When a team has members from 10+ countries, country-specific 'do's and don'ts' are useless. The effective strategy is developing broad cultural intelligence: slowing down, listening more than talking, and using inquiry to ensure mutual understanding with any colleague, regardless of their origin.
Related Insights
Prioritizing a candidate's skills ('capacity') over their fit with the team ('chemistry') is a mistake. To scale culture successfully, focus on hiring people who will get along with their colleagues. The ability to collaborate and integrate is more critical for long-term success than a perfect resume.
When managing teams across different cultures (e.g., US, Taiwan, Japan), a leader can bypass complex cultural frameworks by simply asking each person, 'What's the best way for me to deliver feedback to you?' This personalizes communication, eliminates guesswork, and demonstrates respect.
Address cultural issues by applying product management principles. Use surveys to gather data and identify pain points, then empower the team to propose solutions. Test these ideas like product features and iterate based on what works, making culture-building a shared, active process.
Leaders focus on obvious cultural differences like language. However, the divide between departments in the same organization (e.g., military vs. State Department) can be larger and more insidious because it’s less apparent, leading to misinterpretation rooted in different organizational norms and assumptions.
Hiring for "cultural fit" can lead to homogenous teams and groupthink. Instead, leaders should seek a "cultural complement"—candidates who align with core values but bring different perspectives and experiences, creating a richer and more innovative team alchemy.
An executive who moved from Chicago to Tokyo felt like an imposter and considered changing his leadership style. The best advice he received was the opposite: lean in *more* to who you are. Authenticity is a universal language that transcends cultural and professional barriers.
The core challenge for global teams isn't overt issues like time zones, but hidden ones. Members often lack the local context to correctly interpret information from colleagues, creating "blind spots" where they "don't know what they don't know," leading to misunderstandings and flawed decisions.
A lack of cross-cultural interaction outside of work creates professional blind spots. Managers may innocently misinterpret unfamiliar communication styles or slang as a lack of talent or initiative, undermining efforts to build diverse and inclusive teams.
To bridge cultural and departmental divides, the product team initiated a process of constantly sharing and, crucially, explaining granular user data. This moved conversations away from opinions and localized goals toward a shared, data-informed understanding of the core problems, making it easier to agree on solutions.
Effective collaboration in global teams depends on "mutual adaptation." This isn't just about communicating; it requires members to constantly be in a mindset of both teaching colleagues about their own context and perspective, while actively learning about their collaborators' situations.