Two Chaps - Many Cultures
Global Business Excellence Through Cultural and Emotional Intelligence (ICE-Q)
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Two Chaps - Many Cultures
The Ultimate Guide For Leadership Across Cultures
In this episode we are looking at leadership. Does your idea of effective leadership match with the people around you, or indeed, the people you are leading? Be sure to stick around to the end to hear our top three actions you can take to build knowledge for your particular circumstance.
๐๐ฌ๐ค ๐พ๐๐๐ฅ๐จ โ ๐๐๐ฃ๐ฎ ๐พ๐ช๐ก๐ฉ๐ช๐ง๐๐จ is the worldโs #1 show on the business of culture and the culture of business. Christian Hรถferle and Brett Parry ponder culture in short bursts and deep dives, featuring your questions and comments related to culture, business, and personal growth.
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We're looking at the concept of leadership. Does leadership look the same for you as it does for the people you're working with? Stick around, we're going to find out.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Two Chaps many cultures. In an increasingly globally connected world, it is vital to possess the essential skills of cultural intelligence. Listen along as we present the topics, tips and strategies you can use to develop the power of cultural understanding in your personal and professional life. Here are your hosts Christian Huffler and Brett Parry.
Speaker 1:Welcome back. This is Two Chaps many cultures where we give you the absolute best tips around the culture of business and the business of culture. Today we're talking about leadership and stick around to the end. We're going to give you our top steps that you can take around your particular circumstances to learn what's the most effective way to lead in your environment.
Speaker 3:Yes, in global business, leadership styles are rarely the same. Especially as you cross borders and cultures, you will find that how we lead and how we instruct and how we accept leadership might vary quite significantly. One aspect that is very often connected to that is the concept of hierarchy the idea that power, influence, decision-making authority, is layered and stratified, that there are people at lower ranks that have less decision-making authority and senior leadership has all the power. You may have also heard a term called power distance. That's where that comes from. So very often, different leadership styles and different cultures are often pinned to that idea of hierarchy. And yet that's not the only factor determining how people lead.
Speaker 3:Because, yes, the power might be stratified. It might be different levels of who has how much power, or it might not be. It might be very egalitarian and there are a lot of people who have the same decision-making authority. But how do these decisions get made and taken? And there is the one style that is consensus-driven, that everybody in the group gets to weigh in and essentially finds an agreement that everybody can carry through, or the decision-making might actually be top-down, even though it could be egalitarian or hierarchical. So these are two axes on a diagram, so to say. You have hierarchy and you have decision-making patterns, and that often throws people for a loop when they cross cultures and they have to lead and find themselves some leadership roles that do not match the roles that they're familiar with and they're Home culture or in their last position.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and think about where this comes from. This comes from your upbringing, comes from the way that your parents brought you up, the the experiences at school and other Organizations you may have joined where you've learned an Inherent style of leadership, and now, if you are engaged, you don't have to actually move countries to do this. You may be engaged working with a company that is Founded from another country or culture and you have to learn the leadership style that Exists in that organization. But if you do go to another country, you certainly have to learn it, and that's what we're talking about today. So we'll talk about a few different cultures where we, from our experience, we've seen this. We've worked with a lot of executives and leaders in our time where they've expressed to us frustration, just sheer exasperation Sometimes, in trying to understand the differences that they're seeing between their cultural style of leadership and the one they're involved in leading right, and Since both Brett and I are located in the United States but we're not brought up here, that was not our cultural underpinning.
Speaker 3:We both had our share of getting used to US leadership styles and, let's face it, we're looking at the US first, not only because both of us are located here, but also because in the last 60 to 80 years international global management System structures, patterns, were often shaped in the US and carried out into the global economy. That has been changing in the last decade or two. But by and large, us leadership styles are very often used outside of the s as well and have become ubiquitous in the global economy. And yet when we get to interact with US leadership as non-Americans, we often find ourselves confused or Irritated, because the assumption is and that's what we read in all the books about Leadership and what we learn about US culture is that it's an egalitarian culture.
