Not all personalities perform well in a cross-cultural environment.
Research finds that managers with the following qualities achieve the best performance:
- Social initiative
- Emotional stability
- Open-mindedness
- Flexibility
- Empathy
Transitioning across cultures is not easy, and often managers who are sent to work in a cross-cultural environment are chosen for their business acumen, rather than any inherent cross-cultural skills or adaptability they may possess.
While companies do require managers abroad to know their business, their cross-cultural skills are equally important.
Sometimes successful leadership in one’s home country does not necessarily transfer over to, say, Japan, Germany, or Brazil.
Each of these countries has different cultural values and norms, and if the manager doesn’t have the skills required to accept, adapt, or adopt aspects of the culture, they will fall flat as a foreign manager.
Self-Assessment
Perhaps, you’re not sure if you possess the qualities that are key to cross-cultural leadership.
To self-assess whether your personality is compatible to lead across cultures, read the hypothetical scenario and then answer honestly.
Grief Across Cultures
Grieving processes differ across cultures.
Consider your own culture’s appropriate grieving process.
Do mourners grieve openly and emotionally? Or do they grieve quietly and stoically?
Now, imagine you are from the West, and you’re organizing a relative’s funeral.
The West approaches grief in a somber and communal fashion. Funerals usually involve family and relatives joining either in a congregation or funeral hall, saying prayers, sharing memories, crying. But this is often the extent of the communal grieving process.
Now, consider that the Middle Eastern partner of your relative invites her family to the funeral.
Middle Easterners show grief by moaning and crying out during communal services.
When they grieve this way at the funeral, do you find their actions disrespectful? As the funeral’s organizer, would you be upset that your own family was perhaps uncomfortable with this demonstrative grieving? Would you attempt to adapt the funeral to accommodate different forms of grief?
If you were to attend a funeral in the Middle East, would you adhere to your own cultural norms when mourning, or would you mirror your hosts and express your grief in a similar fashion?
If you are silent, your hosts might find your solemn behavior as disrespectful. Are you alright with this interpretation?
Do you think you could become accustomed to these behaviors if you lived in the Middle East for a time? If so, would you be open to adopting the behaviors when they became natural to you?
Now, consider other foreign funerary customs. For instance:
- The Benguet of the Philippines blindfold the departed and seat them on a chair beside their home’s main entrance.
- The Vaisravana Buddhists of Tibet and Mongolia perform a “sky burial,” ritually dismembering the departed and leaving the body on a mountaintop for vultures to take.
- The Malagasy of Madagascar exhume their departed every couple of years in an event called “the turning of the bones,” in order to dance with them along to live music.
Would you be able to accept, adapt to, or adopt any of these cultural funerary customs?
The answer to this question will give you an idea about where you draw the line and how you might fair in a foreign environment.
What if the above qualities are not your strengths?
Never fear; next week, we’ll talk about developing the skillset to build these qualities.
Success Across Cultures 