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( 4-minute read..I promise it will be more rewarding than scrolling Insta)

I’m sure you’ve been in a meeting where someone made what seemed like an obviously wrong decision? Not wrong because they lacked information but wrong because they completely missed something that felt blindingly obvious to you. Sound familiar?

Carelessness likely isn’t a root cause, but Culture probably is.

Not culture as in "we value innovation" posters on walls. Culture as in the invisible operating system running in your brain that determines how you process information, weight options, and arrive at conclusions.

But, scarily, you can't see your own for the simple reason that you're too close to it.

Martin Lindstrom's research on consumer behavior found something that applies equally to leadership decisions:

Hidden influence. A key phrase.

So, you think you're making objective decisions based on available information. And that has logic to it but actually you're making culturally filtered decisions based on how your particular cultural lens taught you to interpret that information.

A bit of a mouthful there, does it make sense? In other words, a different lens brings a different decision based on the same data.

Erin Meyer studied cultural underpinnings across dozens of multinational organisations and found a pattern that repeats. Western leaders working with Chinese colleagues often think they're deliberately avoiding key points e.g. going around issues without addressing them.

At the same time, Chinese leaders think Western colleagues are making hasty decisions by isolating single factors and ignoring massive interdependencies.

Both groups are frustrated. Both groups think the other is doing it wrong.

It can be a bit confusing until you realise the truth i.e. both groups are processing the exact same information through completely different cultural decision-making frameworks.

Westerners tend to break problems into components, solve each piece, make a call. All very linear, sequential & decisive.

East Asian business culture tends to map all the interconnections first, consider broader implications, build consensus around interdependent effects before moving.

Revealingly, neither approach is wrong. But if you don't know yours is just one approach among many, you'll keep thinking everyone else is incompetent or deliberately difficult.

Another example; take American versus German decision-making styles.

Americans who are generally shaped by frontier culture where you had to decide fast or starve, tend toward rapid individual decision-making. They make the call, move forward & then adjust if needed. This means that power gets concentrated in individuals who can pivot quickly.

Meyer found this emphasis remains robust:

Decisions can always be changed. That belief shapes everything about how Americans approach choices.

Now put that American executive in a room with German counterparts where power isn't vested in one CEO but in a small group of senior managers who decide through group agreement.

Germans have supervisory boards appointing managerial boards. The Vorstand has final decision-making power on company policies. The chairman has considerably less individual authority than in many other countries.

So the American is frustrated waiting for consensus that seems unnecessarily slow. The German is alarmed by what looks like reckless individual decision-making without proper consideration.

The exact same decision to be made with completely different cultural frameworks for how decisions should be made.

You see this in sport very often. You might have a British or Irish person, for example, managing a team with ownership from somewhere like the Middle East. In that scenario there is the very real chance that they’ll get frustrated with what they see as straightforward decisions requiring multiple rounds of consultation.

From the west Europe cultural lens they’d see this train of events; gather the facts, make the call, execute the decision.

But from the ME cultural lens it’s more about understanding how this decision affects relationships across the entire network, then moving into building consensus to ensure everyone's dignity is maintained in the process.

Our British/Irish person thinks they’re being indecisive. They thought he was being disrespectfully rushed.

But neither was wrong. Both were operating from deeply embedded cultural assumptions about what good decision-making looks like.

This is actually a real example and there, eventually, was a breakthrough. It broke through when the British person stopped trying to convince them his way was faster (it was) and started understanding why their way mattered to them. Yes, for sure, decisions still took longer than he preferred. But this way they actually stuck, which wasn’t happening with his previous "fast" decisions.

Ben Lyttleton's research on talent identification in elite sport found this showing up constantly:

You see a player from a particular country and your brain automatically fills in assumptions about their style, work ethic, technical ability.

And this is based on... what exactly?

Answer: Cultural stereotypes you're not even aware you're carrying.

The exact same happens in business. You hear someone's accent and unconsciously adjust your expectations. You see where they studied and make assumptions about how they think. You notice their communication style and decide whether they're "leadership material." True, right?

And it's all based on cultural software running invisibly in the background.

It’s tricky because you can't just "turn off" your cultural operating system. It's too deep. Too automatic.

What you can do is recognise you have one. And that everyone else does too.

When someone's decision-making process frustrates you, ask: what cultural assumption am I making about how decisions should be made?

Speed vs thoroughness? Individual authority vs group consensus? Linear problem-solving vs systems thinking? Direct communication vs relationship preservation?

Your way, no matter how long it has ‘worked’ just isn't universal. It's cultural. So their way isn't wrong. It's all just different cultural programming solving the same problem through a different framework.

Meyer found that effective cross-cultural collaboration takes more time than monocultural collaboration and needs closer management.

But not because people are difficult but because the invisible cultural frameworks aren't aligned.

If everyone in the room shares the same cultural decision-making software, you can move fast. Shortcuts work. Assumptions are shared. You're all running the same program. It looks and feels like a well-oiled machine.

However, mix cultures and suddenly those shortcuts create confusion. Those assumptions conflict. You're actually running different programs trying to collaborate on the same output.

This is important though; it doesn't mean it can't work. It just means you need to make the invisible visible first.

A good exercise to flesh this out is this: think about a recent decision you made. Now ask yourself:

What did I prioritise? Speed or thoroughness? Individual authority or group input? Isolated factors or system effects?

Why did I prioritise that way? Is it objectively best for this situation, or is it how my cultural background taught me good decisions get made?

If someone from a completely different culture looked at this decision, what would they question?

Most leaders can't answer those questions because they've never examined their own cultural decision-making software. It just runs in the background, unquestioned. But in today’s transient world they need to develop that skill and those insights. Fast.

You might be thinking this is all a bit abstract, a bit soft, and asking

Fair enough pushback. Except your decisions often won't work across cultural contexts because you'll be solving for your cultural definition of success, not theirs.

You’ll optimise for speed but they need thoroughness. You prioritise individual accountability when they need group buy-in. You’ll focus on the isolated problem not understanding that they care about ripple effects across the system.

What will happen? I’ll bet money that you’ll land on a decision that might have been brilliant within your cultural framework. But it will be completely ineffective in theirs not to mention introducing unneeded tensions that will sustain.

It’s important to be clear on something…I’m not saying you need to adopt everyone else's cultural approach. That's impossible and probably counterproductive.

But it is worth knowing yours exists. It’s worth recognising when it's in conflict with someone else's. It’s worth asking whether the way you're making this decision serves the actual situation or just feels right because it's how your culture taught you that decisions get made.

Again I'll bet right now you're making decisions you think are objective that are actually deeply cultural. And everyone around you is doing the same thing. All invisible software running different programs, all convinced their program is just "how things work."

Making the invisible visible doesn't solve everything. But at least you stop blaming people for running different software when the real issue is you didn't know the software existed.

Another Newsletter you might find useful....

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Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community. The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone. But you don't have to do it on your own. Onward and Upward, Paul Clarke

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