From Tokyo to Toronto: What Global Leaders Know That Locals Don’t
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Mar 30
- 5 min read
If you’ve never led outside your home country, you’re missing out on one of the most potent leadership accelerators available today: working abroad.
Not vacationing. Not expat-light stints where everyone speaks your language and the office feels just like home. We’re talking about being deeply embedded in another culture—leading diverse teams, managing unspoken tensions, and learning through real friction and failure.
Because here’s the truth: most leadership frameworks are built for domestic success. But leadership in a global context is a whole other ball game.
What You Learn Abroad That You Can’t Learn at Home
Local leadership often runs on cultural autopilot. You know the shorthand: when to speak up, how decisions are made, and how power is expressed. But take that playbook to Tokyo, where decisions are consensus-driven and silence carries weight—and suddenly, you're out of your depth.
Or walk into a boardroom in Toronto, where directness is welcomed, but psychological safety is sacred. What worked back home might now read as tone-deaf, aggressive—or worse, irrelevant.
I was born and raised in Turkey, where hierarchy is respected and hospitality is a leadership tool. In the U.S., I learned how to claim space and speak up—loudly. In France, I experienced a culture where direct feedback, sometimes considered 'rude' by other cultures, is a sign of care—not conflict. And in Ireland, my adopted home of over a decade, I’ve learned that humour, humility, and community often speak louder than credentials.
Living, working, and leading across cultures hasn’t just shaped how I show up—it’s transformed how I listen, influence, and build trust.
I See This Firsthand with the Global Leaders I Coach
Today, I work with dozens of expat leaders—CEOs scaling startups across borders, mid-level managers navigating new markets, and newly relocated professionals trying to find their footing. They’re incredibly capable—and often incredibly overwhelmed.
The leadership strengths that earned them promotions in one country often fall flat in another.
But with the right focus and support, these leaders often outperform their peers. They become culture-bridgers, translators, and trust-builders—precisely because they’ve been forced to adapt, stretch, and lead beyond the obvious.
Five Lessons I Learned From My Intercultural Career Journey:
You’re not as self-aware as you think. You only realize how culturally conditioned your instincts are when they stop working.
Leadership isn’t universal. Eye contact, assertiveness, and feedback styles mean wildly different things depending on where you are.
Trust travels slowly. And it looks different in every culture. In some places, it’s built through credentials. In others, through dinners.
The best leaders are translators. They bridge worlds—linguistically, emotionally, and strategically.
Executive presence isn’t about commanding attention—it’s about creating space. Especially for those who feel like outsiders.
What Is Cultural Intelligence (CQ)?
Cultural intelligence means more than cultural awareness. It’s the ability to adapt your behavior, communication style, and leadership approach in real-time when working with people who think and operate differently than you do.
CQ consists of four key capabilities:
Drive: Your interest and motivation to work across cultures
Knowledge: Your understanding of how cultures influence behavior and systems
Strategy: Your ability to make sense of diverse cultural situations
Action: Your capacity to adapt your behavior accordingly
High CQ leaders are more agile, more inclusive, and more effective in today’s globally connected, hybrid, and diverse work environments.
The Global Research Is Clear
A Journal of Social Issues study found that cultural intelligence (CQ) is a stronger predictor of cross-border leadership success than IQ or EQ. Another meta-analysis of 728 expatriate and 9,995 domestic managers (Kostal, Wiernik, amp; Ones, 2017) found that expat leaders tend to have significantly more diverse leadership experience—especially in high-risk situations, strategic decision-making, and interpersonal challenges.
In particular, the study showed that expatriate leaders had stronger experience profiles in areas like:
Crisis management and critical decision-making
Project execution under complex, uncertain conditions
Navigating interpersonal conflict in unfamiliar or high-stakes environments
Strategy development in cross-border contexts
The research further revealed that expatriate leaders often outperform local leaders in environments with high cultural diversity. Their cross-border exposure gives them a faster learning curve when adapting to new teams and expectations. While local leaders eventually catch up with experience, expats tend to “hit the ground running” in diverse team settings.
In other words, cultural intelligence is a bottom-line leadership edge—one that directly impacts performance, trust, and results in global teams.
Why It Matters Now
Companies are globalizing more and more every day. Even those with headquarters in a single country increasingly have clients, teammates, or partners across borders. Remote and hybrid work have only accelerated this shift.
Yet many leadership development programs are still built on Western-centric models that assume cultural uniformity. That assumption is costing companies dearly:
Lost trust and fractured collaboration
Misaligned goals and communication breakdowns
Poor retention of high-potential global talent
Leadership churn and stalled succession pipelines
As the world globalizes, our approach to leadership must globalize with it.
How to Build Cultural Intelligence (CQ)
You don’t need to move to Tokyo tomorrow. But if you’re serious about being a high-impact leader:
Seek out cross-cultural team leadership roles
Invest in CQ training and coaching
Watch for your own default assumptions—and interrogate them
Read authors outside your cultural frame (start with Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map)
Surround yourself with people who think differently
Because in a world where remote is default and diversity is reality, leadership isn’t just about leading people like you.
Leading across cultures demands nuance, adaptability, and awareness.
The leaders who master this and build true global fluency not only have an edge in leading multi-cultural teams but also they lead with sharper insight, greater empathy, and stronger influence across complex systems.
They’re quicker to read the room, navigate tension, and align people from different backgrounds around a common goal.
Organizations that invest in building CQ in their leaders position themselves strategically to thrive across borders, navigate complexity with confidence, and lead with cultural depth in every market.
Want to equip your leaders with real global fluency? I help organizations build culturally intelligent, high-performing teams.
Here are six ways you can connect with me:
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