When your team sits in Johannesburg, Nairobi and Lusaka, the work may be the same but the context is not. Different public holidays, languages, ways of showing respect and expectations of a manager all shape how your message lands.

Leading across countries starts with noticing your own defaults. If you are used to quick, direct decisions, a colleague who checks with their own manager first may look slow to you, when they are simply following what good practice looks like where they work. Treat these differences as information, not as problems to fix, and remember that individuals vary as much as countries do.

Make the unwritten rules visible

Most friction in multi-country teams comes from assumptions nobody has said out loud: how quickly a reply should come, who can challenge a decision, and whether a “yes” in a meeting means agreement or simply “I heard you”. Agree a short set of working norms as a team and write them down. Revisit them when someone new joins.

A workplace example

Try this in practice

1. Map the context: each location’s time zone, working week, main public and religious holidays, and working languages.
2. Agree three team norms together: response times, how decisions are made, and how to disagree.
3. Rotate who speaks first in meetings, so it is not always the head-office voice.
4. Ask people to summarise next steps in their own words.
5. Hold regular one-to-ones with each location, not only group calls.

Avoid the head-office trap

Teams often drift into treating the largest office as the default. Decisions get made in corridor conversations, and other locations hear about them later. Share the reasons behind decisions, credit local expertise visibly, and ask before assuming that a process that works in one country will work in another. In the EQ at Work method, this is the Understand step applied to a whole team.

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