Global lead­er­ship. Never have two words concealed so much depth. At surface level, it appears to be just another version of the manage­ment prac­tices we may already be familiar with. In reality, it requires a whole set of compe­ten­cies that global leaders must become profi­cient in to succeed in an increas­ingly demanding envi­ron­ment.

The multi­cul­tural compe­ten­cies of global leaders natu­rally feature as crucial skills that help make the job of global lead­er­ship easier. Those compe­ten­cies are:

• Cultural Sensi­tivity
• Cultural Intel­li­gence
• Mindful Inter­cul­tural Commu­ni­ca­tion

Let’s look at each in turn.

Cultural Sensi­tivity

Cultural sensi­tivity is an extremely high-level skill that must be inten­tion­ally devel­oped by global leaders. First, let’s define what it is.

What is Cultural Sensi­tivity?

Cultural sensi­tivity in its most basic form is the ability to under­stand that there are differ­ences in people’s cultures, and those differ­ences will impact the way they do things both inside and outside of the working envi­ron­ment. The basic premise is simply accepting that people do things differ­ently.

At this stage, it’s impor­tant to note that we are not neces­sarily talking about orga­ni­za­tional culture, which refers to chosen value systems that help to form a code of conduct for employees. In this instance, we refer instead to the indi­vidual cultures of employees and the role that these different value systems play in each unique inter­pre­ta­tion of the overall orga­ni­za­tional culture.

In an increas­ingly inter­con­nected world, it is a require­ment that every person in the orga­ni­za­tion is cultur­ally sensi­tive. It helps the indi­vidual teams to thrive in their diver­sity. You could argue that the level of under­standing outlined above, is enough for the majority of people within an orga­ni­za­tion. 

For global leaders, however, they need to go far beyond this defi­n­i­tion and go instead on a journey that mentally frees them from the idea of cultural hier­archy; the belief that one culture should take prece­dence over another. This level of thinking opens up higher levels of under­standing that will help global leaders become more accom­plished and more effec­tive. 

Milton Bennett (1993) in his Devel­op­mental Model of Cultural Sensi­tivity, stated that for true cultural sensi­tivity to be reached, a person must move from an ethno­cen­tric atti­tude to an ethnorel­a­tive atti­tude. 

Ethno­cen­tric Atti­tude

An ethno­cen­tric atti­tude according to Bennett has three main stages of devel­op­ment. 

Denial > Defense > Minimi­sa­tion

Denial

The first is denial. Leaders of orga­ni­za­tions don’t see the value of learning about the indi­vidual cultures of their work­force or the coun­tries the company is oper­ating in. Their belief is that company values should be inter­preted in a way that reflects the cultural back­ground of the company founders. The atti­tude at this point is to ignore that it should even be a feature of discus­sion.

In today’s world, in a lot of global compa­nies, this atti­tude is being rejected and phased out. Whilst it would be nice if this was entirely altru­istic, the truth is that in order to stay compet­i­tive and indeed grow the customer base, compa­nies need to adapt to the changing envi­ron­ment. Customer tastes are now in a place where if they are offended by an ethno­cen­tric atti­tude on the part of a company, they will boycott prod­ucts and services to make a point.

A perfect example of this was displayed by Dolce and Gabbana in 2018, when they offended the whole of their Chinese customer base with a poorly thought-out adver­tising campaign. Chinese consumers are said to make up around 32% of D&G’s customer base; it seems like madness to alienate a third of your customers. Never­the­less, in the advert, a Chinese woman appeared to struggle whilst eating pizza with chop­sticks. The woman appears in a western-style dress as she does this; the point was that viewers see this as funny. 

The inten­tion of this ad remains unclear, but Chinese consumers inter­preted the message to mean that the Chinese woman embraced Euro­pean fashion, but was not educated enough to really grasp the culture. She, and in turn Chinese people, were made to look and feel stupid. The brand issued an insin­cere apology that was not well received. It ended up having serious rami­fi­ca­tions for the busi­ness; some analysts predicted that the total cost to the brand could be up to $500 million. All of this could have been avoided if Dolce and Gabbana had taken the time to get over their internal bias, or at the very least, hire an ad campaign team that was well versed in the nuances of Chinese culture. It was a costly and damaging mistake.

