs of the organization, and all business practices follow strict level distinctions, with organization heads making most if not all of the critical decisions. Instead of encouraging dissent, hierarchical leaders naturally demand loyalty and employees tend to always defer to their boss’s decisions. Together with a top-down system of decision making, leadership in a hierarchical organization gives clear instructions for the implementation of each decision. While a newcomer used to an egalitarian leadership may object that the organization restrains individual freedom, employees appear to express more gratitude and satisfaction under a paternalistic leadership (Cheng et al., 2004). In fact, they take pride in their position in the hierarchy, claiming that it empowers them by enabling to retain information and provide support if necessary (Moser et al., 2001).
The scope of paternalistic leadership in hierarchical societies may also extend well beyond professional work. In Chinese culture, the company could serve more as a social community in addition as a place of work (Paine, 2010). I recently visited the Paris office of a leading Chinese chemical manufacture, two days after a routine inspection by the group CEO. When I set foot in the employee dining room, a prominently displayed blackboard caught my eye. Scribbled in chalk was the latest meeting bulletin from high command:
1. Live and eat western style
2. Watch BBC, CNN and local channels
3. Learn details of Bordeaux wine estates and prepare for individual spot checks
4. (Product related)…
Our friend Lizzy, a 30-year-old product manager also received a touch of personal instructions from both levels above her. Her two bosses both suggested that she should “hurry up” and “loosen her criteria”. An epitome of high-context communication, those words had little ambiguity to a single girl. While such heightened interests into the daily life and family of employees may be chastised as an intrusion of privacy in western cultures (Paine, 2010), a dedicated Chinese subordinate may appreciate the same gesture as an embodiment of trust. Regardless of corporate organization, perceptions of leadership structure through cultural lens can frequently lead to misunderstandings in cross-cultural teams.
Part II: Developing Global Dexterity
Developing scales and models is undoubtedly helpful for improving our understanding of cultural differences, yet it does not address the fundamental question of how one could overcome the challenges of leading a multicultural team. Tolerance can indeed be valuable at first, but taking control requires something more. One must therefore develop strategies to reconcile the differences and most important, adapt certain ingrained behaviors (Molinsky, 2013). “Global dexterity”, a term coined by Andy Molinsky, encompasses a wide range of acquired skills and strategies exercised by global leaders to effectively lead and manage teams outside their home culture. Similar to the art of general leadership, it consists of habits that can be trained through careful observation and introspective reflection. It’s no easy task, however, as cultural adaptation could frequently pose serious psychological obstacles.
Consider the example of Feng Li, as outlined in Molinsky’s book (2013). Feng was a Chinese born management consultant who worked for a firm based in Chicago. He had excellent English skills and was also highly competent technically. Yet one major challenge barred him from continuing on a senior consultant track he yearned for – his unwillingness to contribute during meetings. His boss Robert has attempted every strategy to help him overcome the drawback: assigning him the role of a facilitator and personally encouraging him through one on one coaching sessions. However, Feng’s behavior saw no improvement, and eventually his terse demeanor cost his job.
We may be tempted to dismiss Feng’s tragedy as a personality issue, but there is also little doubt that cultural factors are at play. Feng’s Chinese background features a high-context style of communication and an extremely hierarchical perception of leadership. While his American counterpart would slap his thigh exclaiming “I agree”, Feng’s expression of approval could just be a tacit nod. He was also very likely ingrained with the belief that meetings have the primary function of broadcasting the decisions from the leadership rather than a platform for vigorous debates. Psychologically he may find it uncomfortable and even disrespectful to voice his opinion against his boss in public. Such insolent remark would surely undermine his boss’s prestige in Chinese culture. Feng wanted to be an authentic leader at work as well. To him, speaking up would be committing two sins: disrespectfulness and inauthenticity.
