Coaching Across Cultures: Global Relationships

In this episode of Apex Performance Podcast, Dr. Anthony Simmons explores what it takes to successfully coach, lead, and build relationships across cultures.

Drawing from more than three decades of global leadership and Navy experience, Dr. Simmons explains why cultural intelligence requires more than knowledge. It requires empathy, curiosity, communication, and real world experience.

From Japan and South Korea to West Africa, China, and South America, he shares lessons learned working directly with different cultures and reveals why leaders must connect before demonstrating competence.

You’ll discover how cultural awareness, empathy, and understanding different values can strengthen trust, improve collaboration, and create cultural harmony.

The key takeaway is simple: Great global leaders don’t design for people. They design with them.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Do you ever feel like you're doing all the right things that success still doesn't last? If you're struggling with trust or strange relationships or performance that feels harder than it should, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, executive leader, and scholar practitioner, Dr. Anthony Simmons.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Hey greetings, everyone. Again, I'm excited and honored to welcome you to another episode of Apex Performance Podcast, where all pathways are cemented and authentic relationships through a common act. We must continue to appreciate, communicate, and trust. I am your host, Dr. Anthony Simmons. Speaking of a common act, after reading through Dr. Tim Irmo's book, The Future Begins with Generation Z, it appeared to me that us baby boomers and Xers must get our act together. Now, today's podcast, while continuing to offer accelerated pathways to excellence, it will feature coaching across cultures, which is global relationship. It shares my personal insights from over three decades of leading in global environments. It will highlight my experience performing maritime diplomacy across 65 different countries as a Navy surface warfare officer. In my last episode, I spoke about cultural excellence. Today's talk will expand on those models in the global expanses while leveraging the globe as a prism to magnify perspectives figuratively and literally by looking inside different countries and projecting their experiences outwardly. Now, when coaching globally, one should leverage the globe as a prism of insight. We should get inside so we can look out vice determining, you know, the outer surface and making decisions based on what we see from the artifact level. And I'll talk more about that when I get into the three layers of culture. In her book, Cultural Agility, Paula Calligori suggests leaders are not born with cross-functional competencies that yield agile leaders, global leaders, they must be developed, shaped, and refined through a blend of academia and hands-on exposure. So this episode is buoyed by my first hand experience during countless diplomatic engagements. As I said earlier, during over three decades working in the global maritime defense sector. Now, since the sale of the Great White Fleet from December 16, 1907 to February 22nd, 1909, the Navy has served as an extension of the U.S. Diplomatic Armed. And to that end, I was fortunate to serve in that capacity. As a Navy surface welfare officer, I had the opportunity to perpetuate this model by making countless calls on foreign officials as a commanding officer of United States Navy warships, which is equivalent to a chief executive officer on the corporate side. So global leadership hinges on cultural harmony. It's the key and essential to connecting with diverse cultures. This harmony is anchored in cultural intelligence, which is optimized by a blend of study and hands-on experience. And being global, Angelo Cabrera and Gregory Unri assert that difficulties escaping cultural norms and limited mindsets and local practices, and also the conservative nature of academic institutions, professors, and students merely scratches the surface with study alone. Cultural intelligence requires boots on the ground to appreciate what each culture has to offer in order to explore the three layers of culture, which consists of the artifacts, their spoused values and beliefs, and the underlying assumptions. We have to take an inside-out perspective of the globe. Essentially, this suggests that global leaders must flatten social identities to create cultural harmony in order to facilitate global leadership development. This state manifests through universal perspectives that flatten or zero-out social norms and behaviors so everyone enjoys a common view. This harmony allows disparate organizations to maximize capabilities. For example, you know, it allows the United States Navy to share and delegate leadership roles with partner navies to enhance global readiness. Then how did this really happen? One of the key social intelligence attributes is the empathy gene. Once again, empathy is the catalyst to global leadership coaches' capacity to assess cultures from the lens of partnering countries, you know, rather than defaulting to preconceived behaviors or dominant cultures, social identities. Now, as I move into my bonus for DIS, let's just talk about some of the key attributes I feel that really qualifies me to have this discussion. I would like to feel that my global decorum solidifies my capacity to expand on coaching across cultures and virtually engaging in global landscapes. This decorum harkens back to my 1992 West Africa training cruise, where the captain would expose the junior officers