Cross-Cultural Leadership

Skilled global leaders lead and use cultural diversity to benefit their organisation. This presupposes that one understands the impact of culture at different levels. At one level, people’s behaviour is formed by their ethnic, religious and national backgrounds. At another level, they are affected by the habits, thoughts, beliefs, values and experiences of their generation. In addition to these, the values and culture of our organisations direct our actions.

Well-managed diversity can turn out to provide an organisation a significant competitive edge. On the other hand, badly managed cultural differences can de-motivate people and reduce their comfort and productivity. As a general rule, multicultural teams tend to be more creative, producing solutions that are easy to adopt across cultural boundaries. Diversity helps us to better understand the needs of our customers and other interest groups. Embracing diversity also provides an opportunity to getting the best use out of the talents of a much larger group and to keep these key people motivated to work for our organisation.

Our multicultural leadership training goes through the recently formed concepts, research findings, sample cases and best practices to do with all the levels mentioned above. Generally we also include the Pertec test which can be used to analyse the cultural behaviour profiles of individuals, teams and organisations alike. A typical one-to-two-day training programme is always devised to suit the customer’s situation, giving just the right amount of emphasis to national and organisational culture and generation issues. Our training is mostly interactive and much of it is done in small groups.