What Global Managers Get Wrong

Fernanda: Have you ever walked out of a meeting thinking everything went great? Everyone nodded, nobody pushed back, and the plan seemed solid. Then, two weeks later, nothing happened—no follow-through, no movement, and you're sitting there wondering: did they agree, or did they just not disagree?

If you've managed teams across cultures, there's a good chance that scenario sounds familiar. And if it doesn't yet, it will.

My name is Fernanda Brasileiro. I'm a people development strategist, and for a big part of my career, I worked with teams across Poland, India, China, and the US. Different time zones, different communication styles, and different relationships with hierarchy, feedback, and conflict.

I made mistakes—real ones. Not catastrophic, but the kind that quietly cost you trust, alignment, and momentum before you even realize what's happening.

Today, I want to talk about the five most common things I see global managers get wrong, including some things I had to unlearn myself. This is not a checklist of cultural stereotypes; this is about the assumptions we carry into cross-cultural work without realizing it, and what to do instead.

Mistake number one: assuming your communication style is the default. Here's a belief that a lot of managers hold without ever saying it out loud: "The way I communicate is just normal, neutral, professional." It's not.

Every communication style is cultural. The American workplace, for example, tends to favor directness, enthusiasm, and explicit feedback: say what you mean, be upbeat, and don't make people read between the lines. That style gets rewarded; it gets called confident and clear.

Take that same style into a team meeting with colleagues in Poland, and what reads as confidence comes across as arrogance. Polish professional culture tends to be more reserved and formal in work settings, deeply valuing substance over presentation. Walking in with a lot of energy and not a lot of detail can actually undermine your credibility before you've said anything meaningful.

Go the other direction: work with teams in India, and you'll often find that communication there is relational, context-rich, and highly attuned to hierarchy. A direct "no" from a junior team member to a senior one can feel almost unthinkable. Instead, you'll hear "we'll work on it" or "that could be challenging," which, if you're not listening carefully, sounds like a yes.

Erin Meyer, in her book The Culture Map, describes this as the difference between low-context and high-context communication. Low-context cultures—like the US, Germany, and the Netherlands—put everything on the table explicitly. High-context cultures—like China, India, and Japan—communicate a lot through what isn't said, through relationships and tone.

When a manager from a low-context culture leads a high-context team and doesn't know that this distinction exists, they will misread signals constantly. They'll often blame the team, thinking they aren't communicative or engaged, when the real issue is that the manager isn't listening in the right register.

What to do instead: get curious about communication norms before you assume disengagement. Ask questions like, "How does feedback typically get shared on this team?" or "What does disagreement usually look like here?" You're not lowering your standards; you're expanding your range.

Mistake number two: misreading silence. This is closely related, but it deserves its own moment because silence is one of the most misread signals in cross-cultural leadership.

In American meeting culture, silence is awkward; it means nobody has anything to say, or worse, that something is wrong, so we fill it quickly. But in many cultures, silence means something completely different.

In China, silence in a meeting can signal respect, thoughtfulness, or processing information before speaking. It can also signal discomfort that someone doesn't feel safe voicing, especially in a hierarchical setting where publicly disagreeing with a manager simply isn't done.

In Poland, silence often means someone is thinking critically. They aren't disengaged; they're evaluating, and they will come back to you later one-on-one with a very considered, specific set of concerns.

I learned this the hard way early on. I used to interpret quiet team members as unengaged, and I would call on people directly in meetings to draw them out. In some cultures that's fine, but in others it can be genuinely mortifying.

One colleague later told me very gently that being put on the spot in front of the group made it harder for him to think clearly, not easier. That feedback changed how I ran meetings.

What to do instead: build in processing time. Share agendas in advance so people can prepare, create space for asynchronous input after meetings, and if you need to know what someone really thinks, ask them privately, not publicly.

Mistake number three: not adapting your meeting structure. Most managers design meetings for themselves—for how they think, process, and participate.

If you're a verbal processor who likes to brainstorm out loud in real time, your meetings probably look like open discussions with lots of riffing. That works great for people who share that style, but for everyone else, it can feel chaotic, unfair, or exclusionary—especially if English is not their first language and they need a little more time to formulate a thought.

