Leading Global Teams Effectively

Western managers who are charged with leading global teams face a trap. Their expertise and training usually have their roots in Western, individualistic contexts, steeping them in ideals such as autonomy, empowerment, egalitarianism, and authenticity. Yet according to the GLOBE Leadership Studies, 70% of the world’s workforce is collectivist and hierarchical. These values are characteristic not only of employees in Shanghai and Dubai but also of immigrant talent in Copenhagen and Omaha.

A different approach is needed for leading global teams. It’s not that Western leadership advice is entirely wrong; rather, a global leader needs a larger toolbox and a more refined understanding of when and how to use the tools inside. Cultural sensitivity training and even culture-specific preparation often fall short because they’re too targeted and episodic. It’s like trying to teach a robot how to read and respond to body language with limited training data.

Instead, leaders need to develop “cultural intelligence”—a flexible intercultural fluency for adapting to culturally complex situations. I have spent over two decades researching and consulting with leading international organizations on how to manage workers and teams in different cultural contexts. My research shows that honing cultural intelligence is an unending discipline, refined through a lifetime of work and experience. But a good starting point is to understand the most common mistakes that derail Western leaders and learn how to use cultural intelligence to avoid them.

[ 1 ] Too Much Autonomy

Many leaders who come from individualist cultures fall into the trap of assuming that what motivates them will motivate their team. This often means they don’t see the best ways to motivate people from collectivist cultures.

Misunderstanding often arises around the question of autonomy—encouraging team members to make their own decisions, express their creativity, and manage their work independently. The prevailing view in Western leadership training is that giving employees latitude to do their job is crucial for engagement, retention, and team performance. But autonomy is not equally motivating for everyone. Some individuals thrive when their leader outlines clear processes and deadlines, and they struggle to be productive in environments that lack directive leadership. The degree to which individuals want to make decisions on their own, offer recommendations, and chart their own development paths varies widely depending on whether they have an individualist or collectivist orientation. Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede found that employees from individualist cultures expected to be consulted in decision-making while those from collectivist cultures preferred leaders to make decisions on behalf of the group. INSEAD’s Erin Meyer adds nuance to Hofstede’s finding, noting that most collectivist leaders don’t explicitly solicit their team members’ input, but they do consider their perspectives when making decisions.

Most people value some measure of autonomy, but it’s especially important to individualists. They want a say in decisions, and they thrive in environments that encourage them to express their differences and creativity. In many Western organizations, proactively voicing unique ideas is rewarded because it’s believed to signal initiative and engagement.

Yet the majority of the global workforce has grown up in collectivist environments, where you speak up only when invited to do so—and even then, you’re taught to defer to those more senior. You make decisions based on what’s best for your extended family and the other social groups of which you’re a part. Being told to set your own goals and solve your challenges independently can feel disorienting and demotivating. A McDonald’s executive once told me that the company learned this lesson in India when its Employee of the Month program failed because no one wanted to be singled out. People who were recognized for the award were often teased mercilessly for acting superior and were accused of betraying their team and undermining camaraderie. McDonald’s quietly shifted the program to the Team of the Month, which worked much better given employees’ preference to work collectively to accomplish goals.

Leading a global team requires more than just knowing broad cultural distinctions; it demands the cultural intelligence to accurately assess each situation and adjust the level of guidance, autonomy, and control to the unique values and preferences of each team member. For executives at Everfresh (a pseudonym), a $30 billion company operating in more than 75 countries, this meant rethinking the rollout of its Speak Up campaign. Its purpose was to foster innovation and reduce inefficiencies by encouraging employees to offer constructive feedback. Executives thought people would welcome the initiative, but many employees, especially in Asia, reacted negatively. They perceived “speaking up” as a directive to challenge senior leaders and voice opinions in public forums—behaviors that clashed with their cultural norms. So Everfresh leadership reframed the campaign. It emphasized that participation was expected but made it clear that speaking up didn’t have to be verbal, public, or individual. Alternative ways for employees to contribute, such as allowing collective feedback curated by a group, were introduced, making the campaign more inclusive and effective.

