CONNECT TRUST CARE E-Book

Melanie von Groll

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 191

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Make intercultural collaboration work: Through vivid examples, simple models, and cool business visuals, this book shows how to lead and co-create effectively across cultures.

Leseprobe

MELANIE VON GROLL

CONNECT

TRUST

CARE

Melanie von Groll

CONNECT

TRUST

CARE

Hacks for Intercultural Leadership and Co-Creation

ELISABON MEDIA

This English edition is published by ELISABON MEDIA and

translated by Melanie von Groll.

The original German edition Connect Trust Care. Hacks für interkulturelle Führung und Co-Creation was first published in November 2024 by

Verlag Franz Vahlen GmbH, Munich.

elisabon-media.com

ISBN Print: 978-3-912396-00-3

ISBN E-Book (ePub): 978-3-912396-01-0

© 2025 ELISABON MEDIA, c/o Campuservice GmbH,

Rossertstraße 2, 60323 Frankfurt am Main

E-Mail: [email protected]

Printing & Binding: tredition.com

Layout and Typesetting: Jana Schlosser

Cover Artwork and Illustrations: Roberto Ferraro

All rights of use are reserved.

The publisher also retains the right to make reproductions

of this work for text and data mining purposes.

Verlag: ELISABON MEDIA

Druck und Distribution im Auftrag des Verlags:

tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Deutschland

Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Für die Inhalte ist der Verlag verantwortlich. Jede Verwertung ist ohne seine Zustimmung unzulässig. Die Publikation und Verbreitung erfolgen im Auftrag des Verlags, zu erreichen unter: ELISABON MEDIA, Rossertstr. 2, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany.

Kontaktadresse nach EU-Produktsicherheitsverordnung: [email protected]

To Flora – wherever you are.

Your way of seeing me was the best introduction to this diverse world.

Sawubona.*

* This is a greeting in Zulu, often translated as

“I see you and by seeing you I bring you into being.”

As Brené Brown shares in her TED Talk The Power of Vulnerability (2010):

“In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.”

Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

BEFORE YOU DIVE IN

I. Check-In

II. Connect. Trust. Care.

1 Communicating

MEXICAN INVITATION

2 Disagreeing

3 Persuading

4 Trusting

5 Evaluating

6 Leading

7 Deciding

8 Scheduling

9 Attract, Engage, Retain – Create Jobs People Love

III. Check-Out

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Illustrator

CONNECT TRUST CARE

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Introduction

About the Illustrator

CONNECT TRUST CARE

Cover

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INTRODUCTION

Dear Leader,

It’s a pleasure to meet you here! If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking for a solution that works – one you can apply in your business, with your team. Maybe you’re juggling several challenges right now, and the pressure is on. If so, you’re in the right place.

High-performing teams, motivated people playing to their strengths, and leaders who achieve bold goals together with them – that’s the gold standard. And it’s the measure of a leader’s success. Yet most leaders I’ve met weren’t fully prepared for this role – and lacked the support to grow into it. Perhaps you’re unsure how to unite a diverse mix of personalities, perspectives, and working styles. Or how to balance interpersonal challenges while still hitting ambitious targets – the kind that can affect both your bonus and your next career step.

This book will help. I bring together key lessons on leadership and collaboration with Erin Meyer’s intercultural framework1, adding practical, proven tools. In the real world, these elements never appear separately – they always come at you all at once. Especially in international teams. Here, you’ll find an approach that works with that reality, not against it.

Let me break this down. Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD Business School and specialist in intercultural management, published The Culture Map in 2014.2 She identified eight dimensions that describe how people worldwide work together – from communication and trust to leadership, feedback, and meeting styles. Each dimension sits on a scale with opposite tendencies at either end. By plotting different cultures on these scales, Meyer reveals their preferred ways of working.

For many in international business, it’s a genuine eye-opener. It explains cultural behaviour in concrete business situations – and shows leaders how to bridge those gaps in their teams. That alone can make life much easier. But the real story doesn’t stop there.

