Cultural Intelligence for Global Leaders Masterclass
Overview
In a Gulf organisation a single team meeting can contain eight nationalities and four working cultures. The manager who leads it well is not the one with the strongest technical record. It is the one who can read a room that does not signal the way their own culture does.
This masterclass builds cultural intelligence as a practical leadership capability, not as sensitivity training. Delegates map their own cultural defaults, learn where those defaults quietly cost them, and practise adapting without becoming inauthentic.
The programme uses live case work drawn from regional business situations: negotiating across hierarchy expectations, giving difficult feedback where direct criticism is costly, and running meetings where silence means different things to different people.
What you will learn
- Map your own cultural defaults and their blind spots
- Recognise the dimensions on which working cultures actually differ
- Adapt communication style without losing authority or authenticity
- Give and receive difficult feedback across cultural expectations
- Run meetings where participation norms differ around the table
- Negotiate where hierarchy and face carry different weight
- Build trust in distributed and multinational teams
- Diagnose whether a team problem is cultural, structural or personal
Who should attend
This programme is designed for practitioners in the following roles.
- Senior and executive leadership
- Country and regional managers
- Heads of function and department
- Project and programme directors
- High-potential managers
- HR and talent leaders
Sectors
- All sectors
- Multinationals
- Joint ventures
- Government-linked entities
- Professional services
- Contracting
Programme agenda
Reading the room
- What cultural intelligence is, and what it is not
- The dimensions that genuinely predict workplace friction
- Self-assessment: mapping your own defaults
- Why competent managers misread capable teams
- High-context and low-context communication in practice
- Case exercise: decoding a meeting that went wrong
Leading across the difference
- Adapting style without becoming someone else
- Feedback where direct criticism carries a cost
- Hierarchy, face and how decisions really get made
- Building trust in distributed and multinational teams
- Negotiation across differing expectations of authority
- Case exercise: leading a team through a contested decision
- Personal action plan for the ninety days after the programme
Your facilitator
Industry Expert
This programme is delivered by a practising specialist with direct operating experience in the field, selected for the specific cohort. Facilitator details and a full biography are issued with the joining instructions once a session is confirmed.
Certification
Every delegate who completes the programme receives a ForumMinds certificate of completion, issued digitally within five working days of the final session. The certificate states the programme title, the delivery dates and the contact hours completed.
Others in this area
Run this for your own team
This programme can be delivered in-house at your premises and rebuilt around your equipment, processes and case material.