Leading Across Cultures: Trust, Emotion, and Execution

For most of my career, culture has been treated as something peripheral. Important, yes but rarely central. Something discussed in HR forums, leadership offsites, or diversity panels, rather than in the same breath as strategy, capital allocation, or risk.

I’ve never been comfortable with that separation.

Even before I formally began my career, culture caught my attention in a place where many would not expect to find it: accounting. In the mechanics of balance sheets and acquisition models, I noticed something quietly revealing. We assign a monetary value to goodwill, an abstract concept that captures reputation, trust, relationships, brand, and future earning potential. What we often fail to acknowledge is that culture sits right beneath that line item. Culture is goodwill operationalized. It is the invisible infrastructure that determines whether value compounds or erodes.

That observation stayed with me. And it followed me through every role, every country, and every leadership mandate that came after.

Growing Up Professionally Without a Monoculture

I have never led or been part of a monocultural organization.

From my very first professional experience, I worked alongside people from different nationalities, languages, and professional backgrounds. Belgian colleagues alongside Luxembourgish, French, German, and English ones. Later, this expanded into even broader international environments. Different educational systems. Different generations. Different assumptions about hierarchy, conflict, trust, and communication.

At the time, I didn’t frame this as “diversity.” It was simply the environment. But with distance, I can see how profoundly it shaped me.

When you are surrounded by people who think, speak, and interpret the world differently, you lose the illusion that your own perspective is neutral. You become more aware of your own blind spots. Sometimes that brings confidence. Sometimes it creates hesitation. Often, it does both at the same time.

What it never allows is complacency.

Diversity Is Not About Representation. It’s About Perspective Weight.

We often reduce diversity to visible attributes or demographic checklists. That framing is incomplete.

True diversity shows up in how people weigh experience. How quickly they speak or hesitate. How candid they are in disagreement. How they interpret silence. How they relate to authority, time, and uncertainty.

A 30-year-old digital-native product manager from one country does not experience risk the same way a 55-year-old operations leader shaped by multiple crises in another country does. Neither is right nor wrong. But their perspectives carry different emotional and experiential weight.

As a leader, you are constantly “playing” with these differences, not manipulating them, but navigating them. If you ignore them, they surface anyway. Usually later. Usually louder.

Trust Is Not Universal. It Is Cultural.

One of the most underestimated challenges in international leadership is the assumption that trust works the same way everywhere.

It does not.

In some cultures, trust is given quickly and withdrawn slowly. In others, it must be earned over time; once established, it becomes deeply resilient. In some environments, disagreement is a sign of engagement. In others, it is perceived as disloyalty.

Earlier in my life, I was probably more cautious than necessary. Perhaps even guarded. That may have come from early experiences, or from observing how quickly misunderstandings could escalate across cultural lines. Over time, I learned that distance does not create safety; clarity does.

My approach today is much more deliberate: reach out first. Create trust intentionally. Design environments where people feel safe enough to speak, not because they are encouraged to, but because the cost of silence is higher than the cost of candor.

Is that sufficient to lead teams across countries and cultures? Of course not. But it is the first step. Without it, nothing else holds.

Leadership Without Presence Is a Different Discipline

Leading across borders introduces a constraint that many leaders underestimate: the absence of physical presence.

When you walk into a room, emotions form before words are spoken. Micro-movements. Body language. Energy. These are not “soft” elements; they are data. And they disappear when leadership is exercised remotely.

Without them, misunderstandings last longer. Frustrations accumulate quietly. Signals that would normally be resolved in minutes stretch into weeks or months. By the time they surface, the emotional charge often outweighs the original issue.

This is why remote and international leadership requires compensation mechanisms. More explicit communication. More check-ins. More effort to name what is not being said. It is also why mistakes tend to be more durable when presence is missing; they are not corrected early.

When Emotion Enters, Logic Is No Longer Enough

Navigating cultural differences is one challenge. Navigating cultural differences under emotional strain is another entirely.

Once frustration, fear, or resentment enters the system, the work changes. More time is required. More openness is needed. And importantly, not everyone is capable or willing to do that work at the same moment.

As a leader, this is one of the most uncomfortable realities to accept.

At first, there is often a sense of helplessness. A feeling of being frozen between competing narratives. The temptation is to retreat into structure, process, or authority. That rarely resolves the underlying issue.

What helped me was shifting the focus away from emotion itself and toward a shared currency.

Finding a Common Currency

In business, that common currency is often the project.

Reframing roles. Adjusting responsibilities. Changing the angle from which someone contributes. Creating a new context while honoring the work that came before. These are not cosmetic moves; they are emotional resets.

When done well, they provide continuity without stagnation. They acknowledge past investment while opening space for renewal.

Sometimes, this works remarkably well.

Sometimes, it does not.

There are moments when the emotional bond to a project, a role, or an identity is simply too strong. In those cases, minor adjustments are insufficient. More radical change is required, which I sometimes think of as a controlled earthquake. Disruptive, but intentional.

And sometimes, even that is not enough.

Accepting That Not Every Journey Continues Together

This is perhaps the hardest lesson for leaders who care deeply about people and culture.

Not every difference can be bridged. Not every tension can be resolved. Some cultural patterns, whether organizational or personal, are too deeply rooted to be overcome within a given context.

This is not failure. It is reality.

People change roles. They change projects. They leave organizations. They board different trains. This is not always a breakdown; it is often an alignment correction.

Leadership maturity lies in recognizing when to invest further and when to allow movement without blame.

Leading Through Strength, Not Correction

My guiding principle has always been simple, though not easy: work with strength.

Identify what someone does well. Understand how their cultural background amplifies that strength. Then create enough space for it to express itself fully without forcing conformity.

At the same time, build collective understanding within the team. Not to erase difference, but to contextualize it. When people understand why someone behaves the way they do, friction often transforms into respect.

This requires patience. It requires humility. And it requires leaders to resist the urge to standardize what should remain human.

Culture Is Not a Constraint. It Is Leverage.

When culture is ignored, it becomes friction.

When culture is understood, it becomes leverage.

It shapes how decisions are made, how risk is perceived, how accountability is assumed, and how trust compounds over time. It determines whether the strategy is executed or quietly resisted.

This is why culture does not belong on the margins of leadership conversations. It belongs at the center, alongside capital, technology, and governance.

Because in the end, culture is not what we say we value.

It is what shows up when pressure is applied.

François Jacquemin

P.S.: Want to watch the video version of this article? Go to https://www.francoisjacquemin.com/covered/culture-is-not-soft-its-the-core-of-leadership