Two people can sit in the same meeting and experience something completely different.
One sees a lively debate and open exchange of ideas. Another sees unnecessary conflict. One employee appreciates a manager who gives them freedom to decide how to approach their work. Another wonders why their manager is providing so little direction. One person hears “yes” and assumes agreement, the other simply meant “I understand what you are saying.”
These differences can seem small. But in international teams and global businesses, they can have very real consequences.
Culture influences how we communicate, collaborate, make decisions, approach hierarchy, give feedback and build relationships. Many of these expectations feel so normal to us that we barely notice them - until we work with someone whose expectations are different.
If you want to explore this in more detail, our guide to what culture is and how it works explains how culture shapes the assumptions and preferences we bring into the workplace.
For international organisations, however, recognising that cultural differences exist is only the beginning. The more important question is what we do with them.
That is where intercultural management comes in.
Intercultural management is the practice of understanding cultural differences and using that understanding to work more effectively across cultures, as well as help others do the same.
This does not mean assuming that everyone from the same country thinks or behaves in exactly the same way. Culture is a group phenomenon, and individuals are always individuals. Cultural knowledge gives us additional context for understanding why expectations and behaviours may differ because of cultural differences, but it does not tell us - or even attempt to tell us - everything about the person in front of us.
The importance of intercultural management becomes much clearer when we look at what happens when different cultural expectations meet in everyday business.
Ask ten people from different backgrounds what “good collaboration” looks like and you may get surprisingly different answers.
Should important decisions be made by the manager or discussed with the entire team? Is openly challenging an idea a sign of engagement or disrespect? Should meetings be used to debate ideas, build consensus or confirm decisions that have already been discussed elsewhere?
The challenge is not simply that people work differently. It is that we tend to evaluate other ways of working according to our own expectations.
Someone who waits for clear instructions might be seen as lacking initiative. Someone who acts independently might be considered unwilling to collaborate. A colleague who communicates very directly might be praised for their honesty by one person and considered unnecessarily confrontational by another.
Intercultural management gives teams a way to identify these differences and decide consciously how they want to work together. How will decisions be made? How should disagreement be handled? Who needs to be consulted? What does everyone need from their manager and colleagues?
The objective is not to make everyone work in exactly the same way. It is to create enough shared understanding for different ways of working to coexist effectively.
If you manage an international team, we have also put together 10 practical things managers can start doing to improve intercultural collaboration.
Different ways of working become particularly important when we start assigning meaning to them.
Imagine that a colleague gives you extremely direct feedback. They may believe that being straightforward demonstrates honesty and respect. You may experience exactly the same interaction as unnecessarily aggressive.
Or consider relationship-building. In some contexts, getting straight down to business demonstrates professionalism and respect for everyone's time. Elsewhere, investing time in the relationship first is an important part of establishing trust.
Neither side intends to damage the relationship. The problem is the meaning each person assigns to the other's behaviour.
Intercultural competence gives us another possibility: curiosity.
Instead of immediately concluding that someone is rude, evasive, indecisive or disengaged, we can ask whether there may be another explanation for what we are seeing.
That doesn't mean every misunderstanding can be attributed to culture. Nor does understanding cultural differences mean accepting inappropriate behaviour. It simply gives us an important piece of context before we judge someone else's intentions.
Over time, that ability to interpret behaviour more accurately can make it easier to build relationships across cultural differences.
Our article on why intercultural communication fails looks at several situations like these in more detail.
Cultural misunderstandings rarely appear on a balance sheet under the heading “culture.”
Instead, they show up in the work.
A meeting ends without the decision some participants thought it was supposed to produce. A deadline is interpreted differently by different people. An employee waits for guidance while their manager waits for them to take initiative. Important concerns remain unspoken because speaking up carries different expectations in different cultural contexts.
The result can be delays, rework, unclear responsibilities, slower decisions and avoidable conflict.
Individually, these incidents can look insignificant. Repeated across teams, projects and countries, they can become a performance issue.
This is why intercultural management should not be treated simply as a “soft” people topic. It can influence how efficiently people exchange information, coordinate their work and execute decisions.
This becomes particularly important in global organisations, where teams may be working across several countries, languages and time zones while still being expected to operate as one business.
Good intercultural management cannot eliminate every misunderstanding. What it can do is make teams better at identifying the source of a problem, clarifying what is expected and getting the work moving again.
Cultural diversity can bring different experiences, perspectives and ways of solving problems into the same organisation.
But having diversity and benefiting from diversity are not the same thing.
