The operating system no one sees — and why leaders who read culture well outmanoeuvre those who don’t.
You walk into a room with a team spanning four continents. Everyone is smart, motivated, and aligned on the goal. Yet something keeps breaking down: decisions stall, feedback lands wrong, and leadership feels misread. The culprit is rarely strategy or skill. It is culture, both the one you built inside your company and the invisible one each person carries from where they grew up. Get these two layers right, and everything accelerates. Ignore them, and even the best strategy stalls.
🏢 The Operating System No One Sees
Culture is not a ping-pong table or a set of values on a wall. It is the invisible force that determines what behaviours get rewarded, what gets tolerated, and what gets quietly punished.
The right question to ask is whether your culture encourages innovation, accountability, and collaboration, or whether there are cultural elements that may be holding the company back. More specifically: if the company is pursuing a growth strategy, does the culture encourage risk-taking and entrepreneurial thinking, or is it too risk-averse? Those two things cannot coexist indefinitely.
Culture also has a maturity curve. At the nascent end, culture is not formally defined, sub-cultures form within teams, silos emerge, and there are no initiatives focused on culture-building. At the optimised end, culture is fully integrated into all aspects of the organisation, virtually all employees deeply understand and embody it, and the organisation has metrics and KPIs specifically tied to cultural health. Where does your organisation sit on that scale?
When culture and strategy are misaligned, no amount of clever planning will save you. Driving cultural transformation involves changes to leadership behaviour, communication strategies, and performance management systems. Culture shifts when leaders shift, first.
🗺️ The Map You Did Not Know You Needed
Here is a scene that plays out in boardrooms across the globe every single day. An American company expands into China, brings its celebrated flat-hierarchy culture, and encourages everyone to challenge upward. Within weeks, the local team perceives the managers as incompetent, not because they delegate, but because they arrive without a clear plan and expect subordinates to fill in the gaps. The Chinese employees did not see it as their job to have ideas or make suggestions to their leaders. Their measure of success was to do what they were told, when they were told, and to do it well.
Neither side was wrong. Both were operating from deeply ingrained cultural logic. The breakdown was the assumption that one way is universal.
It is common for people from different countries to grapple with mutual incomprehension. Often that is because managers fail to distinguish between two important dimensions of leadership culture: how much attention is paid to rank or status, and who calls the shots and how. These two dimensions do not always travel together, and that gap is where many global leaders get tripped up.
🇩🇪 🇯🇵 🇳🇱 Germany, Japan, Netherlands
Consensus-driven. Decisions take longer to reach, but implementation is fast once alignment is in place. Decisions are commitments.
🇮🇳 🇲🇽 🇷🇺 🇺🇸 India, Mexico, Russia, US
Top-down and fast. Decisions are made quickly but remain open to change as new input arises. Speed is the advantage.
The management orthodoxy of pushing authority down in the organisation does not fit easily into the emerging-market context and often trips up Western companies on their first ventures abroad.
“I realised I was going to need to unlearn many of the techniques that had made me so successful in Mexico and develop others from the ground up.”
Carlos, Director of Marketing, Heineken Amsterdam · via Erin Meyer, HBR May 2014
That is not a failure story. That is what cultural growth looks like in practice.
🏆 What High-Performing Leaders Do Differently
Leaders who navigate cultural complexity well do not pretend differences do not exist. They do four things consistently:
1. They do not underestimate the challenge.
Management styles stem from habits developed over a lifetime, which makes them hard to change. Cultural fluency is a sustained practice, not a one-day workshop.
2. They apply multiple perspectives.
In a global team, it is not enough to recognise how your culture perceives each of the others. You need to understand how every team member perceives the rest, and manage across that full map.
3. They find the positive in other approaches.
If a leader clearly understands how people from varied backgrounds behave, cultural differences stop being friction and become the team’s greatest asset.
4. They adjust, and then adjust again.
It is no longer enough to lead the Dutch way or the Mexican way, the American way or the Chinese way. You must be flexible enough to choose which style will work best in which context. Whether we work in Düsseldorf or Dubai, Brasília or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, success depends on the ability to navigate the wild variations in the ways people from different societies think, lead, and get things done.
The leader who reads culture well will always outmanoeuvre the one who does not.
💡 Knowledge Nugget
If a talented new hire from a completely different cultural background joined your team tomorrow, would your leadership style make them feel empowered, or invisible? The answer tells you more about your culture than any values statement ever could.
🚀 Ready to Make Culture Your Advantage?
Whether you are leading across borders, scaling a team, or sensing that the culture in your organisation has quietly drifted away from where you need it to be, the conversation starts with clarity. Let’s explore what is holding your organisation back and what becomes possible when culture becomes intentional.
Sources: (1) Erin Meyer, “Being the Boss in Brussels, Beijing and Boston,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017. (2) Erin Meyer, “Navigating the Cultural Minefield,” Harvard Business Review, May 2014. (3) Strategy Offsite Playbook (DT-C Knowledge Source). (4) Organizational Design Diagnostic Playbook (DT-C Knowledge Source). Sources (1) and (2) are held in the DT-C Leadership knowledge library. Sources (3) and (4) are held in the DT-C Organisational Development knowledge library.