to diplomatic engagements during his personal call on host nation officials. He would always select a junior officer to accompany him. We refer to this junior officer as the captain's bad boy. Essentially, he was affording us nass, you know, first-hand experiences on how to do diplomatic engagements. Additionally, I like to couple this with my two years being stationed in Japan as the commanding officer of the USS Lyson, which proved to be most rewarding because it allowed me to ingratiate into the Japanese culture through participating in culture events while working with a sister ship, which was our host ship, to glean operational insights and also enhance culture awareness through the appreciation of Native traditions and customs. And finally, participating in Navy partnership building, and which I had to leverage my innate empathy gene and propensity to identify with people and my coaching-based leadership approach and a blend of doctoral scholarship coupled with years of leading in global landscapes, building partners and developing teams, is most fitting, I feel, to underscore this episode. As I've mentioned in other episodes, we have to connect before we demonstrate competence. This connection is a matter of building relationships, you know, through visiting culture centers, participating in sporting events, doing community relations and goodwill projects, and also doing exchange programs with partnership Navy where we send sailors to their ship and they do likewise with our ship. Now, my book, Champion Organization Wellness, Chapter 6, offers a firsthand account on working amid diverse cultures. Now let's talk about becoming culturally intelligent. So obtaining cultural intelligence requires global leaders to embody what Kabara and Henri define as a global mindset, global entrepreneurship, and global citizenship. The mindset is merely acquiring psychological, intellectual, and social capital, while entrepreneurship is capitalizing on differences and reinforcing similarities to expand on opportunities through collaboration. And finally, citizenship is a matter of excelling through mutual perspectives. Collectively, you know, they are all pathways to cultural intelligence in order to yield cultural harmony. The global mindset is about capturing the artifacts and it provides only a glimpse of the spouse values and cultural attitudes. So to truly work inside of multicultures, it requires entrepreneurship and citizenship. It's a matter of peeling back the onion and delving deeper into the spouse's values and cultural attitude to unravel the underlying assumptions at the core. Essentially, harmony is the holistic application of culture levels. It's a matter of coalescing everything into one vision and appreciating a common prism. Again, this vision is magnified by boots on the ground and having personal experiences to unearth cultural attitudes or the unspoken opinions about what is considered good or bad, respectful or rude, and cultural values which are embedded assumptions. This is when cultural intelligence really begins to take root. Now let's talk about cultural citizenship, which involves highlighting and appreciating and enhancing attributes of other cultures by identifying the differences or highlighting the advantages of your culture. The key is not viewing the differences as barriers, rather, it's about integrating those key global organizational leadership concepts and depicting the interdependencies for developing culturally agile leaders that can transform global space into resource oasis. For example, you know, when operating with allied countries, the U.S. likes to emphasize proportionality or commonality to not overwhelm other countries with the large U.S. footprint. For example, the United States once deployed 170-foot patrol closer to the Western Pacific, all the way from San Diego, to demonstrate congruency. Essentially, this initiative created a palatable picture and also a roadmap to model agile global leadership. Now, as we know, anytime we build relationships, we have to have awareness. So in this regard, we have to start with cultural awareness, which depends on assessing cultural values where Huffman and Gellerman apply four criteria: balance, alignment, viability, and authenticity. Balance is the amount of emphasis we place on certain values. Sometimes we look at it from the opposite counter perspectives. And also it can be the representation of the needs and also the emphasis or like work-life balance for particular situation. And also we have to look at the tamping aspect of it, where alignment is compatibility across a group of individuals, where viability is how each value supports the business backdrop. How does it fit into the pre-existent whole? For example, we had the Royal Korean Navy where we placed them into a command role, which they had no experience with that one. So we had to be very careful in ensuring how viable they would be in that responsibility. Now, for as being authentic, it's the way values are expressed, whether it's verbally or behaviorally, it's the underlying essence and alignment of values can always try and, you know, the content therein. So this assessment enables a co-create relationships in order to unearth those underlying assumptions that we spoke to earlier across the three layers of culture there. Then we have to evolve this into effective communication platform to draw out, you know, the partner cultural strength by considering the cultural dimensions for viable leadership development approaches from partner with the countries from their vantage point. So to that end, Dutch social psychologist Gerth Harsteed identified four cultural dimensions, which are power