To resolve Feng’s psychological dilemma, perhaps we should first clarify the concept of authentic leadership. Avolio and Gardner (2005) defines it as “a process that draws from […] a highly developed organizational context, which results in both greater self-awareness and self-regulated positive behaviors”. It appears then, that authentic leadership is a concept that promotes awareness not just confined to oneself but equally to the environment and the perspectives of others. Feng ignored a critical premise while pursuing the concept of authenticity, which in reality synergizes with the global dexterity to a certain extent. He was simply too fixated with his own beliefs that he failed to develop “an organizational context”. The flexibility that cross-cultural management demands is a quest of observation that culminates to an enhanced awareness of one’s role personal role in an organization. In other words, stretching your tolerances leads to a better understanding of your own limits. Regardless which direction the leader needs to shape his/her actions, self-regulation will be critical towards implementing the adaptation. We can therefore observe that overhauling one’s rigid perspectives would not violate the principles of authentic leadership.
Cultural norms are never fixed points on a scale, but rather a range of appropriate behaviors depending on the context. After keen observation, agile cross-cultural leaders have the ability to project the perceived differences onto a well-defined scale (such as Erin Meyer’s model) and stretch their personal ranges to accommodate. It’s unrealistic to expect a perfect alignment even for the most experienced leaders, but even a tiny overlap after the adjustment would be sufficient. As a leader of a multi-cultural team, Feng’s boss could have modified the format of the meeting by borrowing and fusing ideas from multiple leadership ideologies. Instead of anxiously waiting for Feng to participate during meetings, he could ask everyone around the table to present their opinion in turn. Meeting contribution could be woven into performance management with rewards to further incentivize feedback. By institutionalizing a clear system that everyone follows, he could effectively alleviate Feng’s concern with interrupting his superiors (Knight, 2015). Alternatively, they could break the meeting into smaller groups where each group collectively present their feedback and concerns after careful discussion. This approach encourages everyone to exchange their honest opinions with their peers without the fear of annoying the boss personally.
The art of conversation and giving feedback in multi-cultural settings require a different set of agility altogether. Global leaders adapt not only their style in day-to-day management, but also their lexical shrewdness. Although a German boss may express dissent with the bulldozer statement “I totally disagree with you”, his British counterpart might round off his feedback by “Please think about that some more” (Meyer, 2013). The intentions they attempt to convey, however, are all but similar. While the incongruity in the language of giving feedback may baffle a newcomer, experienced leaders learn to accurately interpret the message with a cultural context. Correspondingly, when it comes to annual appraisals, they thoughtfully personalize the language for each subordinate by flavoring the feedback with upgraders (totally, absolutely) and downgraders (a bit, kind of). To British team members they may sandwich a suggestion with two compliments, but to an Israeli coworker they must be prepared to staunchly defend their position (Brett, Behfar and Kern, 2006).
The numerous additional aspects global dexterity entails carry beyond the scope of this discussion, yet the strategies presented here for effective cross-cultural leadership remain universally applicable. The process originates from carefully identifying the cultural discrepancies, customizing strategies to expand cultural comfort zones, to flexibly adjusting specific management strategies to derive cross-cultural understanding and carryout business objectives. The most challenging component is often the first: gauging cultural differences from a neutral scale. It’s tempting to jump to judgmental positions or make personality assumptions. Importantly, we should always keep in mind that cultural styles are inherently relative, and while a German manager would complain that the British are fickle and disorganized, an Indian associate may claim the exact opposite, that the British are rigid and inflexible (Meyer, 2013).
In practice, it is nearly impossible to identify a single style that satisfies all the intricacies demanded in cross-cultural leadership. Rather, it’s a series of habits that contribute to a fluid system of strategies an individual refines throughout his/her lifetime. The style may shift drastically between eastern and western philosophies, or individual and group settings depending on the need, but it will never result in the loss of authenticity. As adaptive as a leader’s style may become, it nevertheless always retains its elasticity. Perhaps this is the essence of the art: a harmonious blend of keen situational awareness, well-defined flexibility, and an exceptional aptitude for self-regulation. I hope that the principles of global dexterity can percolate across the organizational echelons, to leaders and rank-and-file members alike, as we