Defense

After this stage, an ethno­cen­tric atti­tude will move to a more defen­sive line. Differ­ences are recog­nized, but they are believed not to add anything posi­tive. So a partic­ular culture asserts itself as better than other cultures, creating a cultural hier­archy. A form of progress, but not much better than denial.

This way of thinking produces orga­ni­za­tional strategy that is inher­ently very aggres­sive. It divides and it conquers and is almost colo­nial in its approach. Many of the world’s former empires were built in this way. Whole cultures were lost and destroyed in the process. 

Again, this way of thinking is widely consid­ered to be an unac­cept­able model for any orga­ni­za­tion that wishes to consider itself modern and forward thinking. 

Mini­miza­tion

The final stage takes on a more passive aggres­sive tone, whereby orga­ni­za­tions use company culture as a smoke­screen to rein­force their own cultural values. At this stage, orga­ni­za­tions are aware of cultural differ­ence but choose to focus solely on the human char­ac­ter­is­tics that unite people.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem so bad. Seeing people as people shouldn’t be a bad thing. But when it erases people’s culture and still holds up one culture as supe­rior, for true global leaders, such an atti­tude can never be good.

You see this in action in today’s busi­ness world. Cata­strophe Manage­ment Systems, for example, were caught up in a lawsuit in 2018 when Chastity Jones had a job offer rescinded after refusing to cut off her dread­locks. Manage­ment at the firm cited that ‘dread­locks can be messy’ and so refused to give her the job unless she cut off her hair.

In other words, they were happy to recruit a woman of color but it had to be on their terms, and in line with cultural values that one version of what ‘looks profes­sional’ is better than another version. How an employee chooses to wear their hair should not impact the quality of work they produce. Their lack of cultural sensi­tivity cost them an expe­ri­enced employee. 

Ethnorel­a­tive Atti­tude

You can see that an ethno­cen­tric view of cultural sensi­tivity does not appear to be fitting for global leaders. It’s outdated, and whilst it is a far easier approach, and an approach that many orga­ni­za­tions use today, global leaders need to be up for taking on a greater chal­lenge.

That chal­lenge comes in the form of having an ethnorel­a­tive atti­tude. Let’s look at what that is. Again, Bennett outlines three stages:

Accep­tance > Adap­ta­tion > Inte­gra­tion

Accep­tance

Accep­tance here is not a glum, moody atti­tude towards differ­ence. It’s actu­ally the starting point global leaders will go through to become compe­tent in shifting perspec­tives. At this point it is under­stood that ‘ordi­nary’ means different things to different people. It may be ordi­nary in one country for people to show up and work 9am to 5pm. It may also be ordi­nary for people to show up at 7am, work until midday, and then have a 3‑hour lunch break. Then they come back and work from 3 until 6pm. It’s still eight hours of work, there’s just a different appli­ca­tion.

The pursuit of finding out the inner work­ings of the different cultures that feed into the work­force is inten­tional. It becomes an impor­tant part of strategy, which is clearly absent from the ethno­cen­tric view.

Increas­ingly as teams become more remote, this will become a neces­sary atti­tude for global leaders to embed in their way of approaching manage­ment tasks.

Adap­ta­tion

Adap­ta­tion takes accep­tance a step further as global leaders start to actu­ally engage in commu­ni­ca­tion that is tailored to the different cultures present. It’s similar to learning a language; you start off being able to read it a little and maybe under­stand key phrases. Then the next stage is to start being able to actively speak and commu­ni­cate in that language. It may feel a little clunky and a bit alien but nonethe­less, you give it your best shot.

Global leaders who are devel­oping this skill may feel like this as they learn to switch between different perspec­tives. You start to know instinc­tively how to approach and deal with the different cultural contexts, and you do so without judg­ment. 

Inte­gra­tion

At this point, the full expres­sion of what it means to be cultur­ally sensi­tive is real­ized. Having gone through the stages of acquiring the knowl­edge of all the different cultural contexts rele­vant to their manage­ment tasks, a person now moves seam­lessly through all these contexts, instinc­tively accounting for them and responding to them as a native would.

We see exam­ples of this in people who can speak more than one language. Global leaders should actively aim for this level of cultural sensi­tivity. To become fluent in under­standing, adapting to and inte­grating different cultures will hugely increase the effec­tive­ness of a global leader, giving them invalu­able versa­tility and matu­rity that will have a hugely posi­tive impact. 