Everfresh used two other strategies to reframe its approach to autonomy. First, leaders designed cultural training specifically geared for midlevel managers, recognizing that these are the people with the most-direct impact on whether employees speak up, take ownership, and feel engaged. The training went beyond simply raising awareness about cultural differences. It focused on equipping managers with the skills needed to interpret subtle cues and provided tools for supporting employees who found it uncomfortable to voice their perspectives and make recommendations. The training used role-plays and coaching to teach managers how to understand nonverbal cues, emotional signals, and indirect communication styles. Managers learned that indirect eye contact, silence in meetings, or reluctance to respond via email can hold entirely different meanings depending on a person’s cultural background. They learned to decode unfamiliar behaviors and navigate issues like power dynamics and the importance of saving face, how much autonomy each team member valued, and how to adapt their leadership style accordingly.

In addition, Everfresh managers learned how to revamp team activities that were biased toward an individualist view of autonomy. Take brainstorming, for example. It might seem ideally suited to collectivists because it invites broad participation, but brainstorming is inherently individualist because it is rooted in participants’ willingness to speak up with unique ideas. To make brainstorming more culturally intelligent and effective, managers asked team members to begin by writing down their ideas. This practice benefited not only collectivists but also non-native speakers and introverts. They also offered multiple ways for team members to share their ideas, such as one-on-one conversations, in writing, or through group submissions. For professional development discussions, Everfresh moved from focusing solely on individual achievements to also emphasizing group stability and collective success. This approach aligned with the values of team members from collectivist backgrounds, who prioritize group harmony over individual accolades. Over time, Everfresh saw a significant increase in constructive input from employees around the world, along with improvements in its employee engagement scores.

[ 2 ] Too Much Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a crucial aspect of effective leadership. According to Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson, teams need environments where members feel accepted and comfortable enough to take risks and share concerns without fear of embarrassment or retribution. (For more on this topic, see “What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety,” in this issue.) Google, an early adopter of Edmondson’s work, found that teams with higher levels of psychological safety had lower turnover rates, implemented diverse ideas more effectively, and generated more revenue. However, the teams included in Google’s study often lacked significant diversity—members were mostly white or South Asian men steeped in Silicon Valley’s culture. On these teams, “psychologically safe” meant that people felt comfortable openly disagreeing with and debating one another, but that kind of open conflict is incongruent with what most of the global workforce perceives as safe.

When leaders in other organizations attempt to replicate Google’s success applying psychological safety, many end up with teams whose members, instead of embracing a culture of rigorous debate, are timid and afraid of offending one another. They default to the common knowledge effect, in which team discussions revolve around familiar ideas that everyone already knows, and individuals avoid sharing anything that might be disagreeable and lead to uncomfortable debate or finger-pointing. The research on this backfire risk is now extensive. Several studies, including one led by Jeff Dyer at Brigham Young University, have shown that many global teams have become places where safety, inclusion, and belonging are emphasized at the expense of intellectual honesty and the confidence to challenge the status quo—the exact opposite intention of psychological safety.

Leaders can use an array of strategies to create psychological safety without sacrificing intellectual honesty on culturally diverse teams. One is to develop team norms that guide behavior while embracing diverse perspectives. Isabella, an executive I coached, led the global marketing division of a U.S. company’s top product line. Her team spanned four regions and several time zones, and team members had differing cultural preferences. When preparing a campaign, they had vastly different opinions on messaging, timing, and design priorities, causing friction and stifling performance. Isabella brought in a facilitator for trust-building activities and discussions on collaboration, but the bonding didn’t last. So she tried a different approach: To address conflicting priorities, the team developed some norms—for example, “Any product launch campaign needs to be tested in at least three markets within six weeks.” This allowed the team to balance two differing priorities: speed and thoroughness.

To ensure that norms are explicitly inclusive, rather than defaulting to the dominant culture’s preferences, leaders can co-create norms with their teams—soliciting input from everyone, identifying where cultural differences come into play, and negotiating adjustments to gain the most from the diverse approaches. Isabella’s team developed a variety of acceptable ways to meet the norm of gaining stakeholder support before launching a campaign. Some team members preferred gathering input early in the process while others felt more comfortable securing buy-in after the design was nearly final. The team agreed that both were viable ways to follow the six-week rule of thumb.

Many global teams have become places where safety, inclusion, and belonging are emphasized at the expense of intellectual honesty.

Another tactic leaders can use is to adjust the types of questions they ask their teams. For instance, instead of asking a closed question that prompts a yes or no answer (such as, “Are we missing anything?”), rephrase it as an open-ended question that encourages participation: “What are we missing?” This simple adjustment supports both psychological safety and intellectual honesty. The first question may cause a team member to think, No one else has brought this up, so I don’t want to be the one to say it. The second question acknowledges that issues have likely been overlooked and should be brought forward.

