Imagine that a few months ago you took a new role as the managing director of country operations in a large multinational. You are keen to learn the new market, and also to infuse new energy into already sluggish results. One of your personal traits and important values is that people are open and honest, that they speak with you with transparency about what is not working, and about what might be holding their teams back from doing their best. You would think this approach would be welcomed, and that the leadership team would soon align and be glad to operate on the basis of openness and transparency. Right?
▍You may be farther from the truth than you might think
That is the story of Martijn, a Dutch engineer who built a career managing various parts of large multinational business, and went on to lead country operations in several parts of the world. What he learned is that his direct approach didn't work as easily as he expected, especially with certain people. He was quite frustrated when he came to me and asked why.
A year ago, he took the role of country manager in France. He had done everything he believed would be good for the team.
He was empathic, authentic and direct. A good listener.
He had told his team, sincerely and more than once, that his door was always open. That if something wasn't working, they should come to him, or raise it in the meeting. And still he didn’t get the response he expected. The real problems reached him late, or sideways, or not at all until they were too large to solve gracefully.
He read the silence as a lack of trust in him. And he was wrong.
▍The mentor: Geert Hofstede
To understand what leaders like Martijn are missing, I often turn to the work of Geert Hofstede, the Dutch social psychologist who gave us the very idea at the heart of this story.
Hofstede's path was an unusual one. He trained first as a mechanical engineer, and only later turned to psychology, and he never quite lost the engineer's habit of wanting to measure what everyone else treated as vague. In the 1960s and 70s, as a personnel researcher at IBM, he found himself sitting on something remarkable: over a hundred thousand employee surveys, gathered from more than fifty countries. When he analysed them, he discovered something that has shaped the field ever since. What best predicted how people answered was not their age, their gender, or their rank. It was their nationality.
From that data he distilled a handful of dimensions along which cultures reliably differ. His insight rests on a simple, freeing premise: every culture, and every individual within it, carries preferences, patterns of perceiving, of interpreting, of feeling and making sense of the world. We rarely notice our own, because to us they don't feel like preferences. They feel like reality, like plain common sense. The trouble begins when we assume everyone else shares them, and read the people who don't as difficult, evasive, or disengaged.
One of Hofstede's dimensions is power distance. And it goes a long way to explaining why some of the leaders on Martijn's team would not bring their concerns to him directly.
▍What power distance actually is
Power distance describes how much the less powerful members of a group accept, and expect, that power sits unequally. The term comes from the Dutch social psychologistGeert Hofstede, whose study of employees across more than fifty countries became one of the most cited works in cross-cultural research. It was later refined by Robert House and the GLOBE study, who added a useful distinction: how much hierarchy a culturehasis not the same as how much it believes itshouldhave.
Put plainly: in some cultures, openly challenging your boss in a meeting is a sign of engagement and respect. In others, it is a risk that feels close to reckless, and the respectful thing is to protect the leader from being questioned in public, and to raise the concern quietly, later, in private.
Neither is better. They are simply different instructions about what respect looks like.
Hofstede then did what an engineer-turned-scientist would do. He checked whether the index held up against the wider world.
Comparing his Power Distance Index across some seventy-six countries, he found it correlated with a striking range of things.
Higher power distance tracked with greater income inequality, smaller middle classes, and a greater prevalence of concentrated power.
It even showed up in how societies handle conflict. In higher power distance cultures, political change has more often come through upheaval and revolution. In lower power distance ones, it has tended to come through gradual, more peaceful evolution.
The pattern reached into business, too. Lower power distance societies tended to have younger executives and more spontaneous, maverick-driven innovation. Higher power distance ones drove innovation through hierarchical support and sponsorship.
▍Why Martijn's open door stayed unused
Martijn's own instinct sat at the more egalitarian end of this dimension, where a junior person contradicting the boss reads as healthy and honest. Several of the French leaders on his team carried the opposite instinct, where speaking up against the boss in front of peers felt unsafe, even improper. They also thought of solving issues themselves before raising them was a good way to show respect. So when Martijn said “come to me with your concerns,” he heard himself offering freedom. Some of his team heard an invitation they could not safely accept.
Through Hofstede's lens, ppower distance is defined by theacceptanceof those at the bottom, not the ambition of those at the top. It isn't a measure of how much bosses crave control. It's a measure of how much those with less power expect and accept that power sits unequally.
That is why Martijn's situation was never really about him. His French colleagues' restraint didn't come from anything he did. It came from what they themselves expected of the relationship between a leader and their team.
In large power distance societies (Hofstede pointed to Russia, Mexico, and China), inequality is felt to be normal, power is centralised, and subordinates expect to be told what to do.
In small power distance societies (Denmark, the United States, the Netherlands), inequality is something to be reduced, power is expected to be used legitimately, and subordinates expect to be consulted.
It is Martijn's whole story in miniature: he came from a culture that expects to be consulted, and led people who, in that setting, expected to be told.