So why spend so much time talking about cultural sensi­tivity being a compe­tency for global leaders to master? 

The simple answer to that is that the ability to be cultur­ally sensi­tive under­pins all the other multi­cul­tural compe­ten­cies. Global leaders must be able to move seam­lessly through the different cultural frames in order to master the other compe­ten­cies. It’s the only foun­da­tion that will adequately sustain global leaders in their roles and must be under­stood fully.

Cultural Intel­li­gence

The next building block for cultur­ally sensi­tive global leaders, is cultural intel­li­gence. All of us at some point would have heard of emotional intel­li­gence. Emotional intel­li­gence is about being able to accu­rately assess and manage emotions. It’s a funda­mental skill within a work­place envi­ron­ment. Without it, it’s very diffi­cult to under­stand and moti­vate a work­force, or unite them behind a common goal. 

Someone who has a high level of emotional intel­li­gence is under­standing, empa­thetic and able to manage their own emotions. Inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships are strong because the ability to correctly iden­tify the emotions of others actively guides their thinking and behavior in order to achieve mutu­ally bene­fi­cial goals.

Cultural intel­li­gence can be consid­ered to be the next level up from emotional intel­li­gence. It includes both the ability to correctly iden­tify when a person is oper­ating out of universal human idio­syn­crasies and when a person is acting out of cultural condi­tioning. Once this distinc­tion is made, a cultur­ally intel­li­gent leader is able to accu­rately modify their behavior accord­ingly to ensure they get the best out of the people they interact with.

Domestic managers can be emotion­ally intel­li­gent and that will be enough to discharge their duties at a high level. Global leaders however, in keeping with the complexity in which they operate, must do more than be emotion­ally in tune. They must also endeavor to be cultur­ally in tune and flow between the two compe­ten­cies. In short, global leaders are like chameleons; they morph and they change in order to do busi­ness with people that operate outside the native culture of the leader or the orga­ni­za­tion. 

Mindful Inter­cul­tural Commu­ni­ca­tion

Once the hard work of becoming cultur­ally sensi­tive and intel­li­gent is done, the next stage is to become compe­tent at mindful inter­cul­tural commu­ni­ca­tion. The ground­work has already been laid at this point so all that remains for a global leader to do is to under­stand what inter­cul­tural commu­ni­ca­tion is.

What is Inter­cul­tural Commu­ni­ca­tion?

Inter­cul­tural commu­ni­ca­tion is the prac­tice of being able to clearly commu­ni­cate with people from different cultures. It’s impor­tant because cultural iden­tity is devel­oped socially through various mediums of commu­ni­ca­tion. Global leaders have to under­stand the dynamics of how a culture is formed in this way and then tailor their commu­ni­ca­tion style in a way that honors these cultural and social norms. 

In the same way emotions impact the way human beings inter­nalize messages, so does culture impact us; it affects the way we encode messages. In order for global leaders to become profi­cient in this compe­tency, the way they commu­ni­cate must be:

• Appro­priate
• Adap­tive

Appro­priate Inter­cul­tural Commu­ni­ca­tion

Some cultures are happy to commu­ni­cate over the phone or via email. Other cultures require that people are phys­i­cally present when discussing things of signif­i­cance. Global leaders must be able to ascer­tain what is appro­priate for the given audi­ence.

Adap­tive Inter­cul­tural Commu­ni­ca­tion

The goal of any global leader when it comes to mindful inter­cul­tural commu­ni­ca­tion should be to constantly be looking for ways to reduce the possi­bility of being misun­der­stood. When consid­ering how a message should be deliv­ered, global leaders are acutely aware of how a person’s culture affects how they inter­pret any message given. Compe­tent leaders make sure that when they deliver a message, the goal is to be under­stood correctly and for that message to be encoded and inter­preted as intended.

Both of these prac­tices will help global leaders commu­ni­cate effec­tively with other cultures, ensuring that messages are posi­tively received, and common objec­tives can be met.

All of these compe­ten­cies come together to form a highly effec­tive skillset. Ulti­mately, those who are able to master these skills, set them­selves apart as some of the most gifted leaders; inspiring leaders who are able to tran­scend the bound­aries of culture to lead people in a common purpose. 

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