(and Why That's Good)
Dec 8, 2025
| by
Henrik J Klijn
We talk about leadership like it’s supposed to be clear. Vision. Direction. Decisive forward motion.
But here’s what actually happens when leaders work across cultures—national, generational, organizational: that clarity vanishes.
What shows up instead is something messier and far less comfortable: confusion.
After documenting cross-cultural business failures for years, I’ve learned something counterintuitive. That discomfort isn’t the problem. It’s the entire point.
When Confusion Carries Information
eBay entered Japan in 2000 with every advantage. Brand recognition. Capital. Technology infrastructure. They understood their product worked globally—it had already proven itself in multiple markets.
Two years later, they exited with less than 1% market share.
The diagnosis? “Cultural misalignment.” But that explanation obscures what actually happened.
eBay’s platform emphasized individual sellers and bargain hunting through auctions. Japanese consumers preferred buying new items from established retailers. They valued brand trust over price competition.
Those preferences weren’t secret. Market research documented them. But eBay’s leadership operated from a set of assumptions about e-commerce that worked in the U.S.: seller diversity equals marketplace strength, auctions create excitement, and individual entrepreneurship drives growth.
When those assumptions didn’t translate, the company had two choices: treat confusion as failure and double down, or treat it as signal and adapt. They chose the former.
That pattern appears consistently in cross-border failures. The confusion isn’t about lacking information. It’s about not recognizing when your operating logic has stopped applying.
Why Conventional Cultural Training Misses the Target
The global corporate training industry generates over $20 billion annually. Cultural competency programs represent a significant portion of that spend.
Most follow a similar model: teach country-specific behaviors, provide frameworks for cultural dimensions, test for comprehension. The assumption is that culture works like a language. Study it, practice it, achieve fluency.
But research on training effectiveness tells a different story.
A meta-analysis published in Academy of Management Learning & Education found that knowledge-based cultural training—learning about cultural differences—had significantly weaker effects on cross-cultural performance than metacognitive training—learning to monitor and adjust one’s own thinking.
“Most cultural training operates like a phrasebook,” says Hanlie van Wyk, co-founder of Leading Across Culture. “It gives you scripts for specific situations. But leadership isn’t scripted. The moment that matters is when your script runs out and you have to read the room. That’s the skill we develop.”
The limitation isn’t the training content. It’s the underlying model. Culture doesn’t sit still long enough for memorization to work. What’s true in a Seoul boardroom doesn’t hold in a Berlin startup. What works with Millennial teams fails with Gen Z.
Mastery is the wrong goal. Attention is what scales.
What Research Shows Actually Works
Studies on cross-cultural effectiveness consistently point to the same factor: metacognitive awareness. Not what you know about other cultures, but your ability to notice when your own assumptions stop making sense to the room.
That awareness requires three specific practices:
Document your assumptions before decisions.
When setting a deadline, launching a product, or structuring a team, write down what you’re assuming about how people will respond.
This practice makes invisible logic visible. When a North American executive assumes “yes” means commitment and an Asian team hears it as polite acknowledgment, the gap isn’t about language. It’s about unspoken rules regarding hierarchy and face-saving.
Research on cross-cultural negotiation supports this approach: explicitly naming assumptions reduces misalignment more effectively than learning cultural norms.Recognize when certainty arrives too fast.
Confidence drives leadership. But in cross-cultural contexts, premature certainty often signals you’ve stopped learning.
“The executives who struggle globally aren’t the ones who lack cultural knowledge,” says Flor Bretón-García, LAC co-founder. “They’re the ones who don’t notice when their knowledge stops applying.”
Effective leaders build a practice of pausing when decisions feel obvious. They ask: “What am I not seeing?”Use confusion as diagnostic information.
When a conversation feels misaligned, when a decision stalls for reasons no one can articulate, that friction carries data.
Instead of rushing to fix the misunderstanding, examine it. Ask: “What different logic might be operating here?”
This doesn’t slow decision-making. It prevents the multi-month delays that come from executing on false agreement.
The Stakes Keep Rising
Global commerce isn’t slowing. Cross-border M&A activity exceeded $1 trillion in 2024. Remote work has made distributed teams standard. Gen Z entering the workforce brings expectations shaped by different contexts than the Gen X leaders managing them.
The penalty for cultural misalignment is rising. Not just in spectacular failures like eBay’s Japan exit or Target’s $2 billion Canada withdrawal, but in everyday friction: missed deadlines, stalled negotiations, talent that leaves because they don’t feel understood.
The opportunity cost is harder to measure but equally real. Markets you can’t enter because you can’t decode them. Innovations that don’t surface because certain voices don’t feel heard. Partnerships that dissolve in mutual confusion.
What LAC’s approach offers differently: instead of treating culture as a variable to control, it teaches leaders to recognize culture as a system they’re already inside—one that shapes their perception even as they try to shape outcomes.
That recognition doesn’t guarantee success. But it prevents the specific type of failure that comes from not knowing what you don’t know.
What LAC Perspectives Explores
Leading Across Culture (LAC) Perspectives is a weekly series documenting what happens at the intersection of leadership and cultural complexity.
Each week, we examine documented patterns from real business contexts, explore research on effective cross-cultural leadership, and share frameworks that help leaders stay curious when their instincts stop working.
Not mastery. Not playbooks. Just rigorous attention to the gap between what leaders think they know and what actually lands.
Because the best leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know which questions matter—and when to ask them.
Henrik J Klijn
South African-born Henrik J.Klijn has been writing since ehildhood, when his mother handed him a stack of notebooks to fill with his stories. Years later, she admitted it had more to do with keeping him quiet "because everyone needs a break, now and then."
In his role shaping Communication & Strategic Content for Leading Across Culture, Henrik develops content systems for global clients. Previously, as Head Copywriter at Reflex Media, he built content strategies for platforms reaching 56 million users globally. As a writer, he has contributed to various outlets, including Sourced Fact Media, Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, The Big Issue, and considerable Afrikaans—his home language—publications.
Currently, Henrik is pursuing a Master's in Journalism and Sociocultural Anthropology at Harvard. He is authoring a predoctoral dissertation on the |xam people of South Africa and the role of storytelling—told in resignation at their imminent extinction at the end of the 19th Century—as oral history and collective memory. In his spare time, he attends music events, ranging from classical to jazz and electronica. Henrik is an avid cook and a voracious reader who tries never to complain about Chicago winters, a city he has called home since 2017.
