When people across borders read the same situation differently
A decision that looked settled in one meeting is reopened in the next. Concerns from the local team arrive after the rollout. Headquarters reads silence as agreement, and the local team reads a direct question as distrust. The cost shows up as rework and late escalation, and trust builds slowly. I help leaders find out what is driving the friction and agree how to work together.
I lived and worked in China from 2005 to 2013, and I have worked with leaders across North America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. That work has included European and American managers running operations in China, and Chinese leaders working inside U.S. companies. It has also included teams split between the United States and Japan, Korea or the U.K.
Start with what happened
National culture is often part of the explanation. So are decision rights that were never made explicit, incentives that pull in different directions, and the habits of different professions and companies. I test each explanation against what happened before recommending anything, and I examine the assumptions on both sides.
What we work on
- Who decides what, and where local discretion is needed.
- How concerns and disagreement reach the people who need to hear them, and when.
- Different expectations about authority, candor and responsibility.
- Preparing leaders for a cross-border role, negotiation, acquisition or partnership.
- Agreeing how headquarters and local teams coordinate, and checking whether the agreements hold.
Ways to engage
Diagnostic
Interviews on both sides of a specific breakdown or recurring problem. You receive a written account that separates what happened from how each side interpreted it, with recommendations.
Facilitated sessions
Separate, then joint, sessions in which each group maps the assumptions it has taken for granted, followed by explicit agreements on decision rights, escalation and communication.
Coaching for cross-border roles
Individual coaching for leaders whose role spans countries, or whose team's expectations differ from their own.
Briefings and workshops
For leadership groups preparing for work across China and the West or other cultural boundaries.
How we judge progress
Before we begin, we agree what should be observably different and choose two or three indicators suited to the team, for example concerns raised before rollout, fewer decisions reversed by headquarters, clearer escalation routes, or both sides reporting better coordination. We review them alongside the business results that matter to you, without claiming coaching alone caused them.
Selected experience
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.
Team work with Chinese teams in Shanghai, and coaching for Microsoft China's COO on leading the business in China.
Individual coaching for leaders in a Chinese manufacturing plant, navigating authority structures, communication norms, and trust-building in a U.S.-Chinese multinational context.
Coached senior leaders, taught and localized negotiation programs between Chinese and Western practices, and co-led a strategy offsite for 60 members of the Financial Advisory Services practice.
Aligned the plant's German and Chinese functional heads on what excellence meant in practice. Within a year the plant was recognized nationally for lean manufacturing.
Coaching and consulting with Samsung's corporate strategy team on leadership alignment.
Delivered a Leader-as-Coach program for managers.
Strategy sessions with the China leadership team, including supply-chain sustainability.
Coaching Chinese engineering and data science leaders working in a U.S. company, on authority, self-expression and managing up.
Aligned German management and Chinese staff on explicit operating agreements.
Team work after the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. It began with differences between the two countries and moved to differences between the two organizations.
More cases
A German-managed five-star hotel in Beijing described a standards problem. Interviews showed German managers and Chinese staff following two unwritten contracts neither side could see. A five-stage process ended in operating agreements both sides wrote.
Read the case →A Chinese-rooted investment firm in the United States used 360 and Harrison data to make its standards explicit before a new partner arrived.
Read the case →A U.S. design team and its Japanese manufacturing counterparts had been in quiet conflict for months. Stakeholder interviews on both sides, then separate workshops and a joint session on decision rights, stopped the redesigns.
Read the case →In clients' words
You have provided us with invaluable, ongoing support in helping us realign people and processes to harness cultural differences.
His encouragement helped me make the decision to pursue adventurous executive opportunities in China after working in the US for 15 years.
Having worked in both Chinese and U.S. organizational cultures, I was still navigating the differences in authority, communication, and self-expression.
China–West Work
My specialization, and the subject of a book in development.
Start with a conversation
Tell me what happened, who is involved and which countries or organizations are on each side.