Leadership training is one of the most important tools that today’s organizations employ to obtain leverage and a competitive advantage in a crowded market. Without effective leaders who know how to keep a team happy and still deliver efficient and high-quality results, an organization can never hope to succeed. There is, however, one significant problem with a majority of leadership training being employed today: it locks its standards of success to the perspective of just one culture.
Given that today’s businesses are almost invariably working in an international or multi-national context, cross-cultural leadership training is more important now than ever before. Simply put, leadership styles that work well in one cultural context, such as the United States, might come across as rude, alienating, or even downright incompetent when exported to another cultural paradigm, such as China. This can spell the difference between a leader who moves a company forward and one who holds the company back in an increasingly globalized era of business. In order to succeed across cultures, then, today’s leaders must bear in mind the following insights about effective cross-cultural leadership strategies.
A Problem of Translation
One of the biggest problems associated with leadership training is a failure to account for how those skills will translate to a cross-cultural context. Simply put, skills that may serve one well within one culture may not function at all in a different cultural context (and this is true of both national cultures as well as individual institutional cultures). A 2016 study on cross-cultural leadership looked at more than 17,000 respondents across 62 countries in order to develop an exceedingly robust image of just how leadership styles are accepted – or not – in different cultural contexts around the world.
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