Leading Across Cultures Is Not About Sensitivity.
It’s About Reading the Room When the Rules Are Invisible.
You’re leading across borders, languages, or cultural norms, and something isn’t translating. The meetings are polite but unproductive. Decisions get made in rooms you’re not in. Trust is slow to build and fast to break. What worked in New York or London isn’t working in Shanghai, Seoul, or Singapore.
I’ve spent over fifteen years working across Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and Thailand, and have seen how quickly things fall apart when cultural friction goes unnamed. I’ve lived the adjustment in both directions: Western leaders entering Asia, and Asian leaders stepping into U.S. and European contexts.
What We Work On
Engagements are built around what you’re actually navigating. These are the patterns that come up most.
Reading the real dynamics in cross-cultural teams, not just what’s being said.
Building influence when your natural leadership style doesn’t match the room.
Navigating decision-making processes that follow different rules than you’re used to.
Managing tension and misalignment across cultural norms without defaulting to one “right” way.
Preparing for high-stakes negotiations, conversations, or transitions in unfamiliar cultural contexts.
How It Works
Engagements are tailored to the situation. Some clients need individual coaching as they step into a cross-border role. Others need help with a specific team, negotiation, or market entry.
We start with a diagnostic conversation and design the engagement around what you’re actually facing. On-site facilitation is available for team engagements.
Where I’ve Done This Work
Mixed-Group Facilitation
Multiple workshops facilitating mixed groups of French and Chinese senior leaders through belief, behavior, and value differences, including directness norms, hierarchy, and how disagreement surfaces and gets resolved across cultures.
Cross-cultural facilitation for mixed European and Chinese teams, addressing the organizational and interpersonal friction that arises when Western leadership models meet Chinese working norms.
Team-level facilitation bridging American designers and engineers with Japanese manufacturers, navigating consensus-building, directness norms, and the gap between stated agreement and actual alignment.
Individual and Organizational Work
Coaching Chinese leaders on navigating relationships and working dynamics with American counterparts.
Individual coaching for leaders in a Chinese manufacturing plant, navigating authority structures, communication norms, and trust-building in a U.S.-Chinese multinational context.
Served as Master Coach for Deloitte China, working with senior leaders navigating cross-cultural organizational dynamics.
Strategy facilitation for Deloitte China’s Financial Advisory Services practice.
Multi-year cultural transformation engagement across manufacturing operations.
Coaching and consulting with Samsung’s corporate strategy team on leadership alignment.
Partnership on leadership development programs for senior financial sector leaders.
Strategy sessions for senior leadership teams operating in the Chinese market.
When the Drawings Kept Coming Back Redesigned
Cross-cultural breakdowns rarely begin as cultural disagreements. They usually begin as operational problems that nobody is interpreting the same way.
A U.S.-based design and engineering team at a global electronics manufacturer was working in persistent misalignment with their Japanese manufacturing counterparts. On the surface, the problem looked operational. The American team would send drawings; the Japanese team would quietly redesign them rather than raise concerns. Video calls were tense and unproductive.
The Americans attributed the failures to technical issues — a broken feed, a language barrier. They were misreading the signal entirely. From the Japanese team’s perspective, the Americans operated like a high school club — informal, individualistic, and unmoored from institutional hierarchy or shared values. There was no clear structure to engage with, no obvious decision authority to surface concerns to. So they worked around it.
We began with separate workshops, each team mapping the cultural operating assumptions they were taking for granted. What norms felt obvious to them? What did they assume the other side understood that had never actually been stated?
The gap turned out to be structural as much as cultural. Ownership and decision rights had never been clearly named. The Japanese team had no formal place to surface concerns, so they absorbed them and redesigned around them.
The first concrete step was clarifying authority: design and engineering decisions sat with the American team, and the Japanese team had a defined channel for raising objections before changes were made. The joint session focused on three areas: communication across high- and low-context styles, explicit decision rights, and how misalignment would be surfaced early rather than late.
The redesigns stopped. Not because the Japanese team stopped having concerns, but because they finally had a place to put them.
The American team learned to read silence differently — not as agreement, but as a signal worth investigating.
Both teams left with something they had never previously articulated: a shared operating structure for how the relationship actually worked.
In their words
Thank you, Michael, for your extraordinary coaching and consulting work. You have provided us with invaluable, ongoing support in helping us realign people and processes to harness cultural differences. Through your services, we have gained new and enlightening perspectives on how to better achieve our strategic objectives.
Let’s find out if this is the right fit.
A 30-minute conversation. I’ll ask what you’re navigating. You’ll get a clear sense of whether this is the right kind of help. No proposal until we’ve talked.