In my last few years working at the World Bank I ran leadership programs for senior staff with management potential - staff known in the leadership "industry" as "hipos". The Bank must be one of the most culturally diverse workplaces on the planet and has offices in many developing countries. But instead of making the most of this diversity there's a prevailing political correctness that usually leads to conformist behavior, especially at headquarters in Washington.
One of the goals of the leadership program was to try to bring the diversity to life. In one strand of our program we met with leaders from countries as diverse as Ukraine, Mongolia, and Rwanda. What did leadership mean in these cultures? In Ukraine we met businessmen who had built clean corporate cultures in a sea of corruption, in Mongolia we met with politicians grappling with all the risks of a mineral boom, and in Rwanda we met leaders from all walks of life managing the aftermath of genocide. It was an extraordinary experience.
But an easier way to explore culture and leadership is to read a new book by Erin Meyer, called The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. Erin, who works for INSEAD business school in Paris, and participated in one of my programs, is a stunningly good teacher. In the book she provides a map across 8 dimensions for looking at cultural diversity and then harnessing it. The map is simply a discipline to pause, take stock, and be deliberate, rather than jumping to conclusions. If you are managing a team face to face or virtually, lining people up on the map makes you much more aware of team dynamics and how to manage it.
Here are a couple of excerpts from an article she wrote in the Harvard Business Review based on her book. In the map below, she is comparing an Israeli with a Russian:
“Communicating: When we say that someone is a good communicator, what do we actually mean? The responses differ wildly from society to society. I compare cultures along the Communicating scale by measuring the degree to which they are high- or low-context, a metric developed by the American anthropologist Edward Hall. In low-context cultures, good communication is precise, simple, explicit, and clear. Messages are understood at face value. Repetition is appreciated for purposes of clarification, as is putting messages in writing. In high-context cultures, communication is sophisticated, nuanced, and layered. Messages are often implied but not plainly stated. Less is put in writing, more is left open to interpretation, and understanding may depend on reading between the lines.
Deciding: This scale, based on my own work, measures the degree to which a culture is consensus-minded. We often assume that the most egalitarian cultures will also be the most democratic, while the most hierarchical ones will allow the boss to make unilateral decisions. This isn’t always the case. Germans are more hierarchical than Americans, but more likely than their U.S. colleagues to build group agreement before making decisions. The Japanese are both strongly hierarchical and strongly consensus-minded.”
Erin Meyer, HBR, May 2014