distance, which is forma and distance with relationships, the uncertainty, avoidance, the individualism, collectivism, and masculinity and femininity. Also, Eastern culture is a group and community, while Western is more self-interest and individualistic. All these matters must be taken into account when we're assessing a culture. So attaining cultural intelligence involves applying, once again, the EQ social skill of empathy in order to personally act, to build cross-cultural relationships while considering these dimensions. Ethics, values, communication, work-life balance. There are some of the intracultural challenges that we use in order to shape this undertaking. For example, Americans are considered more ethnocentric at times, which can imply lacking empathy towards smaller countries. Since the days of Western migration, hierarchy and clan cultures have presented challenges with the U.S. and the Canadian cultures. In leadership communication, Johnson and Hackman suggest endangerous Americans and Canadians, they view communications from a circle of perspective where everyone is united and responsible for each other from a physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being perspective. Now, when considering work-life balance across macro cultures like European, they do four-day work weeks compared to America five-day work weeks. So according to Joshon, shorter work weeks are catching on in Europe and America not so much. You know, he also says the reduction of work week has been a deliberate policy in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, while research reveals Americans worked longer than most technologically advanced nations except Ireland. Now, to mitigate these cultural disparities, the United States Navy used cultural awareness training to indoctrinate members on host nation customs and traditions in advance of doing partnership engagements. The goal of the awareness training is to afford sailors the opportunities to interact from a mutual prism. It helps to overcome ethnocentric behaviors, it helps manage egos and prevent the fundamental attribution error. To demonstrate the gravity of this training here, leaders, including the commanding officers and their senior enlisted advisors, personally indulge in the cross-cultural training by making videos for Aaron throughout the ship prior to the port visit. Now, as the pathos, let's move into some hands-on experience. As my opportunities that have been afforded to me while operating across multiple nations have given me the chance to have intricate engagement, such as community relations, the social events, and also participating in other activities to understand the cultures at the three layers that we talked about, you know, the outer, the espoused values, and the underlying assumptions. So from a customer tradition and a business protocol in practice, culture gaps must be addressed both socially and also from a business perspective. So my multinational training exercise, I like to rely on how we first go in in order to nurture familiarity and also to create neocultures between two countries by using embedding and stabilizing mechanisms, you know, at the outset of the operation. So prior to performing at sea, I talked about how we do the cross-cultural training in order to make sure there's some good synergies, make sure we're connected, as I mentioned earlier, to do connection before competence. So it's customary for the U.S. to visit foreign ports, you know, for those social events that I talked about. We do tours, we do goodwill and community relations, and we do sporting activities in order to become familiar with the Allied cultures. Then for second-order effect, in order to reinforce the importance of relationships and to make sure we have synergy, we do the cross-pollination of service members where it's arranged where we send United States Navy members to foreign ships, and then they also do likewise by sending representatives of liaisons officers to our ship in order to solidify this partnership building and to operationalize cultural norms. So in champion organizational wellness, I actually have a vignette that talks about how I illustrated my involvement coaching the War Korean Navy in order to assume these leadership roles during our maritime operations that was taking place in the Yellow Sea when I was uh commanding the ship there back in 2007. So once again, as we look at culture awareness and fully understand the intricacies of, you know, the cultures, it's invaluable for coaching across culture or seamen in these global relationships. Diplomatic engagement has afforded me this what I call the first-hand boots on the ground experience, you know, in order to obtain that global mindset, entrepreneurship, and citizenship in order to achieve culture harmony. I recall I did a United States American cruise or circumnavigating South America, and I had the honor. Yes, I guess I was always the one raising my hand to take on opportunities to go and explore. But, anyways, I spent a few days on board a Chilean ship where I actually stayed overnight there and trying to understand how they operated. And one of the things that really caught my attention was doing a firing exercise. And I was in the combat information center, and these guys started doing manual calculations on how to measure trajectory and the angles of elevation for the gun in order to fire at a certain distance. This is something I've taken for granted because it's all embedded in the technology in the United States ship. So that gave me appreciation for why it takes other countries, you know, alone a while sometime to get fire solutions. But one thing I did not engage in from