When I first started teaching, I frequently stopped throughout my lectures to ask, “Do you have any questions?” Inevitably, the same few students responded, while the majority stayed silent. But when I graded their assignments, it became clear that many didn’t fully understand the material. Eventually, I stopped asking if they had questions and started asking what questions they had and began to say things like, “This is a challenging concept. I’m sure you have questions, so now is a great time to ask them.” This tactic is particularly effective when dealing with people from collectivist cultures or a mix of cultural backgrounds because it normalizes the act of asking questions and fosters a more inclusive environment. So, instead of asking, “Are you facing any challenges?” try something like, “We just finished a tough quarter. Everyone is facing significant challenges. I want to hear about yours.” This shift signals that sharing challenges is not only safe but expected.

Psychological safety is critical, but it must be developed with cultural intelligence to ensure that diversity moves beyond being a politically correct bonus to becoming a genuine source of improved performance and innovation.

[ 3 ] Too Much Emphasis on Differences

Understanding our differences has become the holy grail of inclusion initiatives and cross-cultural management training. It’s considered key to building innovative teams. And there’s plenty of evidence to support the power of diversity. Team members who have diverse backgrounds and perspectives offer built-in expertise for tackling problems and viewing products and projects more critically. But overindexing on differences can be damaging. One Deakin University study of 265 Australian workers found that diversity can make us anxious, leading to reduced knowledge-sharing and communication challenges with colleagues from different backgrounds. Researchers from the University of Missouri found that some diversity initiatives can also inadvertently lead to disengagement and the exclusion of underrepresented individuals, hindering the very inclusion they were meant to create.

A meta-analysis of 199 cultural intelligence studies by Thomas Rockstuhl and Linn Van Dyne showed that knowing a lot about cultural differences can be more harmful than being culturally ignorant. When people become overconfident in their understanding of differences, it can lead to rigid, categorical thinking in which behavior is reduced to monolithic labels like being “German” or “Gen X” or an “engineer.” In addition, a heightened focus on how we’re different becomes mentally taxing and prevents dynamic, generative learning about one another. Cultural intelligence equips leaders to skillfully acknowledge and adapt to diverse backgrounds while keeping the team centered on shared objectives.

One effective strategy for harnessing diversity’s benefits is for leaders to emphasize perspective-taking with their teams. Perspective-taking is the ability to step outside one’s own experience to imagine the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of someone else. Unlike empathy, which can sometimes confuse personal feelings and the team’s mission, perspective-taking enhances cognitive flexibility while maintaining focus on the task at hand. It helps team members understand, for example, how two smart people can receive the same information yet arrive at radically different conclusions.

A study led by Adam Galinsky at Columbia University illustrates the power of perspective-taking. Students were shown a photo of an elderly man sitting next to a newspaper stand and were asked to write a short essay about a typical day in his life. Galinsky divided the students into three groups. The control group was asked to simply describe the man’s day. The second group was told to describe his day without using stereotypes, and the people in the third group were instructed to write the essay in the first person, imagining themselves as the man.

Many of the students in the control group used negative stereotypes, portraying the man as lonely, dependent, and declining in health. The students instructed to avoid stereotypes wrote more neutral descriptions about the man, making up scenarios about how he might spend his time and what he might be thinking about. The students asked to write in the first person had the most positive descriptions, highlighting the man’s wisdom, his broad circle of friends, and the joy he finds in life’s simple pleasures. Managers can apply this strategy when teammates disagree about a course of action by asking them to describe the opposing perspective in the first person. This approach humanizes teammates, encourages perspective-taking, and may lead to insights that enable the team to find a solution that leverages multiple viewpoints.

Another way leaders can prevent an overemphasis on differences is by focusing the team on solving a shared problem. Research has consistently shown that labeling differences within a group—whether based on culture, identity, or even something as trivial as assigning people to “blue” or “green” groups—inevitably creates divisions. The most effective way to counter this tendency is to reframe the group’s identity around a common goal or challenge. The psychologist Muzafer Sherif’s famous Robbers Cave experiment illustrates this: Researchers divided boys into two teams at summer camp, leading to conflict that only subsided when they faced shared challenges, like fixing the camp’s water supply and a broken truck carrying food. In a far more dramatic, real-world example, at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian doctors and nurses work together to provide top-quality care, focusing on their shared commitment to patient care rather than their cultural differences.