Mars International Travel Retail provides a useful example. The team was already remarkably international: around 60 people representing 18 nationalities, speaking 25 languages and working across 10 locations. Yet the organisation came to an important realisation. Although they celebrated their diversity, they were not necessarily leveraging the diversity of thought it could provide.
That distinction is crucial.
Simply putting people with different perspectives into the same room does not guarantee that those perspectives will influence the outcome.
If everyone adapts to the dominant way of communicating, challenging ideas or making decisions, some of the potential value of that diversity can disappear. The people may be diverse while the ideas that actually make it into the conversation are considerably less so.
Mars therefore began developing intercultural competence more deliberately, eventually creating a Cultural Ambassador programme and integrating cultural understanding into areas such as meetings, feedback and customer interactions.
Here you can read the full Mars success story.
This is where intercultural management and innovation connect. Different cultural perspectives can broaden the range of ideas available to an organisation. Intercultural competence helps create the conditions in which those ideas can be expressed, understood, challenged and developed.
In other words, it can help turn diversity of people into diversity of thought, and diversity of thought into something the business can actually use.
Mars is not the only organisation to have approached intercultural competence this way. You can find further examples and lessons from organisations working across cultures here.
The importance of intercultural management extends far beyond the internal dynamics of multicultural teams.
The same cultural differences can influence relationships with customers and suppliers, international negotiations, cross-border projects, regional offices, global change initiatives and expansion into new markets.
For instance, let’s think about a global initiative developed at the headquarters.
The strategic objective may be identical everywhere, but employees in different locations may have different expectations about leadership, involvement, communication and change. A highly participative approach that creates enthusiasm in one location may create uncertainty somewhere else. A fast rollout that signals momentum to one group may feel poorly considered to another.
Successful international management therefore requires more than translating the same message into another language. Organisations need to understand how people in different cultural contexts may interpret what they are doing and adjust the way they communicate and execute accordingly.
The same principle applies outside the organisation. Customers, business partners and suppliers also bring cultural expectations into the relationship.
Intercultural competence is therefore not relevant only to HR or people management. It is a capability that can support the organisation wherever business crosses cultural boundaries.
Once people begin learning about culture, there is often an immediate benefit: behaviour that previously seemed inexplicable starts to make more sense.
That awareness is important, but knowing that cultural differences exist does not automatically mean we know what to do about them.
A workshop might help someone understand why a colleague approaches hierarchy, feedback or decision-making differently. Developing intercultural competence means taking the next step: learning how to adapt communication, clarify expectations and establish working practices that allow people with different preferences to work together effectively.
In other words, cultural awareness helps us recognise differences. Intercultural competence helps us navigate them.
This is also why intercultural management should not be reduced to learning lists of etiquette or memorising what people from different countries supposedly do. The aim is to develop the ability to recognise when culture may be influencing a situation, understand what might be happening and respond appropriately.
There is no single formula because every team and organisation operates in a different context.
There are, however, a few useful principles.
Make expectations explicit rather than assuming everyone shares the same understanding of communication, responsibilities, deadlines, decision-making or collaboration.
Stay curious before judging. When behaviour seems strange or ineffective, ask what might be behind it before deciding what it means.
And adapt without stereotyping. Cultural knowledge is a tool for asking better questions, not a shortcut for deciding who someone is.
Perhaps most importantly, intercultural competence needs to become part of how people actually work. Awareness is useful, but lasting benefits come when cultural understanding influences meetings, communication, leadership, onboarding, feedback, decision-making and other everyday practices.
Cultural differences are a reality of international business. They can bring new perspectives, experiences and approaches to solving problems. They can also complicate communication, relationships and execution.
Intercultural management helps organisations influence which side of that equation becomes more prominent.
When people understand cultural differences and know how to navigate them, collaboration becomes easier, trust is less vulnerable to misinterpretation, teams spend less time resolving avoidable misunderstandings, and organisations are better positioned to use the different perspectives that a culturally diverse workforce can provide.
The same capability becomes increasingly valuable as business crosses borders, whether the organisation is managing an international team, working with a customer in another market or implementing a global strategy across multiple countries.
Ultimately, the aim is not to eliminate cultural differences. It is to make culture work for the organisation rather than against it.
Cultural diversity creates possibilities. Intercultural management helps turn those possibilities into results.
If you want to better understand the cultural dynamics affecting your teams or international business, contact us. We can help you identify where culture is influencing the way people work and develop the intercultural competence needed to work with those differences more effectively.