Tools for leading between several cultures, to read in ten minutes and try by Monday.
The free guide
A practical 12-page guide, to read in 20 minutes. For each conversation: why it matters, the cultural trap, three questions to ask yourself and a sentence to open it.
Excerpt · conversation no. 3
Feedback is the fastest way to help a team improve. It is also the fastest way to damage a relationship when it is poorly received. In a multicultural team, the same sentence can have two opposite effects depending on who receives it.
Direct feedback passes for honesty here and for humiliation there, especially if given in public. Conversely, very cushioned feedback, wrapped in compliments, may not be heard at all: the person keeps the praise and ignores the request. Neither is “the right way”; the trap is believing that yours is universal.
“I’d like to give you some feedback on this morning’s meeting. Is now a good time?”
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A manager congratulates and criticises a colleague in Abidjan in the same sentence, in the middle of a meeting. He will not speak up again for three weeks. Why the same feedback helps here and hurts there, and four practices to make it travel without breakage.
Practical notes
Each note takes two minutes to read and links to a point on the Compass. Filter by what you want to work on.
If you can’t state your direction in one sentence, your team won’t be able to repeat it. Write it in twenty-five words at most: where are we going, why now, and what we will not do. The third part is the hardest, and the most useful: a direction is recognised by what it excludes.
In a multicultural team, this sentence has another advantage: it translates. Long speeches get distorted from one language to another; a short, concrete, repeated sentence crosses borders.
To try: test your sentence on three people, then ask what they take away from it. If the three answers differ, rewrite it.
A fourth priority doesn’t add to the other three: it dilutes them. Everyone then picks the one that suits them, and the team moves in four directions at once. Three priorities per quarter are enough to guide day-to-day trade-offs.
Everything else waits or is delegated. It is not a renunciation, it is a message: this is what matters now. In cultures where people don’t dare say no to their superiors, this short list even becomes a protection for your teams.
To try: display your three priorities at the top of every team meeting for a month, and ask which priority each new topic belongs to.
After a difficult question, in committee or in front of a client, the temptation is to answer straight away to show you are in command. The three-second silence has the opposite effect to what you fear: it gives weight to the answer that follows.
Those three seconds give you time to choose your first word. They also show that the question was heard. In some cultures, this thinking time is in fact expected: answering too quickly can come across as casual.
To try: once a day this week, count to three in your head before answering a question that matters.
The regular one-to-one is the simplest management tool, and the most often abandoned. Twenty minutes, every week or every two weeks, with each direct report. One rule: their agenda first, yours second.
This meeting is not a progress update. It is the moment when people can say what is blocking them before it becomes a problem. Where people don’t spontaneously talk about their difficulties with their superiors, its regularity makes all the difference.
To try: schedule these meetings for the whole month, and cancel them only as a last resort.
“Yes, noted.” For you, that is agreement. For the person opposite, it may only mean “I heard you”. In many professional cultures, saying no head-on, especially to someone more senior, is not done: disagreement travels through other signals.
The remedy is simple and offends no one: end every important meeting with a shared restatement. Who does what, and by when. It is not mistrust, it is precision, and it protects everyone.
To try: keep the last five minutes of your key meetings for a participant to restate the next steps.
Multicultural teams don’t argue over goals, but over the way of working: who decides, how we say no, what counts as acceptable lateness, how we give each other feedback. As long as these rules stay implicit, everyone applies their own.
A charter of five rules, written together, makes these expectations visible. What matters is not the document but the conversation that produces it. Reread it every six months: a team that changes members also changes rules.
To try: suggest that your team writes the first rule: “With us, a decision is made when…”
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