Speaker 3:People in the United States they like to see themselves as egalitarian, a culture where everybody has free speech and free expression and freedom from other influences and everybody gets to Pursue their own happiness.
Speaker 3:It's enshrined in the Constitution of the country. So a culture that sees itself as very Egalitarian, a culture that sees itself as having rather flat hierarchies. And Yet it turns out when you work in a US organization that your boss might be very chummy and you get to call them by their first name, you don't have to use hunter-rifics or their academic titles, or you don't have to Be submissive to them. They park at the same parking deck where you park your car, they shop at the same grocery store that you shop at and their kids might go to the same school that your kids go to. And still, despite all that perceived equality, american bosses can be quite Authoritarian or autocratic in their decision-making. It is very often a strong top-down decision-making which is counterintuitive to the idea of egalitarian for Non-anglo-saxon cultures. And we find that in other Anglo cultures your native culture, australia falls into that Flat hierarchy, but fairly top-down decision-making the UK, canada, they would all fall in that Quadrant of the graphics, so to say right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And then you go to another culture which we might Condemn a lot of research has been done between Eastern West cultures that we go to somewhere like Japan where, from an outsider's perspective, we might actually see the honorific nature in which leaders are regarded and the Hierarchy that is explicit on the surface. And yet there is a real deep, consensus-building culture that sits underneath the surface of that, and it's all about harmony. It's all about getting people from the very bottom to buy into the concepts first and the decisions flow up to the leader, where the final decisions are made. And these are something again, on the surface the perception is one thing and underneath the surface it's completely different. So as a leader, especially in cultures like that, where building relationships and building trust and credibility are so vitally important, you can benefit yourself by spending a lot of time getting to know and observe these things that are under the surface. So let's look at another culture. What about your culture, my friend? The old German culture? What would we say that would be like from?
Speaker 3:an outside perspective. My home culture, if you will, germany, tends to be a bit more hierarchical than most of the Anglo-Saxon culture. There are many continental European cultures. That includes Italy, that includes Spain, that includes France, that includes Czech Republic, austria, switzerland. They tend to be quite a bit hierarchical, not as much as, let's say, japan or China, as we will discuss in a little bit. They're more hierarchical than the Anglo-Saxon cultures or the Nordic cultures.
Speaker 3:So the expectation is in Germany it's clear who calls the shots. We know this is the boss and this is the middle management, these are the subordinates, the underlings. So it seems to be clear from the Orchyard who gets to give orders and who gets to accept instructions and do as you're told, maybe Just to find out that German leaders will rarely make unilateral decisions. Similarly to Japanese culture, german work culture fosters consensus because consensus drives acceptance. And if we can, as a German leader or a leader in a German work context, if I can manage to get a broad consensus amongst my team, making concessions if I have to in my approach, but if I can get my team to agree on the way forward to 80% or more, I eliminate the risk of insubordination. I eliminate the risk of people not fully buying into the idea.
Speaker 3:And I will be seen as a leader who is decisive and yet who listens to the experts on the team. Because in German organizations it is important that the members of the team and their leaders are competent, have the subject matter expertise and their respective fields, and these expertise is better be listened to by the leader. And if the leader does not take these data points and those special qualifications into account and into the equation of decision making, that leader will perhaps not long be the leader of that group. So hierarchy paired with consensus, decision making comparable to that of Japan, but toned down in terms of hierarchy and in terms of consensus, but it is. If you plot it on a graphic, you will see that Japan and the US are the polar opposites and Germany sits there somewhere in between the two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and closer to Japan, of course, is China, and I've been to China and done business there.
Speaker 1:I probably should have absolutely done my research before I went maybe a little bit of reading around Confucius, perhaps Just understanding just how respect for authority and hierarchy is embedded into that culture, and that I had to really strategically map out who I was going to engage with and how quickly I was going to be able to build credibility and trust.
