Developing Cross-Cultural Competence for Leaders: A Guide

149 Pages·2022·4.088 MB·English

by  Joseph J. Thomas, Clementine K. Fujimura

Developing Cross-Cultural
Competence for Leaders
This book offers an accessible reference and roadmap for the practical
application of cross-cultural competence (3C) for leaders dedicated to
leading with diversity, inclusion and personal development in mind.
Developing Cross-Cultural Competence for Leaders takes readers from
ideational to real, asking them to step out of their comfort zone and
learn to navigate cultural differences. The authors invite readers to
join them on a journey of discovery of themselves, their personal
and professional peers and ultimately the cultural landscape they
inhabit both knowingly and oftentimes unknowingly all in the hopes
of opening doors to empathetic and effective communication. The
skillset required for 3C is developed throughout the book beginning
with a discussion of relevant concepts, leading the readers through
narratives of extreme environments and ending with a roadmap for
use in leadership positions. Each chapter discusses a foundational
idea contextualized with sample narratives and ending with thought
questions. The authors summon readers to embrace dissimilarities,
shift perspectives, dare to engage and navigate in new and even adverse
social and cultural contexts.
Developing Cross-Cultural Competence for Leaders is an essential reading
for students of leadership development, as well as military and non-
military professionals.
Joseph J. Thomas is Director of The Stockdale Center for Ethical
Leadership at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
Clementine K. Fujimura is a Cultural Anthropologist and Professor at
the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

JOSEPH J. THOMAS AND
CLEMENTINE K. FUJIMURA
Developing
Cross-Cultural
Competence for
Leaders
A Guide
Cover image: © Getty images
First published 2022
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Joseph J. Thomas and Clementine K. Fujimura
The right of Joseph J. Thomas and Clementine K. Fujimura to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-10044-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-10043-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21335-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003213352
Typeset in Joanna MT
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction: Developing Cross-Cultural
Competence for Leaders 1
One
Defining Culture for Leadership 12
Cross-Cultural Understanding as a Function
Two
of Leadership 25
Experiential Learning and Immersive Environments
Three
to Develop Leaders 45
Four
The Ethnographic Method for Leadership 60
Developing 3C in the Workplace and the Role
Five
of Communication 70
Six
Biases and Obstacles to Critical Thinking 79
Optimizing 3C with Key Ingredients: Empathy,
Seven
Mindfulness and Reflexivity 99
Conclusion: The Personal and Organizational Benefits
Eight
of Being Cross-Culturally Competent 118
Afterword 129
Index 133

