Global organizations need leaders who can work effectively across cultures, but the traditional path to developing that capability often includes international assignments, relocation and frequent travel. That path is not available to everyone, and it may not always be necessary.

Today, a leader can start the morning collaborating with colleagues in Europe, spend the afternoon working through a decision with a team in another region, and end the day connecting with employees across the U.S., all without leaving home. The exposure is there. The challenge is turning that exposure into development.

Working globally does not automatically make someone culturally agile. Paula Caligiuri describes cultural agility as the ability to be comfortable and effective when working across cultures. Often, global work first exposes assumptions people did not realize they had. Cultural agility develops when employees learn to recognize those assumptions, understand how others may experience the same situation differently and adjust how they work together.

Researchers have long examined the role experience plays in shaping leaders. The Center for Creative Leadership’s assessment, challenge and support model emphasizes that development occurs when people are stretched while receiving the feedback and support needed to learn from the experience. Research by Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck similarly found that challenging global experiences can become powerful sources of leadership development.

For today’s distributed organizations, many of those experiences are already happening. The opportunity is to become more intentional about learning from them.

Make the Invisible Visible

Every team operates with unwritten rules about how work gets done. How quickly should someone respond to a message? Is disagreement expressed directly or privately? Does silence during a meeting signal agreement, respect, uncertainty or disengagement? Should decisions happen during the meeting or after everyone has had time to reflect?

Even simple things, like how teams socialize or which language people use in casual conversation, can be experienced differently across cultures. The difficulty is that people rarely think of their own expectations as cultural. They simply think of them as normal.

Cultural agility begins with making those invisible expectations visible. Instead of teaching employees a list of behaviors associated with particular countries, leadership development can help people become more curious about the assumptions behind their own behavior. Before interpreting a colleague as resistant, disengaged, overly direct or indecisive, leaders can pause to consider what expectation might be shaping how each person interprets the situation.

For learning and development (L&D) teams, this means using situations employees already encounter as opportunities for reflection. Meetings, feedback conversations, project handoffs, decision-making and conflict can all become part of the learning experience. Cultural development becomes part of the work rather than something reserved for an international assignment.

Design for Different Starting Points

At one global team gathering, employees arrived from several regions after very different journeys. Some had traveled only a few hours, while others had spent much of the day crossing time zones. Soon after arriving, the company organized a lengthy walking activity. It was intended as team-building, but the plan overlooked the different levels of fatigue people brought with them. For some, it was enjoyable. For others, it was exhausting. No one intended to exclude anyone, but the experience revealed a common organizational blind spot: treating fairness as giving everyone the same thing rather than recognizing that people begin from different places. A shared experience is not automatically an inclusive one.

The same principle appears in everyday global work. A meeting that falls conveniently within one employee’s workday may require someone else to join early in the morning or late at night. Employees may also enter global experiences with differences in language fluency, travel demands and familiarity with organizational norms. Cultural expectations, caregiving responsibilities and comfort challenging authority can create additional differences in how people experience the same workplace.

Culturally agile leaders learn to notice those different starting points and consider how others might experience the same situation differently. Organizations can build that habit directly into leadership development. Before launching a global meeting, program, offsite or team initiative, leaders can consider whose perspective shaped the design and where unintended barriers might exist. Considering these questions early can help leaders spot potential barriers before the experience is already underway.

Create the Culture Together

Global teams can intentionally establish shared expectations so that no single location or group defines how everyone should work. Employees don’t have to abandon their existing working styles. Instead, the team can determine which practices will allow people with different perspectives and cultural norms to contribute effectively.

That might include deciding how meetings will be facilitated and where decisions will be documented. Teams can also discuss how disagreement should be raised, when asynchronous input makes sense and what response times are reasonable across time zones. These conversations create space for employees who may communicate and contribute differently. These discussions are especially valuable when a team first forms, but they should continue as the team evolves. People join and leave. Projects change, and practices that worked six months ago may no longer work.

One approach is to ask global teams to develop a short working agreement and revisit it after 60 or 90 days. Beyond checking whether the agreement is working, leaders can ask a more revealing question: What assumptions did the team make about one another that turned out not to be true?
That reflection turns everyday collaboration into development.

Cultural Agility Starts Before the Airport

International assignments and travel will continue to provide valuable developmental experiences. Organizations, however, do not have to wait for an employee to board a plane before developing the ability to lead across cultures. Those experiences are already happening in virtual meetings, global projects and difficult conversations. They happen when expectations compete and in everyday moments when colleagues discover that what feels completely normal to one person may feel very different to another.

Organizations can help employees recognize those moments and learn from them. They can make invisible assumptions visible, design with different starting points in mind and give teams the opportunity to create shared ways of working.

Cultural agility does not begin with a passport. It begins with recognizing that the way a team has always worked may be only one way of working.