The person I interviewed is the Senior Vice President at Schneider Electric.

He is originally from Egypt,

and now based in Canada. He has worked at the company for over 18 years within 6 different domains,
leading a global team of seven directors and sixteen senior managers, while his work ranged from
managing the marketing of various global portfolio offers. Frequent global collaborations, team
meetings, and leading global team, he is now one of the most culturally adept individuals within the
team encouraging diversity and knowledge across the global teams. Managing different regional teams
from North America, Europe, Middle East, and China, he has worked and managed over multiple global
portfolios launches and marketing offers.

As the discussion went ahead, he shared that of the greatest challenges he faced while managing and
interacting with global teams were language, different cultures, and varied expectations based majorly
on the culture of the countries the employees were based in. The first challenge he faced was the
language barrier: “There seemed to be a huge gap in communication leading from how a common
language is perceived and spoken within a global team. Clearly communicating words with varied
accents was one of the challenges that led to ineffective communication, resulting in decreased clarity
and communication gaps on different projects”. As an individual hailing from Egypt, his English accent
was not as clear as it would have needed to be to clearly communicate the projects and its nuances, and
that led to a smaller confusion, leading to poorer deliverables. One of the greatest pieces of advice I
believe he made was that experience teaches you skills that you cannot gain directly from books.
Although, this advice may not be accurate for others, but I believe in that advice as well, that there are
some skills that you gain in the real world through years of experience. One of the advices he gave to
tackle this barrier was to try to adjust the pace and clarity of your accent to its most basic level, as global
teams may not be aware of the country specific lingos. A loud and clear accent with complete words will
help not just the English-speaking countries, but also countries with different national languages.

Moving ahead, the second greatest challenge faced by him was the difference in culture, and this ties to
the next challenge as well. While working with the team of China, he faced a cultural understanding
dilemma, that he could not at first understand, leading to increased miscommunication. One of the
instances as he mentioned was that the Chinese culture (and this ties back to one of the class
discussions about how hierarchy based vs skill based cultures vary) was highly hierarchical and quite
different from the work environment he was working in. He was used to a more of a skill-based work
environment, where even the interns were encouraged to actively take responsibility of high-level tasks
and the employees within that work environment were encouraging towards their contributions. On the
other hand, the Chinese culture was a hierarchical culture, greatly because of the national culture which
believes in greater respect to individuals with greater experience and/or age. He said that the Chinese
culture believed that skills and a certain level of credibility is gained through years of experience. He
mentioned that, there had been many times that younger employees from China had credible ideas,
however, the hierarchal culture, according to him, created a certain kind of barrier for open diverse
conversations. Another challenge stemming from the cultural differences was that of the expectations
from different regional teams and the approach of work. To address this challenge of differences in
approaches and expectations, he clearly communicated a global approach tailored to a team with
diversity in culture. He encouraged that most teams be diverse with culture to establish a clear global
approach that should be comfortable with all the cultures leading to greater understanding of different
cultures within the team, resulting in increased efficiency.

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Working now in Canada for over nine years, a culture which was drastically different from his home
country. He learned that, leading a team in a different country takes immense understanding of the
nuances of the culture of the regional team. Canadian culture, as he describes, believes in a highly polite
and reciprocal work environment. During his initial years as a new immigrant, he came across many
instances which made him understand the difference in his approach and what approach should have
been instead taken. Understanding the smaller things within each culture gives a deeper insight in how
effectively a regional team can be managed. Hailing from a hierarchal culture, his greatest lesson
learned was to lead a different cultural team, you need to understand on a surface level the perception
of the regional team members, and to accomplish this the first step can be inviting team members and
other employees for a group lunch at work and talking through topics not necessarily work related,
wherein you can understand how a culture perceives different things, giving you insights on establishing
a cross-culture approach.

To conclude, the most important advice that he gave is that to become a global leader you must have
two most important skills: Adaptability and Self Awareness. By being self-aware, we know what our core
strengths are and how we can use them to put forward your best skills and guide others, and by being
adaptive you are able to accept different viewpoints stemming from cultural diversity and gives you the
necessary flexibility to be encouraging of different cultures and establishing a common global approach.

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