Speaker 1:And when I learned that obviously as a regular business traveler, sometimes you're tired after a long day at the office in a new place or where you're traveling and you just want to go back to your hotel Not really that possible in a place like China, I found, because that building credibility and trust is often done outside of the business with the senior people, and those times that's where you make the connections, that's where you build that trust and build that relationship. The Guangxi in China, and I found it a really great learning experience and I saw it and observed it in many parts of China and it was something that after a while, when I got to do this work, that I helped advise people doing that and going to that culture and just taking a step back and preparing well ahead in advance on what leadership is going to look like in those culture.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and sometimes that means those social parts include imbibing maybe, or letting your guard down in front of people that you have to or want to build that relationship with. And it's not only in China. We see similar things in Japan or in Korea, so East Asia is very similar in that regard. Now let's go to South Asia and let's look at the Indian subcontinent, where we also see strong hierarchies at play and we also see a rather top-down decision-making process similar to that of China or to that of Korea maybe.
Speaker 3:And yet the hierarchical approach to distributing power is not necessarily built on an autocratic idea of leadership. It is more the idea of I, as the leader, am responsible for you as my team members. So it's paternalistic. In modern India it also can be maternalistic, as we see female leaders do similar things. It's the parental leadership self-image right. I, the leader, am responsible for you team members and your success, so it is within my responsibility to lead you to our team success. That could mean that I will make brash decisions, that I will make swift decisions and that my style of enforcing those decisions will not necessarily allow for discourse or pushback. So it is to be accepted the way I lead, and yet in return, my subordinates understand that they are under my tutelage, they are protected by my leadership and if something goes wrong, my head is on the chopping block. So it is a leadership style that involves these paternal instincts. And one word of caution around Indian leadership style that I had to learn the hard way.
Speaker 3:Very often you will read or hear that in India communication style can be very indirect, that you need to read between the lines in order to fully grasp the instructions or what is being told to you. That doesn't always have to be the case. It really depends on where you are in the picking order, what position in the hierarchy you have, and if you are the recipient of instructions, the communication style towards you will be quite direct, sometimes Surprisingly direct. If you think that India is indirect Now, if you are more at peer level or in different departments, then you'll realize the directness level will change. Right, it really depends on context. So be careful of these overly simplistic do's and don'ts instructions. India is very diverse, india is very idiosyncratic and whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite might also be true.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And another culture that is where we probably should question our stereotypes is Brazil going to the South American continent, where we see a culture on the surface where people might think of carnival and party time. The laid back Brazilian and that's certainly true, of course, of all stereotypes is a certain amount of truth to it, but think about what it means for leadership. Now, of course, an outsider that comes from a very structured leadership hierarchy or framework, then they can be surprised or frustrated by what is perceived as a lack of structure and a little bit of a kind of again that that laid back approach to time.
Speaker 1:What deadlines mean? The ability to change direction and refocus very quickly, and this is what makes for effective business in Brazil. And as a leader, you have to plug your style into that. And if it is, of course, the opposite and you're leading people in that sense, you have to learn to adapt fairly quickly and start to think about how are you going to be perceived if you come in there with some very tight structures. How much pushback are you going to get? And, of course, then, because it's such a relationship based culture, how much are you going to build rapport and trust with the team that you're leading and in a culture like that, which is very important, that's one of the key things to do.
Speaker 3:And talking about relational cultures, relationship foundations, let's move over to the Arabic world and look at one of the biggest players in that geographic region, saudi Arabia. We could easily also include the Emirates or Egypt in that focus, but keep in mind that in Arabic cultures, relationships are the foundation of the societal structure. In Arabic culture you find that the trends to urbanization and to permanent settlement came a lot later than it did in Europe or in East Asia. So we're dealing with a society that has a different relationship to the land it occupies and therefore relationship amongst leaders, amongst family members, amongst extended family and the relationship between families is of critical importance. So the hierarchy that you also see strongly expressed in Saudi Arabia in other parts of the Arabian cultural macro zone, is similar to India's strongly paternalistic the father, the benevolent father, looking after the family and taking care of the family, but making decisions very often in a top down autocratic style, not often explaining the decision making process or not having the need to explain it.