This showed up for me a lot on cross-time-zone calls. When you have someone in Krakow at 4:00 PM, someone in Hyderabad at 8:30 PM, and someone in Chicago at 10:00 AM, the energy in that room is not the same.

The person at 8:30 at night is exhausted, the person in Krakow is trying to wrap up their day, and the person in Chicago just had their second coffee and is ready to go. Yet, the meeting was designed around one person's schedule and communication style.

Some practical shifts made a real difference for me: sending a written agenda at least 24 hours in advance, inviting written pre-responses for key questions, rotating who facilitated or summarized the meeting, and, when possible, rotating the meeting time so the inconvenient slot didn't always fall on the same region. None of these are complicated, but they signal something important: "I designed this meeting for all of us, not just me."

What to do instead: before your next cross-cultural team meeting, ask yourself, "Who is this structure serving?" Then make the adjustments for the people it isn't serving.

Mistake number four: ignoring time zone empathy. I want to stay on that time zone piece for a moment, because it often gets treated as a logistical issue when it's actually a respect issue.

When a manager in Chicago schedules a recurring 9:00 AM call that hits Krakow at 4:00 PM and Hyderabad at 7:30 PM every single week, and never rotates it or acknowledges it—never saying, "I know this is late for you, and I appreciate it"—it sends a message. It says, "My time zone is the center; yours is the accommodation."

Over time, that message accumulates. It contributes to the feeling that the real team is wherever headquarters is, and that everyone else is a satellite. That is a fast track to disengagement from your global team members.

I've seen this erode trust in ways that were hard to rebuild—not because people were openly resentful, but because they quietly concluded that their experience didn't fully matter to their manager.

What to do instead: rotate meeting times when you can. When you can't, acknowledge it explicitly and thank people for accommodating. Consider which meetings actually need to be live and which can be asynchronous. And if someone consistently gets the worst time slot, make sure they get something else—visibility, credit, or meaningful access to you that balances it out.

Mistake number five: treating cultural sensitivity as a checkbox. This might be the one I feel most strongly about.

A lot of organizations approach cross-cultural competence the way they approach compliance training: do the thing, check the box, and move on. Send your global managers to a one-day cultural awareness workshop, give everyone a personality assessment, distribute a guide on working with a specific country, and then nothing changes. Awareness without practice is just information.

Real cross-cultural competence is a skill built over time through real interactions, through getting it wrong, and through asking awkward questions with genuine curiosity about another person's experience. You can't download it, and you can't master it in a day.

What I've seen work is when leaders stay genuinely curious. When they ask their team members, "What's working for you? What's not? What do you wish I understood about how you work best?" and then actually listen and adjust. That isn't cultural sensitivity as a checkbox; that's cultural intelligence as a leadership practice.

Researcher David Livermore defines cultural intelligence, or CQ, as the capability to function effectively across national, ethnic, and organizational cultures. His research shows that the differentiator isn't knowledge of specific cultural facts; it's motivation and adaptability. It's leaders who are genuinely interested in getting it right, not just looking like they are.

What to do instead: replace one-time training with ongoing curiosity. Build check-ins with your global team members that aren't just about project status, and ask them about their experience working with you. You might be surprised and humbled by what you hear.

So, those are the five. Let me do a quick recap: assuming your communication style is universal, misreading silence as disengagement, designing meetings only for yourself, treating time zones as logistics instead of respect, and checking the cultural sensitivity box and calling it done.

None of this is about becoming an expert in every culture on the planet—that's not realistic, and it's not the point. The point is to lead with enough humility to know that your default isn't everyone's default, and enough curiosity to keep asking better questions.

I've worked across more than 15 countries over the course of my career, and the most effective global leaders I've encountered weren't the ones who knew the most facts about other cultures. They were the ones who cared enough to keep learning.

If this resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it in the comments, especially if you've had your own "I totally misread that situation" moment across cultures—you're in good company. If you're leading a multicultural team and want to go deeper on this, this is one of the areas I work on with organizations through workshops, leadership development programs, and consulting engagements.

The link to reach me is in the description below. Thanks for watching, please like and subscribe, and I'll see you on the next one.

Fernanda Brasileiro

People Development Consultant & Strategist

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