Cross-Cultural Leadership - Paper Example

Angelica Larios

An organization is composed of people from different cultures. For leaders to be able to communicate and work efficiently, they must learn how to interact with everyone. For them to achieve this, they might consider practicing the following.

First, a leader needs to stop being self-centered. This means that you need to be open to other concepts, opinions, needs, and assumptions. According to Joiner and Josephs (2006), this helps the leader to be open to different viewpoints and accept other's outlook. Leaders feel useful if at all they can be able to do this. Switching your frame of reference requires a leader to append their opinions, pay attention and watch briefly. They need to avoid impulsive conclusion and accept all the values in what is happening around them. Most of the time, we forgot about our cultural assumptions and how they influence our behaviors and decisions as leaders.

Second, the leader needs to be interested in knowing more. To see and understand the frames of references of others, you need to look for them. Being curious and openness is a significant step towards achieving cultural agility (Hall, Rowland and Stokes 2015). Without interest, a leader can spend a lot of time on travels, but they will not experience change. Asking questions in a friendly manner is an indicator of your curiosity, and it's an important way of stimulating others opinions.

Leaders can also consider what they have in common. Looking and accepting commonalities help to break the barrier of difference. Building and focusing on the commonalities at an early stage of interaction helps leaders to develop cultural agility more and become operational than those who pay much attention to their differences only (Caligiuri and Tarique 2016). Focusing on the differences blinds the leader from seeing what is right about other culture and they develop a negative attitude which becomes the reference of their ruling and operating as leaders.

Janis Ward-Catlett

I agree with you that the best example of a cross-cultural leader is Jesus himself. In all his endeavors, he was interested in other people, and he did not judge them according to their culture or race. I believe that there are leadership styles that the current leaders may enumerate from Jesus which will help them to be agile.

First, an agile leader must appreciate the facts that we are living in situations where change is paramount, uncertain and competitive. The leader, therefore, understands that this is the reality and they need to adapt to the constantly changing world (Reiche, B. S. (2015). They achieve this by predicting possible threats and opportunities by continually reviewing their organization's surroundings for new growth. They look at the obstacle they are facing with pure eyes and a desire to reason beyond their past suppositions.

Being a creative thinker with a genuine sense of purpose leader may help you to be agile. This leadership style of leadership actively involves a wide range of stakeholders in their operations, and they persuade and get knowledge from them concurrently (Pollack, 2018). Their power to look at situations from diverse perspectives and to decide between apparently contrasting issues enables them to come up with new planned ideas. Therefore, their plans for the future are innovative, essential and convincing. Leaders who practice this kind of leadership have little struggle accommodating other people's views because they are already used to it. Moreover, they are interested in interacting with different cultures so that they can influence them positively.

Flexible leadership style equips the leader with an extensive collection of behaviors that allow them to adapt to the strains of any given circumstances continually. According to (Meyer and Meijers (2017), their attention is on both short and long-term goals, hierarchal direction setting, fulfilling participation and developing individual efforts and strong teamwork. By doing this, they can interact with as many people as possible because their goal is to reach everyone at their levels. Christ saw every individual as essential, and he, therefore, made efforts to reach to their needs. A good leader must be able to accept people from different backgrounds and be more interested in knowing their culture, and by doing so, they may be able to be agile.

References

Joiner, W. B., & Josephs, S. A. (2006). Leadership agility: Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change (Vol. 307). John Wiley & Sons.

Meyer, R., & Meijers, R. (2017). Leadership agility: Developing your repertoire of leadership styles. Routledge.

Hall, R., Rowland, C., & Stokes, P. (2015, September). New thoughts on leadership in turbulent times. In 8th Annual Conference of the EuroMed Academy of Business.

Reiche, B. S. (2015). An integrative approach to cross-border expansion: The role of global leadership. The Center for Global Enterprise.

Caligiuri, P., & Tarique, I. (2016). Cultural agility and international assignees effectiveness in crosscultural interactions. International Journal of Training and Development, 20(4), 280-289.

Pollack, A. (2018). CignaCultural Agility and Global Leadership Development Through International Immersion and Volunteerism. Catalyst.