An international workforce brings knowledge into your business that a single-culture team cannot. Whether that knowledge reaches your decisions depends on choices made at the top: the working language, who holds authority, and how an objection travels to the people who sign.
Andy Demir | Qalbur Perspective | People & Culture | 12 minute read
Executive Summary
Diversity gives you access to different perspectives, but the research does not promise an automatic performance dividend. The return comes when the people who run the organisation give relevant knowledge a fair route into decisions, keep its meaning intact across languages and close with commitments everyone understands. Drawing on two management books and current research, this essay identifies four stages at which a contribution can be lost: access, interpretation, influence, and commitment. It looks at how language shapes status and promotion, Europe's recruitment pressures, and the limits of AI translation. My suggestion is to examine one real decision process at a time and judge it by its consequences.
In This Article
- When agreement leaves room for misunderstanding
- The dividend needs a more careful business case
- Where participation loses its value
- Language can become an informal promotion criterion
- Europe requires local diagnosis
- AI translation changes the work, but leaves judgement
- Shared standards still matter
- What senior leaders should consider
- Questions for the Boardroom
- The capability a company can actually use
- References
When agreement leaves room for misunderstanding
An international team can agree a strategy and still leave the meeting with different ideas of what has been authorised. One person hears a commitment, another hears a proposal that still needs consultation, and a third decides that raising a reservation in front of the regional director would be out of place. The presentation may have been clear, and you still have no common decision.
Most organisations file this under communication, but the consequences show up in places you do measure: a tender goes ahead on an untested assumption, a delivery concern arrives too late, or an experienced colleague loses influence because their judgement travels less easily through the company's working language. My argument is that cross-cultural leadership earns its place on the executive agenda when it improves how knowledge informs decisions and how commitments translate into action.
I have lived in Turkey, the UAE, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Those places give me context for this subject, but none of them makes a nationality a reliable guide to how an individual will behave. The more useful starting point is the particular team in front of you: who holds authority, who is expected to speak, and under what conditions people can contribute.
Two older books help from different sides. In The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off (2013), the consultants Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan examine the distance between inclusive intentions and what organisations actually do. In Bridging the Culture Gap: A Practical Guide to International Business Communication (second edition, 2008), Penny Carté and Chris Fox explore how expectations about language, hierarchy and negotiation shape understanding. Together they raise two questions your executive committee should be able to answer: can people contribute, and does their contribution survive interpretation?
The dividend needs a more careful business case
Kaplan and Donovan's lasting contribution is their attention to insiders and outsiders, the in-groups and out-groups every organisation has, and to change at the individual, group and organisational levels. You can sincerely welcome difference while your recruitment, promotion, and customer-facing practices continue to reward familiarity. Awareness helps, but the decisions your organisation repeats, including the ones you sign off on, determine whose capabilities it actually uses.
The broader promise that diverse teams reliably perform better needs qualifying. A 2024 registered-report meta-analysis by Lukas Wallrich and colleagues combined 615 reports and 2,638 effect sizes. Demographic, job-related and cognitive diversity were each positively related to team performance, but the average effects were small. They were stronger where the work was complex or called for creativity and innovation, and in cultural contexts with lower power distance and lower collectivism.
The study measures team diversity, so it cannot tell you whether a particular inclusion programme works. What it does undermine is the habit of treating workforce composition as a performance guarantee. The commercial case becomes believable when you can name the mechanism: people who know a customer's market may improve a market-entry decision, and an engineer from a different tradition may spot a design assumption worth testing. My own reading of the power-distance finding, which the study does not test directly, is that the authority structure you build may decide whether diversity pays off at all.
Fair treatment also stands on its own, whatever its financial return. A person's access to opportunity should not depend on whether your finance team can attribute extra revenue to it. Keeping that commitment separate lets you test the commercial claims honestly, without making anyone's dignity depend on an optimistic business case.
Where participation loses its value
Here the two books meet. Combined, they provide a practical diagnostic with four stages, which I offer as my own synthesis rather than as a validated research model. Access asks whether the relevant people can contribute. Interpretation asks whether their meaning is understood. Influence asks whether their evidence can change the decision. Commitment asks whether the decision becomes a shared and authorised course of action.
The stages explain why a meeting can look inclusive and change nothing. A regional specialist gets an invitation but little time to prepare. Their objection, a specific customer constraint, is recorded in the minutes as a general concern, and the commercial proposal goes forward unchanged. Count attendance, and you will miss every one of those losses.
Influence is where you should look most closely, because consultation can easily become a ceremony. You remain entitled to reject an argument, but your decision process should show that it was examined against explicit criteria. When people keep providing useful evidence and never receive an answer they can follow, the invitation to speak loses its credibility. I would argue the tone is set at the top: when the executive committee visibly answers objections from the regions, people further down learn that raising them is worth the effort.
