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Coaching Corner
Nailing multicultural leadership
As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your teamâs success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
In our Coaching Corner series, we share real-world coaching cases that come from our work with leaders.
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The challenge
Jan is a highly experienced and successful VP in a multinational headquartered in London. Recently the organization has opened a new strategic hub in Singapore following the acquisition of a large regional company. This is a critical initiative for Janâs organization and the CEO has called together a summit at the new Singapore facility to bring together business leaders from all over the world: Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East. As a prominent leader with a strong multicultural personal background and tenure within the organization, Jan is called to lead this series of meetings. The remit is to gauge peopleâs responses and concerns about the acquisition and planned expansion and gather input around integration efforts.
For Jan, this assignment represents a career step, as its success will position her well for greater seniority within the company â something that she is keen to explore. However, she has some anxiety. A lot is riding on the summit, both for the organization and for her personally, and as the summit kicks off with a first town hall meeting she is already detecting some incongruity within the different stakeholdersâ expectations and responses. Some leaders are proactive and vocal in their support or opposition to this strategic move for the organizations, others are less vociferous and seem reluctant to contribute ideas or feedback, while a third contingent is quiet and â in Jan’s mind â seems to be sitting on the fence and waiting to see the outcome. Most concerningly, the latter contingent appears to be from the region most impacted by this acquisition.
Despite her experience in managing diverse and multicultural teams, Jan is starting to feel out of her depth. Reading the room, she senses both discord and disquiet â there are clear signs and signals that stakeholders who are not on the same page cannot find common ground or shared mechanisms to communicate with each other. But although Jan sees this, she is unsure how to respond or how to ensure that everyone is heard and valued while collecting the insights needed to support the company as it formulates its next moves.
With a second all-hands meeting looming at the end of the week, Jan decides to contact her executive coach for insights and guidance.
Jan starts to recount various moments and situations and as she does so, she realizes that she needs to rethink her approach to the remaining aspects of the summit. She is reminded that silence is also feedback.
The coaching journey
Given the exigencies of the situation, Jan and her coach get to work fast. First, they discuss some of the anxieties that are undermining her confidence. Talking to the coach, Jan can articulate how much she fears getting her leadership of this assignment wrong, and that if she fails to bring everyone together in a productive manner, it will derail the summit and reflect poorly on her personal leadership capabilities. Sharing these thoughts helps her to see that her own fears are contributing to a sense of paralysis and lack of agency.
The coach encourages Jan to step back and to identify the knowledge and skills she has acquired as a strategic implementer. Stepping up to this challenge purposefully is within her grasp. However, given the remit for this summit is around gathering insights to support integration efforts, there is a real opportunity for her to approach the cross-cultural complexity and dynamics in the room in a fresh and inclusive manner, one that will bring people together into the many important conversations that are needed at this time â ones that need to happen within regions and across regions.
Here, the coach pauses and invites Jan to reflect on her own extensive multicultural background and to pinpoint some of the most effective mechanisms and approaches that have served her well over the years. Jan starts to recount various moments and situations and as she does so, she realizes that she needs to rethink her approach to the remaining aspects of the summit. She is reminded that silence is also feedback.
With a sense of quiet but nervous optimism, she continued to work with her coach. As they talked, some clear and helpful ideas began to appear; certain guidelines that Jan will be able to use for more nuanced communication with her culturally diverse colleagues.
Among these are:
- The importance of remaining humble and curious, even in situations that feel well-known or safe or where you might feel you have the perfect skillset or experience to manage dynamics.
- The need for nuanced intelligence around oneâs own biases, and to be purposeful about seeing other people in a holistic and non-stereotypical way.
- Using collectivistic communication so that everyone feels included and valued, and that they are encouraged to have a stake in what happens and/or is decided.
- Prioritizing social contracts, human connection, and relationship building are needed to build trust while clarity and momentum need to be established.
âShe also forges better, stronger bonds of understanding and collaboration with new colleagues and allies across the organization â alliances that did not exist prior to the meeting.â
The impact
Armed with these guidelines, Jan resolves to adapt her approach to the next all-hands meeting. To lead more collectively, she very quickly sets up a series of conversations with key stakeholders (over meals, where appropriate). She seeks their support and asks them to work closely with her to find the best way to solicit input from the groups they represent (or are members of). She permitted the crafting of different approaches even if they varied from the ânormalâ way things had been traditionally done in the organization.
Having gathered their feedback, Jan reconfigured the all-hands meeting so that breakouts and workshops are addressing specific issues with different stakeholders invited to lead or participate in these events as they choose. This is all shared via a communiquĂŠ that is purposefully inclusive in tone â suggesting that everyone listens to understand, embraces different perspectives, and seeks ways to support the companyâs shared purpose.
The resulting meeting is a resounding success. Jan successfully captures a rich array of feedback requests that inform the strategic direction of the initiative and the organization at large. She also forges better, stronger bonds of understanding and collaboration with new colleagues and allies across the organization â alliances that did not exist prior to the meeting.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Are you specifically aware of your cross-cultural behavioral repertoire and can you switch between styles even from conversation to conversation?
- Where might you hold assumptions, biases, and communication-style preferences? How can you identify when they may not be working and with whom?
- Are you taking time to listen to yourself and to what is happening in the room, while identifying when you may have selective listening?
- While holding the whole room of diverse and culturally different people is the beginning of collective leadership, what internal fears might you have and how do they show up in the work you do? Who and what may support you in these times and how?
In this series, we share real-world cases that come from our work with leaders. Read on to discover the specific challenges that face each of the leaders we have coached â and the insights that have helped them navigate their multifaceted challenges to find their own solutions. How might these insights and questions apply to you?
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