Managing Multicultural Teams

“Today, success depends on the ability to navigate the wild variations in the ways people from different societies think, lead and get things done. By sidestepping common stereotypes and learning to decode the behaviour of other cultures […] we can avoid giving (and taking!) offense and better capitalize on the strengths of increased diversity.” This from Erin Meyer of INSEAD in her article in the May 2014 edition of the Harvard Business Review: “Navigating the Cultural Minefield.” Besides highlighting various cultural “scales” which can assist the decoding of other cultures, she also highlights four rules for managing across cultural differences which can help capitalize on the strengths of diversity.

Here’s how to manage multicultural teams along with further considerations:

Managing Multicultural Teams

Focusing on leading as one of the cultural scales (from “egalitarian” to “hierarchical”) the author prescribes four “rules” for managing across culture in a multicultural team:

1.       Don’t underestimate the challenge

As management styles “stem from habits developed over a lifetime” they can be hard to change: both yours and that of your team! Starting with yourself, you may need to “unlearn” your own style when moving to a new culture and/or managing a new multicultural team.

2.       Apply multiple perspectives

If you are leading a team of various different cultures, “it isn’t enough to recognize how your culture perceives each of the others.” In addition, you need to understand how each different culture perceives each other culture in the team!

3.       Find the positive in other approaches

This is the very essence of managing multicultural teams. If all you have is a negative view of other cultures, managing a multicultural team is going to be very difficult! Accentuate the positive to capitalize on the differences in the team.

4.       Continually adjust your position

Practice makes perfect. If you consider management as a one-to-one relationship with each team-member, then consider which management style might be the most effective in each instance, and keep adapting even if that means going back to “square one”.

Et alors

Unfortunately and all too often, some managers expect everyone else to adapt to their style and make no effort to accommodate their team! This is can be found in more “ethnocentric” cultures (where the group considers their culture to be the primary point of reference). Similarly, this article is focused on expatriate managers – managers who are already adapting by moving overseas and then having the challenge of managing a multicultural team; however one of the issues for multicultural companies is when the manager (usually at head office) is “local” and has a multicultural team (of expatriates). Whilst the team might be busy adapting, it is often the case that the manager makes little or no effort to do the same. When that is the case, it very unlikely that the team will be able to collectively capitalize on their cultural diversity – steps 2 to 4 will be impossible to achieve without step 1 from the manager! This highlights the point that multicultural awareness and training should not only be for managers going on assignment overseas but also for any manager in a multinational group who might be welcoming multicultural staff into the team!