Back in 2018, RW3 culturewizard found that 89% of corporate employees were on at least one global virtual team, and 62% worked in teams spanning three or more cultures. Since then, the rise of remote, hybrid, and virtual work has only increased the presence of global and multicultural teams.
While this global collaboration is a positive shift, it brings challenges that can’t always be solved through standard training. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, David Livermore highlights four Western leadership preferences—autonomy, empowerment, egalitarianism, and authenticity—that don’t always translate across cultures. In fact, 70% of the global workforce comes from cultures with more hierarchical or collectivist values.
And it’s not just workers in Dubai or Shanghai who may struggle with these norms—it could be immigrant talent in Copenhagen or Omaha. Livermore argues that today’s leaders must build “cultural intelligence,” a flexible fluency for navigating culturally complex situations.
Here are five tips to help you grow your cultural intelligence and lead more effectively across cultures.
Table of Contents
5 Keys to Leading Global Teams
1. Indulge Your Curiosity
Much of learning starts with good old-fashioned curiosity. We ask questions because we want to learn why the sky is blue, how magnets work, and if a platypus is a mammal or a reptile. As adults at work, curiosity leads to innovation and improvements.
That spark of curiosity can contribute to learning about other cultures to develop a more inclusive mindset. Ask questions to learn about the original cultures of those on your team. Try to understand how they see the world. What do their family structures look like? What are their early work experiences like? How do their beliefs and experiences shape their work preferences and styles?
Remember, an inclusive mindset doesn’t only mean bringing others into your preferred way of doing things. Sometimes it means finding ways to modify your preferences in a way that encourages full engagement from everyone on your team.
2. Be Flexible in Your Communication Style
Active listening is a vitally important skill for any leader, but leaders with cross-cultural teams can sometimes encounter difficulties. Nonverbal cues, emotional signals, and indirect communication styles can vary widely from culture to culture, and it can be easy to misinterpret unfamiliar cues when learning to communicate across cultural divides.
In his piece, Livermore highlights one organization that offered a combination of role-play and coaching to help managers learn how to interpret signals across cultures. “Managers learned that indirect eye contact, silence in meetings, or reluctance to respond via email can hold entirely different meanings depending on a person’s cultural background,” he writes.
Formal training and coaching can help, but leaders can also pay close attention to nonverbal cues and signals their team members send. When a cue feels unfamiliar or sends an unclear message, leaders should reach out to a trusted team member or another leader with more experience in the culture to understand what’s really being said.
3. Adapt Your Oversight as Necessary
It’s not that non-Western employees necessarily have different levels of competence than Western employees—rather, they have different comfort levels with oversight. For employees from hierarchical or collectivist cultures, more oversight is welcome. Livermore writes that “autonomy is not equally motivating for everyone” and suggests that individuals from collectivist cultures tend to prefer directive leadership and decision-making.
Leaders accustomed to taking a “hands-off” approach with their teams might find a more directive approach uncomfortable. In a Western-oriented workplace, that approach can feel like micromanaging. However, leaders should recognize that a more directive approach is comfortable and promotes productivity for team members from other cultures. Be flexible about what level of oversight your team members need.
4. Promote Culturally Intelligent Psychological Safety
It’s safe to say that psychological safety is part of mainstream work culture now (though there are misconceptions around the concept).
However, as Livermore points out, global teams require an understanding of psychological safety, which includes “cultural intelligence.” He suggests that “many global teams have become places where safety, inclusion, and belonging are emphasized at the expense of intellectual honesty and the confidence to challenge the status quo—the exact opposite intention of psychological safety.”
The goal of psychological safety is not to get everyone to be nicer; rather, the goal is to create a culture of intellectual openness that encourages improved performance and innovation.
Often, minor changes in language or processes can create an environment that’s more comfortable for team members from other cultures to speak up. For example, simply shifting from a closed-ended question (“Are we missing anything?”) to an open-ended one (“What are we missing?”) can encourage more participation.
5. Establish Inclusive Team Norms
Leaders need to work with their teams to establish norms and processes that result in productivity and innovation. However, for leaders working with teams from various cultures, norms might not look the same as norms on a team of primarily Western team members.
Ideas around meeting schedules, personal and team goals, and project processes can vary widely from culture to culture. Rather than defaulting to the preferences of the dominant culture, leaders should gather input from all team members to discover what others prefer. That range of preferences can be a good starting point for developing a team charter that sets principles and guidelines everyone can feel comfortable with.
Leading a global team may have complexities many leaders haven’t previously dealt with, but it can also be a rewarding experience full of growth opportunities. Leaders can deliver business and people results by approaching the challenges of leading a global team with curiosity, flexibility, and openness.
Self-check:
- Can you alter one team practice or norm to make it more culturally intelligent?
- What is one open-ended question you could start using to encourage more openness on your team?
- Can you learn one new thing about a culture represented on your team? How can you integrate that knowledge into how you manage your team?
