Everyone Said Yes to the Plan. So Why Hasn't It Started?

You’ve led teams in Canada for a decade: lay out the options, ask for input, decide together, move fast. You bring that same approach to your new team spread across three countries. Everyone nods at the plan. Two weeks later, nothing has moved.

TL;DR: Most leaders don’t fail at leading across cultures because they try too hard to fit in. They fail because they don’t try at all: they lead the way they always have and assume it travels. Culture shapes what people expect a leader to do, from how decisions get made to how much authority you’re expected to hold, and a leadership style that matches those expectations tends to outperform one that doesn’t (den Hartog & de Hoogh, 2024; Euwema et al., 2007). Here’s where the mismatch usually shows up, and what to do about it.

How decisions actually get made

In plenty of Western organizations, a meeting is where a decision happens: lay out the options, get a read, move. In other cultures, the meeting mostly confirms a decision shaped elsewhere first. In Japanese firms, this shows up as nemawashi, quietly building agreement through one-on-one conversations before anything is proposed formally. A field study of senior executives at Japanese trading companies found that this informal groundwork, not the meeting itself, was where real influence over decisions actually happened (Gilbert, 2003). Culture also shapes which formal structure a team defaults to in the first place: research linking individualism and power distance to workplace decision-making found four distinct participation patterns used across countries (Sagie & Aycan, 2003). Treat the meeting as the decision point everywhere, and you may be skipping the step that actually earns commitment.

A leadership style doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because nobody checked if it was the right one for this room.

How directly people expect to hear things

A study surveying 774 people across Dutch, Greek, and Japanese cultural groups found real, measurable differences in communication style: Japanese participants reported communicating the most indirectly, while Dutch participants leaned more on direct, low-context language (Broeder, 2021). Leading with blunt, individual feedback in a culture that reads directness as confrontation doesn’t just miss the mark. It can shut people down before they’ve told you what they actually think.

How much authority you’re expected to hold

Leadership style doesn’t transfer evenly either. A study of more than 116,000 managers and employees across 33 countries found directive leadership backfired far more in individualistic cultures than collectivistic ones, while a warmer, supportive style paid off less in collectivistic cultures than individualistic ones (Euwema et al., 2007). The same directive style that reads as decisive in one culture can read as controlling in another. The same hands-off style that lands well in one can read as a leader who isn’t leading in another.

Where to start

Find out where the real decision happens before you call the meeting. Ask a trusted person on the team how decisions like this one usually get made. In some organizations, that’s the meeting. In others, it’s a series of conversations before it (Gilbert, 2003; Sagie & Aycan, 2003).

Pick the one thing that’s likely mismatched. Not your whole style, just the piece most at odds with what this team expects: how direct your feedback is, how much you push for consensus, how much authority you signal. Leadership research spanning dozens of countries backs this up: fit with what a culture expects moves the needle more than which style you default to (Euwema et al., 2007).

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t this just cultural stereotyping?

No. These are patterns, not rules for every person in a country. Treat them as a hypothesis to test with your team, not a script.

What if I get it wrong at first?

Expect to. Reading unfamiliar norms is a skill built through real attempts, not something you get right from reading about it first. That’s what leadership development across cultures actually looks like in practice.

Does this only matter for leaders working internationally?

No. The same mismatch shows up moving between companies or departments with different norms for decision-making and authority, not just across borders.

Sources

1. Broeder, P. (2021). “Informed communication in high context and low context cultures.” Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication, 3(1), 13-24.

2. den Hartog, D. N., & de Hoogh, A. H. B. (2024). “Cross-cultural leadership: What we know, what we need to know, and where we need to go.” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 11, 535-566.

3. Euwema, M. C., Wendt, H., & Van Emmerik, H. (2007). “Leadership styles and group organizational citizenship behavior across cultures.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28(8), 1035-1057.

4. Gilbert, D. (2003). “Strategic decision-making in Japanese trading companies: Case studies of information search activities.” Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management, 9(1), 27-38.

5. Sagie, A., & Aycan, Z. (2003). “A cross-cultural analysis of participative decision-making in organizations.” Human Relations, 56(4), 453-473.