Speaker 3:The expectation is that it will be carried out and as the Arabic world is morphing, its core industry, which it has been for the last three, four generations, was petrol and petrol and energy, oil industry, energy industry.
Speaker 3:That industry or that economic basis in the Arabic world is beginning to shift towards more tourism, to finance, to service industry.
Speaker 3:So we're seeing a change in industry and with that, leadership styles begin to adjust. So, depending on where you go in the Arabic world, it might be still more hierarchical, like it is in Saudi, or you will go to countries like the Emirates or maybe other Arabic countries in the area where that has begun to, let's say, see more westernized and Asian influences. And yet be crystal clear, especially if you come from the Western world, like the so called Western world, the central and Western European, north American world when you're dealing with Arabic culture, be mindful of these relationships, because the network in which they operate will be working to your advantage if you know how to plug into these relationship networks. If you are a respected leader coming to Saudi Arabia, you will be building your network and you will ideally use people locally to help you build your credibility, to extend your network swiftly, which I think will get us to one of the three key takeaways for today's episode. You need somebody to take you by the hand, to show you things you wouldn't find by yourself.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely. So we promise you three strategies, three key strategies you can use to understand and learn and be curious about the cultures you're going to. First of all, of course, we are cultural trainers. We advocate that you do some kind of cultural training to give you some insights into what are the most effective leadership traits in that particular culture that you're going to, and that adds to what we call your cultural intelligence. And we want to build that as we go through, because remember also that you may go to another culture or be involved in a company that comes or is based or has a DNA from another culture, and you may already be still working with a diverse team. So even understanding how these variations show up for those people is going to be important. So we got a couple more. What are the final two there, my friend?
Speaker 3:If at all possible.
Speaker 3:Yes, get the training.
Speaker 3:Yes, please, and Brad and I will always advocate, if you don't get anything else, get cultural training and educate yourself read, listen, watch as much as you can about the culture that you're entering. Now we advocate also to combine your training with an ongoing engagement with somebody that can be your attache, your guide. This might be a culture coach that you continue to work with, that is your sparring partner, that is your buddy, helping you see, this could be somebody in your organization that is a native to that culture and that is assigned to you, or you assign yourself to that person and learn from that person. Have that person become your door opener, maybe, or your sidebar person. Before you enter the door Say, hey, I'm going into this meeting now and I think I should be doing this, but maybe what would you do in my shoes? So, have a buddy, have a cultural mentor, have a culture coach that can continue that journey with you, so you can actually practice what you learn in training or what you taught yourself through literature and self study to actually put it into practice.
Speaker 1:Absolutely One of the last things. Of course, the third step in this would be to use what we encourage people to do is active humility, and humility invites feedback, so that feedback can come from the people you are leading. Of course, being mindful of how your authority is being perceived by the people in an appropriate way, but being humble. Sitting with your people, I'm getting an understanding on what they prefer, what the history has been behind or before you arrived, as to what they are used to in terms of decision making styles, decision making processes, so that you can get a little bit of tips again. Widening that network of cultural attachรฉs so that you can become a little bit more knowledgeable and effective as a leader in that new culture, because, after all, it's about success. It's about business success, but also personal success, because you don't want to be left hanging, going home every night, frustrated to the family and taking it out on them and not enjoying the experience of being in the new culture that you're in.
Speaker 1:So that's our top three tips. So we hope you've got a light out of today. We've tried to cover a range of leadership styles from different cultures and we encourage you to listen back at the chapters and we will be back with another episode fairly soon, of course, and always at the end of these videos. We encourage you to subscribe and also hit that bell so that when there's new content coming out, we're doing these once a week and this is all around. As we say, the business of culture and the culture of business to give you the strategies and tips you need to be a successful global leader. Any final words?
Speaker 3:No, my fearless leader, I follow you right. You modeled it so well for me. Off we go, let's succeed.
Speaker 1:That's two chaps, many cultures. Thanks for joining and we'll see you in the next video.