Jon is a senior sales director with a solid history of success leading teams. However, they have always been British, and he must now lead a multicultural team. How can he negotiate the cultural divides?
Jon is an experienced senior manager, currently EMEA sales director in a global engineering company. He has recently moved divisions and now leads a multinational and remote team. Trying to create a sense of teamwork and sharing of best practice is proving quite a challenge. Jon is British and has led mainly British teams – with a significant level of success. Taking on this new team at first seemed like it would be similar to his other leadership positions of recent years. However, his new team consists of seven country managers from Germany, Italy, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Middle East and North Africa.
Such a mix of cultures is a first for Jon. He is mindful that the previous manager had not really got the best from the team – visiting them infrequently and allowing the managers to work in silos rather than sharing knowledge and experiences. Jon wants to do it differently.
He has met with each of his country managers once and recognises that, although the business language of his company is English, the standard of English varies significantly. Likewise, the cultural differences between himself and each of these managers is vast. Where should he start? How can coaching help?
Karen Frost, Director of coaching, Values Based Leadership
There are layers of elements to Jon’s new leadership role – a well-defined set of coaching objectives would address each of them simultaneously. These objectives could be adapted over time as the new team develops.
Jon is clearly an experienced team leader and has a wealth of previous knowledge to bring to his current role. Building on this knowledge and raising his awareness around his own cultural perspectives needs to be the starting point. I would want to complement this experience and help him quickly develop cultural awareness by understanding, valuing and learning from the different cultures in his team.
And not simply by engaging team members through the work they do for this organisation. Jon must also develop strong background knowledge of their country of origin and their careers to date.
This is the door to building trust and rapport with each country manager at an early stage in their working relationship.
Then Jon needs to think carefully about communication and how his natural style connects with the remote nature of his new team. He must develop a blended approach to his style of communication to gain the most from each interaction with the managers.
The silo mentality is the final element to work on. He needs to bring the team together through, for example, a quarterly team meeting, provided it is structured to include elements of business reporting, knowledge sharing and relationship building.
Barbara St.Claire Ostwald, Freelance consultant, coach, trainer, CINCRA
I would seek through coaching to help Jon build up his knowledge on how to manage this multicultural team. I would share the following steps:
Step 1: Generally, Northern and Western Europeans are direct communicators. They prefer to focus on one task at a time, and value promptness. They often place task and individual achievements above relationships. They are not tactile.
Step 2: Generally, Southern (Mediterranean) and Central and Eastern Europeans are indirect communicators (though the Poles are very direct!). I would encourage Jon to look at what is not being said: eg, body language and voice intonation.
As a rule, the latter are tactile. They are generally not bothered by interruptions or changes and believe deadlines are flexible. Forming relationships is important in business and they tend to place emphasis on the group and its goals and achievements – working to live is important.
Step 3: Communication skills and trust are paramount. Without these crucial elements the team will continue to feel “Mistrust, Misperception, Misevaluation and Misinterpretation”1.
We would explore in the coaching how Jon can be mindful of the emotional impact to his team: who feels anxious or excluded, who needs more clarity or prefers steady change.
1 D Trickey and N Ewington, A World of Difference – Working Successfully Across Cultures, WorldWork Ltd, 2006
Coaching at Work, Volume 7 , Issue 5