Manage-wise

Cultural sensitivity and global leadership skills

Some managers are more effective at leading diverse groups than others. Cultural sensitivity and global leadership skills are essential for inspiring people from cultures other than one’s own. Although they reinforce each other, here we describe cultural sensitivity and global leadership skills separately.

Cultural sensitivity

Leaders, as well as others, attempting to influence a person from a foreign country must be alert to possible cultural differences. Thus, the leader must be willing to acquire knowledge about local customs and learn to speak the native language at least passably. A cross-cultural leader must be patient, adaptable, flexible and willing to listen and learn. All these characteristics are part of cultural sensitivity, an awareness of and a willingness to investigate the reasons why people of another culture act as they do. A person with cultural sensitivity will recognise certain nuances in customs that will help build better relationships with people in their adopted cultures.

Cultural sensitivity is also important because it helps a person become a multicultural worker. Such an individual is convinced that all cultures are equally good and enjoys learning about other cultures. Multicultural workers and leaders are usually people who have been exposed to more than one culture in childhood. Being multicultural leads to be accepted by a person from another culture. According to Gunnar Beeth, a multilingual salesperson can explain the advantages of a product in other languages, but it takes a multicultural salesperson to motivate foreigners to buy.

Sensitivity is the most important characteristic for leading people from other cultures because cultural stereotypes rarely provide entirely reliable guides for dealing with others. An American manager might expect Asian group members to accept his or her directives immediately because Asians are known to defer to authority. Nevertheless, an individual Asian might need considerable convincing before accepting authority. The link to leadership here is that cultural sensitivity helps one become a multicultural leader.

Global leadership skills

Global leadership skills are so important that they improve a company’s reputation and contribute to a sustainable competitive advantage. Global leadership skills are those specially important in dealing with workers from different companies. Excellent global leaders have a leadership style that generates superior corporate performance in terms of four criteria: (1) profitability and productivity; (2) continuity and efficiency; (3) commitment and morale; and (4) adaptability and innovation. Behavioural complexity is the term given to this ability to attain all four criteria of organisational performance. Excellent global leaders are able to understand complex issues from the four perspectives just mentioned and to achieve the right balance. For example, when a company is facing a mature market, it might be necessary to invest more effort into temporarily achieving innovation than into achieving high profits.

Global leadership skills also include stewardship, because excellent global leaders act as responsible stewards of human and natural resources. By being responsible, they promote simultaneously economic, social, biological, and ecological development; they act with social responsibility.

The global leader must tap into a deep, universal layer of human motivation to build loyalty, trust, and teamwork in different cultures.

Excerpt from 'Leadership: Research Findings, Practice and Skills' by Andrew J DuBrin. Published by Wiley Dreamtech India.