Multicultural Leadership Perspectives

Blog > Multicultural Leadership Perspectives

Leadership is challenging enough when working with a group of people from one culture; the effort needed to motivate, connect to, inspire, understand and hold people accountable is tremendous and at times daunting. This challenge is multiplied exponentially when the leader is responsible for leading a group of people from different cultures.  Leaders who want to effectively lead multi-cultural communities must operate within multiple value sets, expectations, and leadership orientations. In my personal experience, I have observed that the servant leadership approach is best suited to this complex scenario. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the servant leadership approach can help define a leader’s various cultural lenses, how this translates into working through various leadership orientations and how this may lead to greater leadership effectiveness in multi-cultural settings.

As an immigrant who has spent nearly my entire life in Canada, but is still deeply connected to my Egyptian heritage, specifically in church, the dichotomy of personal individualism within a culture that values collectivism presents some fascinating scenarios in value clashes.  I can recall how the challenges of my teenage years had been amplified by the fact that my quest for independence was framed from an individualistic perspective where I was very focused on my own interests (Jackson and Parry, 2011, p. 78).  This baffled my parents, who expected a teenager with a greater focus on prioritizing family relationships, especially extended family relationships (p. 78).  My personal experience is mimicked by dozens of my Sunday School kids whose parents view the individualistic values of their children as not just baffling, but downright objectionable.  Given that these same parents also came from a culture where there was a high power distance, they sought support from the main local authority (p. 79): the church priest (who also grew up in Egypt).  The priest’s leadership in this (ongoing) scenario has been an exercise in not just masterful diplomacy, but a wonderful model of servant leadership (Zigarelli, 2013).

Servant leadership, according to Zigarelli (2013) is when a leader leads by meeting the needs of their people, which results in people following out of love and gratitude.  This definition fits nicely with Jackson and Parry’s advice on navigating multi-cultural teams: employing a holistic view of people’s actions (2013).  In invoking the authority of the priest, parents sometimes expect the priest to decree that the child must abide by the value of their parents (Jackson and Parry, 2011, p. 79).  Instead, because he understands that the teen’s world lens is shaped by an egalitarian culture, where they expect to have a say in how they run their lives and want to actively participate in shaping their values instead of having them dictated to them (p. 79), he uses his authority to advise parents on how they can engage with their teens differently.  By doing so, he is meeting both the parent’s need to have an authoritarian leader give direction, and the teen’s needs to create a dialogue with their parents with the consequence being that he builds greater trust with both parties.

Observing the successful influence of servant leadership, I strove to make use of this same approach myself while sitting on the board of directors for my church.  This situation involved the same cultures clashing in a very different way.  At a board level, discussions are focused on leading an entire community and I was personally challenged with some board members’ desire to move forward on major projects while applying autocratic forms of leadership where they valued utilizing social ostracization, rules, and dismissal from volunteer positions as ways to influence the congregation to buy into big ideas (Taylor, 2013).  What made this scenario particularly challenging for me was not only did I disagree with this style in favor of a more transitional form of leadership where I pushed to appeal to the needs of the congregation and engage in dialogue with groups that would be heavily impacted by the projects (2013), but my approach to dialogue was considered offensive to some board members.  Most of the board members grew up speaking Arabic, a “high context language” which is subtle and (for me) painfully indirect, valuing saving face (Jackson and Parry, 2011, p. 80).  My clear, direct, and explicit communication style stemming from growing up in a “low context language” (p. 80) was at times seen as puzzling or even offensive.  Trying to move a project forward in this context was challenging and confusing; I felt that I did not have the tools to properly manage myself in this situation. The only method by which I eventually found success was in employing a servant leadership approach.  I took the time to acknowledge the differences between our approaches, appreciated that cultures can ack the feelings and thoughts of others and, with time, found success.  This approach is fundamental to servant leadership and aligns well with Jackson and Parry’s advice on approached leadership with a cultured lens.

It has been my experience that servant leadership is an effective way to lead a group of people who view the world very differently from one another.  By meeting the needs of the individual members of the team, I was able to demonstrate a genuine care for their values, which in turn equipped me to gently coach my peers on the board away from practicing an autocratic form of leadership into to a more transitional form.  Both forms value hierarchy, but seek power in very different ways.  I am grateful to participate in a multi-cultural community where I am able to learn how effective servant leadership can be from other leaders from within my community.

References

• Jackson, B., & Parry, K. (2011).  A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying leadership (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

• Taylor, M. (2013). Leadership Worldviews and Orientations. Unpublished Occasional Paper. Royal Roads University. PDF

• Zigarelli, M. (2013). Ten leadership theories in five minutes. [Video file].

Are you in a position to see culture clashes in your team?  What does it look like and how do you respond?

Blog > Multicultural Leadership Perspectives