The cost will not appear in an inclusion score. Look instead for reworked proposals, avoidable escalations, wrong assumptions about local demand and departures of people whose expertise was underused. These are areas to investigate in your own business; neither the books nor the research cited here assigns a number to them.
Language can become an informal promotion criterion
Language is where this becomes personal for the people below you, and where it is easiest to miss from the top. Tsedal Neeley studied a French high-tech company that had made English its common working language. Non-native speakers experienced a loss of status, regardless of their actual fluency, and those who rated their own English as middling were the most anxious about their performance and job security. It is a qualitative study of one company, but it should give pause to anyone who has signed off an English-first policy: the decision is taken at the top, and the cost is carried quietly in meetings further down, in terms an engagement survey may never capture.
A fast meeting rewards verbal ease. Someone searching for a phrase needs a little time; someone who has misunderstood needs a way to ask again without looking slow; and without both, the team leaves more confident than its evidence justifies. In my view, the chair decides which habit wins, and the most senior person in the room sets the pace for everyone else.
Carté and Fox give a whole chapter to making yourself understood in English, and the principle still holds: keep the complexity of the decision while removing needless complexity from the way it is expressed. “Please confirm the delivery date and the assumptions behind it” travels further than “let's touch base and get everyone on the same page”. Executives set this house style more than any guideline does, so the board pack and the chief executive's emails are the place to start.
None of this makes language requirements illegitimate. Negotiating a contract, explaining a safety procedure or managing a local workforce can demand real proficiency. The judgement for you, and for whoever designs your selection and promotion criteria, is whether a requirement reflects the work, and whether an accent or slower phrasing is being read as evidence about capabilities the process never tested.
Europe requires local diagnosis
The economics make this more than a problem for multinationals. A Eurobarometer survey published by the European Commission on 1 June 2026 found that 46% of European small and medium-sized enterprises struggle to find workers with the right skills, while only about 14% had tried to hire from outside the EU in the previous two years. Language obstacles were among the main barriers they named, alongside administrative and immigration procedures. The figures describe a recruitment problem and say nothing about whether inclusion programmes solve it.
The European Labour Authority's 2025 EURES report on shortages and surpluses, launched in June 2026, adds that many shortages coexist with surpluses elsewhere in Europe, and that administrative barriers, language requirements and difficulties in recognising qualifications continue to hold back mobility. It resists the simple story that Europe is running out of people. Whether capability exists somewhere in Europe and whether your business can use it are different questions, and the second is yours.
A pan-European approach therefore needs more than a contrast between German directness and British understatement. If your work spans a Czech engineering operation, a Polish service centre, a French customer team and an Italian supplier, find out their actual responsibilities, working languages and approval routes; none of those locations tells you how a particular colleague will negotiate or handle disagreements. The same holds in Benelux, the Nordics, or Iberia, where a headquarters policy can travel easily between offices yet still leave frontline staff dependent on a local supervisor to explain it. Cultural familiarity at the executive level tells you little about whether the people doing the work have received instructions they can use.
Gulf-facing work gives you another reason to map authority directly. A cross-border team needs to know who can recommend, approve, and sign; how consultation happens; and what counts as an authorised commitment. Ask the counterpart organisation; an Arab name or an assumption about a region's relationship culture will not tell you.
The same caution applies to the books. Broad descriptions of how Europeans explain a delay, or which nationalities follow rules, are too sweeping to guide judgement about an individual. The lasting value of Bridging the Culture Gap lies in its invitation to investigate differences; its categories cease to be useful once they replace that investigation.
AI translation changes the work, but leaves judgement
AI translation and drafting tools can reduce the effort required to participate across languages. They also shift responsibility to whoever chooses, checks and summarises their output, and a fluent document makes a misunderstanding harder to spot because it no longer looks like a language problem.
A paper presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2025 found that the large language models it studied pushed translations towards a neutral style, losing cultural signals in how something is said, and did worse in non-Western languages. A separate study of culturally specific items in Flemish-to-Serbian literary translation found that the systems tested still struggled to balance cultural nuance with intelligibility. Both concern specific models and tasks; neither tells you how accurate the tool is in your own workflow today.
The practical point is that a tentative reservation, an urgent request and a politely worded refusal must still be distinguishable after translation. Where an AI-generated summary feeds a decision that reaches you or your board, keep the original contribution on file and ask its author to confirm their position has been fairly represented. That is a governance rule, and it needs an owner.
Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report, based on a survey of more than 9,000 business and HR leaders in 89 countries, argues that competitive advantage is shifting from technology, which can be copied, towards human adaptability, creativity and judgement. It gives context and does not measure cross-cultural performance. However much of the language work software takes on, deciding whose judgement counts stays with you.
Shared standards still matter
A credible critic would ask whether all this amounts to too much accommodation. International businesses need deadlines, clear performance expectations and decisions that hold. Reopening every issue in search of full agreement wears out the people responsible for delivery and gives persistent objectors more weight than their evidence deserves.
