When What Made You Successful Stops Working

What happens when familiar leadership approaches meet an unfamiliar context?

Over the past twenty-five years, I have had the privilege of working with leaders and leadership teams in more than seventy countries.

I cannot remember a time when the world around those leaders felt quite as complicated as it does today.

Leaders are dealing with geopolitical tension, AI, skills shortages, and considerable pressure to reinvent their organizations. The World Economic Forum reports that 63% of employers see skills gaps as the biggest barrier to transformation.

I highly appreciate Navid Nazemian's work and consider it a privilege to be part of his network of certified Executive Transition Coaches. In Mastering Executive Transitions, he cites research suggesting that 30 to 50 percent of executive transitions fail during the first eighteen to twenty-four months.

A new mandate can bring unfamiliar stakeholders, politics, an inherited team, and a different organizational culture all at once.

When we talk about complexity at this level, it can sound abstract. Geopolitical uncertainty. Organizational transformation. Matrix structures. Digital disruption.

But leaders don't experience complexity on an organizational chart.

They experience it in conversations.

They experience it when an important stakeholder doesn't respond as expected. When headquarters and a regional team disagree about what needs to happen. Or when an approach that worked well in one part of the world produces quite a different response elsewhere.

Over the years, we have been invited into many organizations because something isn't working between people.

Sometimes the explanation is personality, leadership style, competence, or politics.

And sometimes there is another layer that has not been explored very well.

Culture.

I don't mean culture in the sense of learning what Germans are like, how to negotiate with the Chinese or how to lead a team in Brazil. That approach has always been too limited for me.

One of the foundational convictions behind our work at KnowledgeWorkx is that every person is a uniquely wired cultural human being.

National culture is part of that wiring, but only part. Family, education, profession, faith, organizational history, and experience all play a role. Two people carrying the same passport can have very different cultural preferences.

Usually none of them arrive in a meeting thinking, "I am now going to behave according to my cultural preferences." They simply do and say what makes sense to them.

And that is true for leaders as well.

The leader is not standing outside all this human complexity trying to manage it. They are one of the uniquely wired cultural human beings in the room, with their own ideas about good leadership, trust, accountability, relationships, and communication.

The weird thing is that much of this doesn't feel cultural. It just feels normal.

Until somebody does it differently.

That's when our "normal" gets challenged and we start interpreting their behavior through our own cultural lenses.

"This person isn't taking enough ownership." "That stakeholder is being political." "Perhaps this team member isn't ready for a more senior role."

Sometimes those interpretations are accurate. But sometimes we draw conclusions from assumptions we have never examined.

And leaders act on those interpretations.

We decide who we trust, who has potential, and when somebody needs more freedom or more direction. Sometimes those judgments influence the future of a person or team.

The more senior the leader, the further the consequences of those interpretations can travel.

I have seen very capable leaders become more effective when they recognize this. They become more curious before deciding what something means. They learn where to slow down, what questions to ask and when to dig for the "cultural why" behind words or actions.

I worked with an executive who told me:

"My regional team needs to take more ownership."

There is a lot an experienced executive coach can explore in that sentence. But I wanted to become curious about "ownership."

"What do you mean by ownership?" "What does your team believe about their authority?" What happens when somebody takes initiative and gets it wrong?

There may be a capability or performance issue. But there may also be cultural assumptions underneath the situation that nobody has recognized, let alone articulated.

One of the things I value about Inter-Cultural Intelligence is that it gives us language to explain intellectually what experienced leaders may already do intuitively.

That intuition is often built on success. A leader has responded to similar situations hundreds of times. They know when to step in, when to give people space and how to communicate what they expect. Their approach works, and over time it becomes natural.

But then the context changes. A new role, a different company, another country, or simply a team with different expectations. The leader uses the same approach and suddenly it doesn't work.

If I cannot deconstruct why my approach worked before, it becomes difficult to understand why it isn't working now. It is easy then to locate the problem somewhere else.

They are not proactive enough. They don't take ownership. They should understand that I am trying to empower them.

And this can result in learning coming to a halt.

Inter-Cultural Intelligence gives us language, frameworks, and tools to slow that process down and explore the "cultural why behind the why." What made my approach effective before? What assumptions sit underneath it? What has changed here?

If we can articulate what previously happened intuitively, we have something we can examine. And if we can examine it, we have a better chance of recognizing when our familiar approach needs to change.

There is another uniquely wired cultural human being in this conversation.

The coach.

In the sister article to this one, Coaching Human Complexity, I explored how both coachee and coach bring their cultural wiring into the coaching conversation.

A coach can hear, "My people need to take more ownership," and have their own picture of good ownership. Their assumptions about empowerment, communication and accountability may come from years of experience and coach training. They are also culturally influenced.

If coach and executive share similar assumptions, they can have a highly intelligent coaching conversation and still leave part of the complexity unexplored.

Imagine what can happen if the coach has deliberately developed their ability to see that complexity.

Not an ability to tell the executive how a particular nationality behaves. I would not want that from an intercultural coach.

I would want somebody who can help the executive become more perceptive.

We start with the leader: What is happening in me? What am I bringing into this situation? Then we become curious about the person opposite us, the relationship between us, and the wider context shaping both.

An executive coach is often one of the few people with whom a leader can examine how they are making sense of what is happening.

Am I drawing conclusions too quickly? What am I missing? What am I contributing?

A coach who has developed depth in Inter-Cultural Intelligence can help the executive explore the "cultural why behind the why," giving the leader more language and a wider variety of strategies to engage constructively.

It does not replace the other expertise a coach brings. A leader going through a major transition may benefit enormously from a coach who specializes in executive transitions. That same transition may also involve an inherited multicultural team, unfamiliar stakeholder expectations, or a different organizational culture.

The executive doesn't experience these things in separate boxes. They are part of the same ecosystem, and sometimes it can feel like a rather chaotic "I can't quite put my finger on it" mess.

In that situation, I would want to know whether the coach has the depth to work with the complexity that is actually in the room.

If much of your leadership reality involves leading, influencing and making consequential decisions about uniquely wired cultural human beings, then human and intercultural complexity is already part of your work.

Perhaps it is worth asking whether the person coaching you has learned how to work with it.

Are you navigating human and intercultural complexity in your leadership role?

If this article has raised questions about the coaching support that would be useful to you, let's have a conversation.

We can explore the complexity you are navigating and connect you with an experienced executive coach with specialist capability in Inter-Cultural Agility and coaching human complexity.

Get in touch with us to explore what kind of coaching support might fit your situation.