I recently came across a question in LinkedIn about leaders adjusting their style to work with different cultures. What is raised for me is the dilemma of authenticity + permeability + contingency + consistency. As our teams grow increasingly diverse, we are all challenged to find a way of colleagueship and leadership that is open to other ways of seeing the world, approaching problems, and formulating solutions. At the same time, we also need to be true to ourselves and the strengths we bring to the party. This argues for an openness to growing through our daily interactions, generally through an action/reflection learning cycle where we are openly engaged in considering how we manifest our own cultural set and exploring with others their alternative values and approaches. If we engage in this collaborative exploration with our colleagues, we can move toward greater understanding of each other’s styles, as well as how we each can draw on the other’s strengths and perspectives for team and organizational success.
For the leader, an additional challenge is to find a way to be responsive to the culturally-based styles and desires of different employees while, at the same time, demonstrating consistency in treatment across the group. Different cultures respond best to different styles. Aligning your leadership style with a single group other than your own can be a notable challenge, but is workable, for most folks who have a modicum of self-awareness and openness to learning from others. However, leading a group or organization with several distinctly different cultural sets and expectations means doing more than shifting your style to align with a single group. What works with one group might be really counterproductive with another. What is a leader to do?
The best advice I can give is to generate a learning environment where everyone is learning about each other in much the same way that a leader can learn how to work with a single culture. Continuous, open discovery about the worldviews, approaches, and preferences of everyone on the team becomes the backdrop for the group’s work. The leader is a member of this learning community, one who is consistent in her/his interest in serving the team, and models the ongoing negotiation that the team needs to learn. The leader is still the final arbiter for group direction and decisions, but make those calls in the context of listening to and encouraging open processing by the group across their cultural diversity. Flexible, yet firm.
Of course, this team environment takes longer to establish than a “one size fits all” approach. Extra time is nearly always required, at the outset, when working with diversity, whether you do it well or badly. The payoff is that diversity, well-managed, consistently generates higher creativity and innovation, interpersonal skill-development, and overall adaptability & flexibility. (Doing it badly engenders misalignment, interpersonal conflict, and lack of buy-in and commitment.)
So, since workforce cultural diversity is becoming nearly ever-present, this question is all the more relevant. Organizations truly NEED leaders with cross-cultural leadership skills, for operational effectiveness, for workplace generativity, and for competitive advantage. Those leaders who develop the skills will be in greater and greater demand. Those who don’t will have fewer career options. Happily, the leader, the organization, and society as a whole are served by the same answer: cross-cultural leadership for multicultural teams.
