One of the things I like most about my role as Chief of Staff is the cultural aspect of it. Having the opportunity to travel to different Regions, and to the Market Units within them, I get to see how the same global program gets executed differently depending on where you stand.
Most recently that meant two weeks on the road:
- four days in the Americas Region, in the North America West Market Unit (August 4 to 7), followed by
- five days in the APAC Region, in the ANZ Market Unit (August 9 to 13).
I posted about both legs on LinkedIn while I was there: a great day with customers and partners in North America West, and a great week down under in ANZ.
A Framework for What I Was Seeing
In Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map (PublicAffairs, 2014), she argues that most cross-cultural friction is not a personality clash, it is two cultures sitting in different places on a small number of scales, and that a culture can be similar to another on one scale (how directly people communicate, for example) and be its near-opposite on another (how directly people give feedback).
Meyer maps eight of these scales. I am not using them here to reduce North America West or ANZ to a stereotype, she is explicit that the scales describe tendencies at a population level, not individuals, but they gave me a useful lens for why the same global program needed a different playbook in each Market Unit.
| Scale | One End | The Other End |
|---|---|---|
| Communicating | Low-context: say precisely what you mean | High-context: meaning is layered and often implied |
| Evaluating | Direct: negative feedback given frankly | Indirect: negative feedback softened, wrapped in positives |
| Persuading | Applications-first: lead with the example | Principles-first: lead with the theory |
| Leading | Egalitarian: the boss is a facilitator among equals | Hierarchical: status matters, decisions flow from the top |
| Deciding | Consensual: the group decides by agreement | Top-down: an individual decides, usually the boss |
| Trusting | Task-based: trust is earned through reliable work | Relationship-based: trust is earned through time together |
| Disagreeing | Confrontational: open disagreement is healthy | Avoids confrontation: disagreement stays private |
| Scheduling | Linear-time: one thing at a time, the plan holds | Flexible-time: many things at once, the plan adapts |
North America West: Direct, Fast, and Wrapped in Positivity
Four days with customers and partners in North America West confirmed what Meyer’s research says about the US: low-context and fast-moving, but not as bluntly direct on the evaluating scale as the communicating scale would suggest.
Feedback in the room came wrapped in a positive frame, praise first, the concern folded in gently, praise again on the way out, what Meyer calls the feedback sandwich. Meetings were egalitarian, anyone could jump in, and decisions leaned individual: whoever owned the outcome owned the call. Trust was task-based and fast to extend, deliver in the room once and you were in.
ANZ: Just as Direct, in a Completely Different Register
A week later, in ANZ, the register changed even though several scales looked similar on paper.
Communication was still low-context, but evaluating was noticeably more direct, closer to blunt, feedback given straight, no sandwich required, and nobody seemed to expect one.
Leading was, if anything, even more flatly egalitarian: Australia and New Zealand’s well-known discomfort with anyone acting above the group, sometimes called tall poppy syndrome, showed up as genuine allergy to hierarchy in the room. Trust, though, took longer to earn on paper and shorter in practice: it ran through humor and informality before it ran through the agenda, you built the relationship in the first ten minutes of banter, then got to work.
Same Program, Different Playbook
The program itself does not change: one deck, one set of KPIs, one narrative from headquarters. What changes, Market Unit to Market Unit, is how you land it. In North America (West), I got straight to the business case and let people push back mid-meeting, wrapped in enough positive framing that the pushback never felt personal. In ANZ, I earned the room first, expected the pushback to arrive with a joke attached, and learned quickly not to mistake the informality for a lack of rigor.
| Region | Market Unit | Dates | What Stood Out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Americas | North America West | Aug 4-7 | Fast, egalitarian, feedback wrapped in positive framing |
| APAC | ANZ | Aug 9-13 | Blunt feedback, strong anti-hierarchy, trust built through humor |
Why This Matters
A Chief of Staff role sits at the intersection of strategy and execution, and execution is where culture actually bites. The same slide that lands as confident in North America (West) can land as tone-deaf in ANZ if it skips the humor and goes straight to hierarchy.
I have written before about the physical toll of a heavy travel calendar in How to keep energized despite heavy travels, but the cultural recalibration between Market Units is its own kind of energy management: you are not just changing time zones, you are changing the operating system you lead with.
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