Source: Geert Hofstede, Power Distance Index (PDI)
▍A map, not the territory
One caution, although as a thoughtful reader, you may have already got it.
These patterns describe a tendency, a pattern, and it may be more individual than we might think. People from the same country culture might have opposite individual preferences. Someone on Martijn's team might well have been the most direct person in the building.
National or cultural averages are a place to begin your curiosity, not a label to hang on anyone. The moment they harden into stereotype, they stop being useful and start doing harm.
This is exactly why, in my own work, I lean on assessments that map the individual's preferences rather than assumptions about their passport, a thread I'll pick up in a future edition.
▍So what do you actually say?
If you are working in an international team or do business abroad, it is important to prepare and learn about the main traits of the culture. Some general aspects (like power distance, trusting, disagreeing) will apply to the way they do business, or show up on time, while others, like thinking patterns, might not. Each is a hypothesis to test with the person in front of you.
Here, building on Hofstede's foundation, I draw on Erin Meyer's The Culture Map, which shows how these differences play out culture by culture:
Dutch, Danish, or German.Your open invitation to an open, honest conversation will likely land as indented. Meyer places these among the cultures that skip the cushioning and get straight to the point, where direct feedback reads as respect. “Tell me plainly what isn't working” is not just safe, it's welcome. You can be blunter than feels natural and lose nothing.
French.Expect a fascinating mix, and one of Meyer's favourite examples. The French are more direct with criticism than almost any Anglo-Saxon culture, they will tell you frankly what's wrong, yet they are also distinctly hierarchical in how they relate to authority. So the candour is there, but it may not travel upward to the boss, unprompted, in an open meeting. Give it an explicit route: “I want your honest challenge on this, directly, that's exactly what I'm looking for from you.” Named permission unlocks a directness they already possess.
Italian.Lead through the relationship. Southern European cultures tend to build trust affectively, from the heart, through personal connection rather than task competence alone. A cool, formal “any concerns?” may get you a courteous nothing. The same question, once there's genuine connection between you, opens the door. Invest in the human relationship first, then ask.
Japanese.Two forces compound, and Meyer is explicit about both. Japan is strongly hierarchical and strongly high-context, meaning much of the real message lives in what is left unsaid. Openly contradicting the boss in front of the group can feel improper, and criticism is delivered with great subtlety. Meyer's own guidance is direct: never give or ask for hard feedback in a public forum. Create a private channel, ask specific rather than open questions, and learn to hear the quiet no, the hesitation, the “it might be a little difficult,” that carries the real meaning.
Brazilian.Warmth is the key that turns the lock. Like much of Latin America, Brazil builds trust relationally and personally, and once that trust is real, people are often warm and expressive. But the openness follows the connection, it does not precede it. Show you genuinely care about the person, not just the output, and the candour follows.
Notice the thread running through all of these. The goal never changes: you want the truth. What changes is the door you build for it. Sometimes the door is a blunt question in an open meeting. Sometimes it's a private message, a named permission, a shared coffee, or a patient silence you resist the urge to fill.
Cultural positions above are drawn from Erin Meyer's The Culture Map scales (communicating, evaluating, leading, and trusting).
▍What changed for Martijn
Once Martijn could see the dimension at work, the fix was not to become a different kind of leader. It was to change how his invitation travelled.
He stopped asking for candour in the open room and began building quieter, one-to-one channels, where a person could be honest without ever contradicting him in front of others. He swapped the broad opening (“any concerns?”) for something specific and safe to answer (“I'm weighing these two options, which one worries you more?”). And he learned to say the permission out loud, plainly, that he wanted the disagreement and would not mistake it for disloyalty. Then he proved it, the first time someone took the risk.
The honesty began to arrive. Not because his people had finally learned to trust him, but because he had stopped asking them to show trust in a language that wasn't theirs.
▍The Reflection
So, back to you, in that imagined new role.
When your own open door goes unused, when the honesty you asked for doesn't come, there is an easy reading and a truer one.
The easy reading is that the silence is about you: your team doesn't trust you, doesn't respect you, won't engage.
The truer one is often about culture. The people in front of you may simply be standing at a different distance from your authority than you ever realised, following instructions about respect that they never chose and cannot see, any more than you can see your own.
The most useful thing a leader can do with authority is notice how large it looks from the other side of the table.
▍ThePractice
This week, think of one person who rarely brings you problems directly. Rather than repeating the open invitation, try one specific, private question instead. Notice what arrives once the cost of speaking is lower.
▍The Invitation
If you lead teams that span cultures, and you sense these invisible differences shaping how you relate and work together, that is precisely the work we, at Quantum Leader do with leadership teams. Contact me at daniela@quantum-leader.com, it will be a pleasure to talk.
Kindly,
Daniela
Next Monday: We will continue to explore the cultural dimensions that frame, help or hinder our interactions at home and at work. Stay tuned.