The critic is right about the boundary. Inclusion gives relevant evidence a fair chance to be considered; it does not hand anyone a veto or remove accountability. You can adapt the route by which a concern reaches you and still hold everyone to the same standard of evidence and the same obligation to carry out an authorised decision.
The trade-off is between the cost of examining and the cost of closing too early. High-consequence, unfamiliar decisions, such as a first contract in a new market, require more time to test meanings and assumptions, while routine work runs better with settled protocols. I lean towards a short delay before commitment wherever it is likely to prevent larger delays, disputes or rework later.
Training on its own offers limited assurance. A 2025 meta-review by Kun Zhao and colleagues, covering 37 reviews of workplace diversity and inclusion interventions, found that the effects of diversity training were largely limited to awareness and learning. If your answer to this problem is a course, expect modest results and look for changes in specific practices, because a completed course does not show that daily decisions have changed.
What senior leaders should consider
Begin with one recurring decision that has visible commercial consequences, such as a tender approval, a forecast review or a supplier escalation. Have someone trace how evidence enters it, whose interpretation reaches the final paper, and whether objections receive an answer. One real process examined closely will tell you more than another statement about values, and it gives the executive committee something concrete to fix.
For decisions taken in multilingual teams, set the standard from the top. Ask decision owners to circulate the question and essential evidence in advance, provide a written route for concerns, and close by confirming the decision, its conditions and each owner's understanding. Clarification has to become ordinary enough that nobody pays a price for asking, and your own behaviour in the meetings you chair is where people will look first.
Promotion and hiring need the same scrutiny, and the criteria are set at the top. If executive presence is a criterion, define the behaviour the role requires and gather evidence beyond a fast interview or a polished presentation. If customer-language proficiency matters, test it in the task where it matters. Clear criteria protect your standards and make familiarity a less convenient substitute for assessment.
Then hold the process accountable to business outcomes. Ask whether material concerns were resolved before approval, and read that alongside rework, late reversals and escalation patterns over time, checking for other explanations of any improvement. Representation and belonging measures remain useful, but on their own they cannot show that your organisation is making better decisions.
Questions for the Boardroom
- Which of our recurring decisions depends on local knowledge that rarely reaches the final approval paper?
- In hiring and promotion, how do we separate the language proficiency a role requires from a preference for familiar accents and presentation styles?
- When someone raises a material objection, what happens to it, and can its author see how it was weighed?
- Who confirms that an AI-generated translation or summary in a board paper still says what the contributor meant?
- Where would more examination before commitment cut the cost of rework afterwards?
The capability a company can actually use
Go back to the meeting at the start. It ends well only when people leave with a decision whose meaning and authority they understand. More voices help when your organisation can interpret what they say and give relevant evidence a route into judgement, which takes some patience before commitment and enough clarity to act afterwards.
Both books remain useful reads with those limits in mind. Inclusion points you towards the people and knowledge your company may be overlooking; cross-cultural communication shows how that knowledge travels. Bringing them together sits with the people who set the language policy, the promotion criteria and the rules for how decisions are made. The capability is often already inside your organisation, and whether it becomes capability the organisation can use is largely up to you.
References
- Kaplan, M., & Donovan, M. (2013). The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off. Bibliomotion. Publishers Weekly record
- Carté, P., & Fox, C. (2008). Bridging the Culture Gap: A Practical Guide to International Business Communication (2nd ed.). Kogan Page. Bibliographic record
- Wallrich, L., Opara, V., Wesołowska, M., Barnoth, D., & Yousefi, S. (2024). The relationship between team diversity and team performance: Reconciling promise and reality through a comprehensive meta-analysis registered report. Journal of Business and Psychology, 39, 1303–1354. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-024-09977-0
- Neeley, T. B. (2013). Language matters: Status loss and achieved status distinctions in global organisations. Organisation Science, 24(2), 476–497. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0739
- European Commission (2026, 1 June). Eurobarometer highlights obstacles and opportunities for European SMEs recruiting outside the EU. European Commission
- European Labour Authority (2026, 11 June). ELA launches 2025 EURES report highlighting structural labour shortages across Europe. European Labour Authority
- Havaldar, S., Stein, A., Wong, E., & Ungar, L. (2025). Towards style alignment in cross-cultural translation. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 32213–32230). ACL Anthology
- Budimir, B. (2025). The challenge of translating culture-specific items: Evaluating MT and LLMs compared to human translators. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1 (pp. 455–467). ACL Anthology
- Deloitte (2026). 2026 Global Human Capital Trends. Deloitte Insights
- Zhao, K., Hsieh, W., Faulkner, N., & Smith, L. (2025). A systematic meta-review of organisational diversity and inclusion interventions and their associated outcomes. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 44(9), 53–71. Griffith Research Online
About the Author
Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. Andy writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets and cultures.