Foreword
Leadership matters. Leadership is especially challenging when it
involves people from diverse cultural backgrounds. In decades of
researching and leading global health initiatives and peacekeeping and
stabilization operations, I have seen, analyzed and written about how
carefully planned operations can go seriously awry because of a lack of
cultural understanding. In some of the instances upon which I reported
it was a lack of understanding of the different organizational cultures
involved in a project. In others, it was a lack of understanding of the
local cultures where the initiatives were taking place. And, in yet others,
it was because of a combination of misapprehensions due to both
misunderstanding the actions of local actors and misunderstanding
the actions of colleagues from other agencies.
For the most part those who have taken on leadership challenges
in multicultural environments have had two distinct places to which
they could turn for advice. There are, frst, a myriad of books and art-
icles about the dynamics of leadership. Second, there is an abundant
d
literature advising how better to work across cultures. Only rarely are r
o
w
the two streams of work brought together. In Developing Cross-Cultural
e
r
Competence for Leaders, Drs. Thomas and Fujimura begin to fll this gap, Fo
and they do so with a notable combination of theoretical sophisti- vii
cation, broad experience in leading and teaching about leadership
in cross-cultural settings, and by giving practical advice for how to
develop the skills and orientations necessary for effective culturally
aware leadership.
Thomas and Fujimura are exceptionally well-suited as guides to
the exploration of cross-culturally competent leadership. Together
they bring decades of experience leading complex organizations
and in teaching about leadership through a cross-cultural lens.
That their individual experiences come from distinct organizational
perspectives—military leadership and academic administration and
anthropological research—brings added depth to the conversation
that their book develops.
Too often instruction on working cross-culturally stops at the level
of what I have characterized as “Travelers Advice,” focusing on lists
of “facts” about how other cultures deal with the world and offering
a basic list of things a person engaging members of other groups
should or should not do. Developing Cross-Cultural Competence for Leaders
goes well beyond this and introduces its readers to more sophisticated
understandings of culture.
Thomas’s and Fujimura’s emphasis on treating culture as a source
for helping people create meaning from their experiences necessarily
leads them to discuss culture with greater nuance. Adopting the idea
that culture has representational, directive and affective force provides
a platform for discussing a variety of complex issues about culture,
and they do that in ways that are at once sophisticated and access-
ible to the reader. As one progresses through Developing Cross-Cultural
Competence for Leaders they gain an increasingly refned understanding of
how culture affects leadership and how they can become sensitized to
the complexities that entails. Several of the themes they develop in this
book rate being noted here.
Thomas and Fujimura emphasize the importance of experiential
learning in developing cross-cultural competencies. I especially appre-
ciate that they acknowledge that mere exposure to other cultures is
not suffcient for developing an appreciation for cultural difference.
d
r Indeed, such unguided encounters, or encounters that don’t include
o
w
e constructive refection can have the opposite effect, confrming one’s
r
o
F ethnocentric biases. So, one of the most welcome features of this
viii book is the very practical, structured and doable refexive exercises
that Thomas and Fujimura present. The suggestions they offer for sys-
tematic structuring of cross-cultural training, all of which they have
worked out over decades of training emerging leaders, are straightfor-
ward, useful and offer clear lessons for leaders.
I appreciate too that in developing their discussions the authors rec-
ognize that culture does not reside just in the way people think about
their environments and experiences. Rather, Thomas and Fujimura
show us that culture is also felt—it is embodied—in, as we might
say, “the gut.” They appropriately warn against acting on our “gut
reactions” to cultures other than our own because doing so can lead
to a number of errors in thinking when they engage the heuristics
and biases to which our thinking can fall prey. Thomas and Fujimura
suggest that such reactions be avoided by subjecting experience to
structured refection, and they offer tools to make that refection pro-
ductive. The view of culture that Thomas and Fujimura adopt also
makes it plain that culture orients peoples actions, but it does not
determine them, and that as a result culture is dynamic and changing.
The tools that Thomas and Fujimura present in this book give us the
ability to fgure out the cultural components of troubling interactions
and to address those in productive ways.
Although they review approaches to cross-cultural understanding
and leadership that draw on a dimensional analysis of culture, Thomas
and Fujimura go well beyond those analyses. Their focus on culture
as a meaning system leads them to revealing discussions about how
things that appear familiar, including social relations and the words
we use to describe situations, may well have different meanings for
those from cultures other than our own. Reading Developing Cross-
Cultural Competence for Leaders reminded me of how efforts at civil–mili-
tary coordination during the early 1990s interventions in Somalia
foundered because the international civil servants, military and non-
governmental organization participants in those efforts brought to
their discussions different organizational culture-base understandings
of the shared term “security.”
In engaging such issues, Thomas and Fujimura move the reader’s d
r
o
focus from the surface traveler’s advice to looking at the underlying w
e
r
cultural logics that people use. It is refreshing to see their focus on the o
F
cultural why in addition to the what, something that is often absent from x
i
cross-cultural training materials. They make clear that because scope
matters cultural understandings shift in relation to the challenges at
hand, and that thus developing cultural competencies is a process not
an endpoint.
Developing Cross-Cultural Competence for Leaders is unique in the sophis-
tication with which it combines theoretical discussions, advice for
training and clear lessons for leaders. The need for active, careful,
refexive engagement when addressing cross-cultural questions
resonates throughout the book. Investment in, the study of, and the