on my cowboy hat at headquarters,” she says. “People are debating: you have to participate. I’m not used to it; I’m used to being asked for my opinion, not to have to cut off people in order to interject it. But especially in topics where I’m assured of my expertise, I’ve learned to do it.” Once back in Tokyo, however, she drops the combative style and resumes her respectful stance. “My reports tell me that it’s a function of the language I’m speaking,” Eda relates. “I’m very assertive and strong when I speak English; I’m very polite and soft when I speak Japanese.” It’s a linguistic difference, as well as a cultural one, she explains: English is more clear and direct in its word order, whereas there’s more unspoken in Japanese; its very structure is indirect.
With her sales team and with clients throughout Asia, Eda adjusts her leadership style as local cultures dictate. With Koreans and Taiwanese, she works to coax out the unspoken in one-on-one conversations, as they rarely express their thoughts unbidden, and certainly won’t share them on a big call. Whereas in India, where there’s a culture of open debate—“each of them will have to say something about everything”—Eda asks clarifying questions and makes sure to hold individuals accountable. “India’s a good example of where they’re Asian but not my Asian,” she explains. “Coming from Japan, from headquarters, I knew how they’d feel: there would be a battle for authority. (‘She’s never been to India and she’s managing marketing!’) So I have adopted an approach of total humility. ‘Teach me, tell me why you do things that way,’ is how I win their trust. It isn’t my instinct, necessarily, but if I were them, that’s what I would like to hear from my management.”
Indeed, employing empathy—doing what Eda calls “the mind meld”—has served her extremely well in all local markets. “In instances where there’s likely to be cultural tension, I try to get inside their psyches and simulate how they’ll react in my head before I interact with them,” she explains. “Then I ask questions; I show a willingness to learn.” It’s a tactic, she says, that has helped her bridge gender and age differences, as well as cultural differences. “Once I make it clear I’m not there to criticize or judge but to support them in the best possible way so that we can do the best possible job together—they trust me,” she says. “Empathy works.”
Integrity
As Eda’s story illustrates, the double pivot entails a seamless switch in gravitas. In general, we find, projecting credibility horizontally—to stakeholders across local markets—requires prioritizing emotional intelligence, whereas projecting credibility vertically (to those at headquarters) requires that one demonstrate authority.
In only one aspect of gravitas is pivoting unnecessary, and that’s in demonstrating integrity. Integrity is table stakes. Unless you’re seen as a person of your word—as someone who can be counted on to honor your commitments, no matter how onerous those may become—you won’t get traction with any of the other behaviors. Globally dispersed team members won’t go the extra mile for you because they don’t believe you have their best interests at heart. Peers won’t allocate work to your team or deliver resources that you request because they suspect your motives. Integrity is the foundation on which trust is built and relationships endure across both distance and difference. If you can’t project it, you’ll be incapable of driving results.
Integrity can take time to demonstrate. It often takes a crisis, as subordinates want to see not only how firmly you will stand in the face of a storm, but also whose interests you will shield. Nicolas Japy, CEO of Remote Sites and Asia-Australia for Sodexo, describes being repeatedly tested: crises are perpetual because his people—some seventy thousand employees—are working under extreme circumstances in some of the world’s most far-flung places, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the wilderness of Alaska. Japy depends on his on-site managers—who are fully empowered to hire, train, and deploy local talent, negotiate local partnerships, command resources, and otherwise do what’s necessary to fulfill Sodexo’s contract—to handle whatever comes up. Since the success of his division depends on these managers going the extra mile for him and the company, it’s imperative that he demonstrate he will go the extra mile for them—quite literally. Japy tells of one such opportunity that he seized early in his global role when a site manager in New Caledonia, where Sodexo ran a camp serving a mining operation, called to tell him he had a crisis that he couldn’t handle. “The client doesn’t want to listen to me,” the manager told him. “I don’t know what to do.” Japy, a French citizen who was working in central Africa at the time, got on a plane for the South Pacific. After two full days of travel, Japy arrived to learn that the client “didn’t have the time” to meet with him. Japy went out to the camp to wait. Two days later, when the client showed up, Japy calmly told him that Sodexo could no longer do business with him. The client’s deputy, sensing that Japy wasn’t bluffing, quickly intervened to speak to him alone. Fifteen minutes later, Japy had what he came for: the client’s commitment to honor Sodexo’s terms of engagement. “That happened ten years ago, and my people on the ground are still talking about it: ‘Nicolas flew twenty thousand kilometers, went to the campsite, and negotiated intensely with the client to sort it out.’ And that site manager? He is still there working for me.”
Authority vs. EQ
Our interviews with rising leaders and seasoned global executives make clear that what marks a leader as ready for global responsibility is knowing when to assert authority and when to demonstrate emotional intelligence. To put it another way, rising global leaders can’t afford to misread context. A failure to adapt your style to the situation can undermine your credibility as a leader in irreparable ways.
Ron Lee, a managing director at Goldman Sachs who heads up its private wealth business in Asia, has had to learn the importance of the double pivot: having grown up in Ohio and spending the formative years of his career in New York, he has a cultural background helpful for communicating to the firm’s senior leadership; and having spent the last twenty years living and working in Hong Kong and Singapore, he’s acquired Asian cultural smarts (an acquisition aided by the fact that Lee is of Korean descent). So it fell to him, he says, to coach a colleague who struggled to project credibility with Goldman’s senior leaders.
Lee gave his colleague an ideal forum in which to demonstrate his acumen and leadership: a convening of an important executive committee in Asia. But to Lee’s disappointment, when the strategic group began discussing a topic with which his colleague was very familiar, he remained silent. Afterward, Lee took him aside. “I’m shocked that when we were discussing material of relevance to both us, you let an hour go by without saying a word,” Lee told him. “Why didn’t you jump in to offer your expertise and insight? We all would have benefited.” His colleague seemed genuinely surprised at the censure. “But I’m never sure I’m senior enough to say something,” he told Lee.
As Lee regards this colleague highly, he was surprised that he hadn’t grasped just how important it is to pivot to a more communicative style when invited into the boardroom. “Some of our businesses in Asia have been run by colleagues from outside the region,” Lee observes. “That’s partly because local talent has not yet gained the visibility needed to be given the role.” Local talent, like his colleague, is sometimes perceived as having more technical and quantitative skills than strategic vision and as lacking the ability to build the credibility necessary to interact with divisions worldwide. Lee believes it’s an unfair characterization, but concedes that sometimes he can see where the criticism originates. “There’s definitely a case to be made for developing local talent to think more broadly and for equipping them with the executive presence that projects credibility to global leaders,” he says. On the other hand, “there is also a strong case to be made that in order for Western leaders to become global leaders, they need to develop the cultural sensitivity to recognize forms of leadership that may be different from their own,” Lee adds. Western leaders need to also master the double pivot.
Lee’s story underscores just how treacherous the waters can be between the shores of local culture and headquarters—particularly
