Operating with a global mindset involves auditing local practices and values

By Greg Bott, Head of the Client Development Centre, Addleshaw Goddard  

You are riding in a car driven by your best friend in a zone where the speed limit is 40mph. You notice he's going at least 20mph too fast. Although you warn him, he doesn't slow down. Suddenly he hits and kills a pedestrian. You are the only witness. Your friend's lawyer says he will probably not go to jail if you testify the car was travelling at normal speed. What will you do?

This is one scenario we use in our Future Leaders Programme, which has been designed to support talented senior in-house lawyers as they prepare for their next significant role. In the programme, we explore this fictitious event in the context of how leaders should be cognisant of prevailing cultures (the learned and shared values, behaviour and beliefs of a group).

Research by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner¹ found that 91 per cent of people born and raised in the UK would not lie on behalf of their friend, the driver. However, responses in Greece are more balanced, where 61 per cent would not lie. In Venezuela, 68 per cent would lie to protect their friend.

Some cultural differences are clear to see, while others - like responses to the above scenario - can be teased out with a few simple questions. As with the iceberg metaphor, we see how certain aspects of culture are visible - they appear in people's behaviour - while others remain hidden in the sphere of thinking, feeling and believing.

So what does this mean for the general counsel, or indeed any leader, faced with leading and managing team members whose ontological positions are so varied? Is a fully functioning, effective and cohesive 'global' team attainable or even desirable?

Cultural understanding

There are many different models of cultural understanding which have been constructed over the years. These include Hofstede's dimensions of work-related value,² Hall's research on cultural differences in business³ and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner's guide to cross-cultural management.

These models are often memorable for their comparison of various dimensions. For example, universalist countries take contracts very seriously and employ lots of lawyers to make sure the contract is kept. Particularist countries think that the relationship is more important than the contract and that a good deal requires no written contract - the particular people and situation matter more than the universal rules.

Comparisons are drawn between other dimensions too such as power distance - defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.

Hofstede's research, in particular, has shown that cultural differences between nations are particularly found at the deepest level, the level of values. In comparison, cultural differences among organisations are principally identified at the level of practices, with practices being more tangible than values.

This insight is particularly helpful in framing how leaders should manage geographically and culturally diverse teams. Developing, communicating and reinforcing a set of strong function-wide practices can go a long way in helping to bring team members together and to building trust.

Behavioural profiling

Often, an important step in building that all-important trust is providing an opportunity for team members to learn about their own communication, management and leadership preferences.

Structuring and facilitating a session where team members complete a behavioural profiling tool such as DISC or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can be enormously beneficial. These tools can be extremely effective in holding up a mirror to team and individual practices. Individuals can gain new insights into their communication or management preferences, enabling them to overcome patterns of behaviour that have caused them to become stuck.

Team members can also be invited to share aspects of their profiles with one another and to offer suggestions on how they would like colleagues to interact with them. These exchanges can set new and shared expectations that, over time, have the potential to become working practices for the team.

Collectively, team members can agree a set of behaviours (observable insofar as something one can 'see' or 'hear') that can complement or counterbalance national cultures. An organisational or function-wide culture can then emerge and establish itself as "the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one organisation from others," as Hofstede puts it.

Effective global teams

As with most things in life, something worth achieving - like a culturally sensitive, fully-effective global legal team - rarely comes easily. Leaders must ensure that there are plentiful opportunities for colleagues to engage in joint projects that reinforce shared practices.

A further important role is for leaders to embrace seemingly contradictory values in pursuit of longer-term goals and to help team members to recognise that all parties have something to learn from each other.

Leaders must role model the right behaviours too, cultivating what Daniel Goleman refers to as a triad of awareness "focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world… because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided".⁴

So, while the moral car-crash dilemma provided above is fictitious, there is a world of thorny issues that are all too real for those tasked with leading culturally-diverse teams.

Greg Bott is the head of the Client Development Centre at Addleshaw Goddard (www.addleshawgoddard.com) and a part-time doctoral researcher at Henley Management College, University of Reading

Endnotes

1. See Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business, Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, 3rd ed., 2012

2. See Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations, 2nd ed., Geert Hofstede, SAGE Publications, 2003

3. See Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French and Americans, Edward Hall and Mildred Reed Hall, Intercultural Press, 2000

4. See 'The Focused Leader', Daniel Goleman, Harvard Business Review, December 2013