Episode 162 - Cross-Cultural Leadership

<p class="p1"><strong>Summary</strong></p> <p class="p2">This week we consider the challenges of cross-cultural leadership.</p> <p class="p3"> </p> <p class="p1"><strong>Transcript</strong></p> <p class="p2">Welcome to episode 162 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we consider the challenges of cross-cultural leadership.</p> <p class="p2">How have you found working across different cultures? Perhaps you’ve travelled to other parts of the world, or maybe the business you work in has a broad cultural representation. Sometimes it can be challenging to figure out what’s a personality difference and what’s a cultural difference.</p> <p class="p2">I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of cultures, yet I’m still surprised by cultural differences. Given the global audience for the work we do, I’m always conscious of cultural assumptions that might creep in to the way we think about leadership development. It can be challenging working across cultures. There are core assumptions in our cultural world view that we may not even recognise.</p> <p class="p2">Researchers have built various frameworks to try to understand how cultures differ. One of the better know frameworks is the Lewis Model of Cultural Types. As someone who had travelled the world and spoke 10 languages, Richard Lewis realised he was in a good position to explore cultural differences. His book “When Cultures Collide”, first released in 1996, brought together a framework to understand how cultures can differ. His model is based on a triangle, with the points of the triangle being linear-active, multi-active, and reactive. Lewis then plots countries at each of these points and along the edges of the triangle.</p> <p class="p2">Linear-active cultures are about doing one thing at a time. He saw linear-active cultures such as those in Germany and Switzerland as cool, factual, decisive planners. The UK and US are also close to this cultural type. Multi-active is about trying to