There is a persistent myth in international business that good leadership is universal. That if you can run a P&L in Britain, you can run one in Italy, or Poland, or the United States, with the same tools and the same approach. I believed this early in my career. Experience cured me of it.

This is not to say that commercial fundamentals do not travel. They do. Revenue, margin, customer retention, cash flow — these metrics mean the same thing in every language. But how you lead the people who produce those numbers is profoundly shaped by where those people are from, what they expect from a leader, and what motivates them to perform at their best.

What culture actually means in a business context

When I talk about culture in leadership, I am not talking about food and festivals. I am talking about the invisible architecture of assumptions that shapes how people communicate, how they handle disagreement, how they relate to authority, and how they define loyalty.

In my experience directing country managers across Northern and Southern Europe simultaneously, the contrasts were stark. A German country manager would arrive at a quarterly review with every number validated, every variance explained, and a list of questions in descending order of priority. An Italian counterpart would arrive with the same underlying performance but communicate it through a narrative — context first, numbers second, implications third. Neither approach was wrong. Both required a completely different leadership response.

"The skill that has mattered most in every situation was not financial, not strategic, and not technical. It was the ability to read the room — across cultures."

The three things I had to unlearn

The first thing I had to unlearn was that silence means agreement. In several of the cultures I worked across — particularly in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia — a team that says nothing in a meeting has not necessarily accepted your proposal. They may be signalling deep discomfort through the very absence of objection. I learned to create separate, smaller settings where honest disagreement could surface, because it rarely surfaced in the room.

The second was that directness is a virtue everywhere. It is not. I am Italian, and by Southern European standards I am considered fairly direct. By Northern European standards — particularly British and Scandinavian — I was initially perceived as emotional and imprecise. By Southern European standards, some of my British colleagues were perceived as cold and evasive. Everyone was communicating perfectly clearly in their own register. The problem was that nobody was calibrating for the difference.

The third, and hardest, was that my instinct about people was reliable. It was reliable within my own cultural frame. Outside it, I was often wrong — and wrong in systematic ways that I could only see in retrospect.

What actually works

The leaders I have seen succeed consistently across cultures share three characteristics. First, they are genuinely curious about the people they lead — not in a performative way, but in the sense that they actually want to understand how someone thinks before they try to influence how they act.

Second, they are consistent without being rigid. The values do not change across markets — integrity, accountability, ambition. But the way those values are expressed in day-to-day leadership adapts constantly.

Third, and most practically, they build local trust before they need it. The relationships that save you in a crisis — the country manager who tells you the truth at midnight, the regulator who gives you the benefit of the doubt, the partner who stays when a competitor makes them a better offer — are all built in the quiet periods, not the urgent ones.

The language question

I work in English, Italian and Spanish, and I want to be honest about what that does and does not give you. Speaking someone's language opens doors that remain firmly closed in translation. It signals respect, investment and a certain kind of seriousness that no interpreter can convey.

But language fluency is not cultural fluency. I have met leaders who spoke five languages and were equally clumsy in all of them culturally. And I have met leaders who operated entirely through interpreters and built extraordinary trust across cultures through sheer quality of attention and genuine curiosity about the person in front of them.

Language helps. Listening is what actually does the work.