Diversity training can play an important role as leaders walk the line between ignoring differences and overindexing on them. Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev found that opt-in training sessions that emphasize perspective-taking and skill-building help team members understand how their differences contribute to achieving shared goals. Instead of relying on broad generalizations and stereotypes, leaders can emphasize diverse work styles and values—in areas such as approaches to communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution—that are often shared across a range of identities and cultures. Effective diversity training fosters constructive dialogue by creating an environment in which participants say what they really think instead of staying silent or simply echoing what they think is expected. By acknowledging differences without allowing them to become the dominant focus, leaders can foster a team culture that is both inclusive and high performing.

[ 4 ] Too Much Transparency

Trust in leadership is at an all-time low. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, a majority of people in 28 countries believe their leaders are deliberately misleading them. This isn’t only happening in countries that prefer flat leadership structures, such as the United States and Sweden. Leaders’ credibility is also low in places like Japan and France that prefer top-down leadership. The conventional wisdom in the West is that leaders gain trust by being vulnerable, authentic, and transparent. As former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz put it, “The currency of leadership is transparency.” But those values chafe against the more nuanced, discreet communication styles preferred by much of today’s global workforce. It’s not that team members from other cultural contexts don’t value transparency; they just expect leaders to communicate transparently in ways that align with their own cultural norms. Global teams need their leaders to have a broader repertoire of communication styles so that they can effectively gain the trust of team members.

Western managers are told that owning their mistakes and discussing them openly is crucial for building trust, but for someone from a face-saving culture, it can be disorienting when a leader speaks candidly about a mistake. Leaders hold a position of authority and honor, and hearing them grovel about what they did wrong may actually erode trust. People already know when something has gone awry. Many team members from collectivist cultures would rather see their leader address the issue quietly and restore trust through actions rather than words. Owning mistakes is important, but the way leaders communicate about them needs to reflect the cultural differences on the team.

Team members, regardless of culture or personality, want leaders to be clear. In fact, in the GLOBE Leadership Studies, “clarity” was rankedas one of the highest priorities that global employees want from leaders. One effective strategy is to build trust gradually by gauging team members’ receptivity and modulating the level of disclosure accordingly. For cultures or individuals who may find too much disclosure unsettling, start slowly and build trust through consistency, incremental sharing, and demonstrated competence. In some cases, sensitive information is better communicated through a third party rather than directly from the leader. Some senior leaders task their deputies with sharing difficult information, not so much to avoid the discomfort for themselves but to create an environment in which team members are comfortable asking questions while allowing everyone to save face.

Transparency also requires that leaders expand their repertoire of communication styles to align with the varying comfort levels and values of team members. Ex-Googler Kim Scott says leaders need to use radical candor with everyone. From her perspective, even “obnoxiously aggressive feedback” is better than “ruinous empathy” lest leaders withhold feedback that might be helpful. However, this approach assumes that bluntness is the only effective way to provide clear feedback. In most cultures people communicate more indirectly. They are not necessarily being passive-aggressive or dishonest; they’re just communicating the same message in a different way. Indirect communicators expect their leaders to trust them to be intelligent enough to interpret subtle cues without the discomfort of a confrontational approach. There’s an art to deftly communicating in ways that are crystal clear but without a blunt edge.

An expanded repertoire of communication styles enables leaders to adapt—modifying when and how much information to share—to ensure that their message is received clearly and builds trust. Some team members want play-by-play updates during a crisis, while that level of transparency induces anxiety for others, particularly if there’s no resolution or proposed plan yet. Others may prefer that leaders outline theoretical principles before diving into practical applications.

Culturally intelligent leaders understand that their preferred approach may not build trust with every team member. By adjusting their approach, they build deeper connections, enhance clarity, and respect cultural nuances, avoiding the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all leadership style.

. . .

Within each of the leadership mistakes, there’s a kernel of truth. Autonomy, psychological safety, diversity, and transparency all matter. Cultural intelligence is the key to navigating these complexities on cross-cultural teams. It enables leaders to create environments where all team members feel valued, understood, and motivated. This approach not only builds a more inclusive workplace, it enhances team performance and innovation.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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