a cultural perspective was the pleasantries of having wine at night, you know, doing dinner at sea, which is forbidden in the United States Navy. Now I would like to circle back to my West Africa training cruise that took place in 1992. What I thought was very unique from a cultural engagement perspective was we brought officers from the West African Navies over to represent each country that we were to visit, and they had two weeks aboard the manager walk in order to ride us across and learn how we do business at sea. And I just thought it was an awesome opportunity for me to get to know these officers, you know, from their cultural perspective. So I spent, yeah, this is my curiosity gene now. I spent an inordinate amount of time in their spaces just learning about their culture and you know what to expect. You know, once we arrived in each country, this just added so much value to what I was able to learn and the insight I was able to glean as I did operations inside of each respective country. And also, I like to always recall my time in China operating in the 7th Fleet when I had the opportunity to take the first United States Navy destroyer into Shanghai. And I had the pleasure of visiting financial centers, which was I also visited the Pearl Tower, and more important, I thought it was cool that I got to visit acrobatic shows and had a good appreciation for the amount of emphasis that are placed on acrobatics, you know, for the nurturing and the development, you know, of the kids there in the Chinese culture there. So this was priceless from a cultural learning perspective. Now, for my get off the stage episode, let's talk about sailors in the global maritime domain. First, we have to learn, don't be so quick to place your culture on a poster. We have to establish common purpose through stabilizing mechanisms. We're identifying these common threads and displaying proportionality is powerful and formidable in global engagement. So when interacting with West Africa and smaller navies, I always felt it was critical, you know, to meet them on their terms. I like to say you don't wear a tuxedo to a toga party. So my big takeaway, which I learned from Joint Forces Staff College, is always designed with and not for a nation when you're doing international relations. Now, when speaking of congruency, I like to always point out my advantages I had when I was commanding a patrol coaster. You know, I had the advantage of having a balance there with the artifacts. I was then overwhelm other countries. And as when you're in these global domains, you have to minimize the cultural norms in order to flatten these social identities. You know, through being mindful, you must refrain from the stereotypes of what Dr. Tim Elmore referred to as mental shortcuts that can lead to fundamental attribution errors. So I vividly recall during my voyage to West Africa when we would get called aside to do the dignitary calls to be the captain's bag boy per se. I would always lobby with my fellow officers to take their terms. I could get in the room, you know, doing these calls on foreign dignitaries. So my time as a diplomat allowed me to connect with married cultures and at their locations to build authentic relationships across broad expanses. Hence, it represented some of the best days of my Navy career. Now, as we consider the future implications, we must, as global leaders, implement the Coach Protege initiatives by assigning mixed skills and cultural attributes in order to maximize global capabilities. And what come to mind is my role and involvement with the Coach Protege approach when we brought Royal Caribbean Naval officers on board the USS Lyon to teach them how to take on lead roles and responsibilities there in their regional operational areas. So this intercultural alignment essentially coalesces cultures in order to bolster operational readiness. Now, cultural intelligence is a matter of appreciating other cultural norms. It leads to cultural awareness and cultural harmony that yields cultural agility. So it personifies acuteness for global leaders, assessing and empathizing with other cultures creates agile global leaders that really think beyond their personal values, associated groups, and life experiences. They have the psychological, intellectual, and social capital to think. I mean, being that global mindset to create, that's the entrepreneur global perspective, and also to perform as global citizens. So coaching and building relationships are critical, you know, as virtual landscapes will keep everyone globally connected throughout the years. Global leadership coaches must continue to level social identities to achieve cultural harmony. So when working across disparate groups, information alone is not adequate. Leaders need real-world experience to fully appreciate the depth of cultures. So coaching across cultures hinges on global relationships. Thanks for listening in, and please subscribe to the next episode of Apex Performance Podcast to enjoy game-changing pathways to excellence. Right there at your fingertips. The next pathway will illustrate Dr. Simmons' five dimensions to success. Once again, thanks and hope to see you next time. Bye for now.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

So that's it for today's episode of Apex Performance. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, we'll win a chance to win a grand prize drawing worth $5,000 for a private VIP day with Dr. Simmons himself. Be sure to visit ApexPerformance Podcast.com to pick up a free copy of your gift and ask your questions for Dr. Simmons in your own voice, and he'll answer you back privately in his. Then join us on the next episode.