Recognising and bridging intercultural differences is not enough. Your team will only feel truly engaged when they know they are working in a safe, trusting environment – one where they are free to take risks, make mistakes, and learn. This is psychological safety. A practical route to achieving it is David Rock’s SCARF model, which captures five universal psychological needs at work: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.3

I link the universality of SCARF with Meyer’s Culture Map and add complementary models that extend her framework. The result is a comprehensive, connected approach to leadership – one that works across cultures and meets people’s deepest workplace needs.

Here, you have a clear, practical framework to help you lead effectively while delivering results. When people feel valued and motivated to grow, they will choose to work with you – because you support them and stretch them. That’s how you create loyalty: to you, to your team, and to your organisation. In today’s job market, skills shortages and employee retention are among the most pressing issues businesses face.

And yes – this book is still highly relevant even if your organisation works mainly in a national market and your team isn’t culturally diverse. True monocultural teams are rare these days, and even they contain a wide range of diversity – gender, age, background, identity, ability, worldview, mindset, work style, and experience, to name a few.4

Meyer’s intercultural dimensions can be applied to all these aspects of diversity. Understanding the two ends of any given scale will help you find a balanced approach that works – because you’ve trained your thinking to reconcile opposing tendencies.

BEFORE YOU DIVE IN

You can read this book cover to cover, or dip into it chapter by chapter as a reference. If you read it in one go, you may notice some repetition. This is unavoidable – it comes from the cross-references created by interlinking the models. If you read the chapters individually, the summaries will give you all the key points you need for understanding and practical application.

To prepare you for the surprises and pitfalls that can arise when working with other cultures, I will take you on my own personal journey. My experiences as a child, a student, and later as an independent consultant in leadership and organisational development have taken me from South Africa to Germany, via Mexico and Spain – across different continents, cultures, languages, and climates.

Although I had always considered myself open-minded, adaptable, and easy-going because of my background, I found that in my international career I repeatedly reached my limits – often more than I care to admit. These moments were frequent enough to make me want to write this book. Had I been able to draw on the insights you will find here earlier in my career, many things would have been far easier.

Of course, what I share here is my subjective experience. You may have encountered similar situations but interpreted them differently. Even so, I hope this personal perspective will help you find your own way into the subject – and perhaps avoid some of the challenges I faced.

To bring each of Meyer’s dimensions to life, I start with a story. Once you’ve been drawn into the situation, I’ll show you where it sits on Meyer’s Culture Map, so you can see exactly how it fits into the bigger picture.

Next come YOUR KEY TAKEAWAYS, where I give you concrete ways to work with that dimension in your role. Then we move to ZOOM – the part where we go deeper. Here, I connect Meyer’s concept with another framework that complements it. Why? Because leadership challenges rarely come one at a time. They arrive together, often in unexpected combinations.

That’s why this book exists: to help you manage these overlapping demands with confidence. The ZOOM HACKS turn insight into action, and the SUMMARY at the end of each chapter captures the essence in just a few lines.

Enjoy the journey – and take from it what works best for you.

I.

CHECK-IN

Flora’s stories were fireworks for my senses. Whenever she told me something, her whole body joined in. Her arms painted great pictures in the air, every part of her was in motion. Her voice was deep, her eyes sparkled. The clicks of her language lined up like glass marbles racing along a track, each eager to overtake the next. I marvelled at what she said, utterly spellbound. And when she laughed, pulled me onto her lap, and rocked me back and forth, I knew the story had ended well – just as it always did.

Back then, I had no idea how deeply this closeness and vitality would shape my life – nor how much I would one day miss her warmth and the vivid colours of her world. Flora had been by my side for as long as I could remember. She looked after me and my two brothers. We lived in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was only in Germany, many years later, that I realised Flora and I hadn’t actually spoken the same language – at least not in the strict sense. As a child, I never noticed. Even now I wonder why I can remember her stories in such detail. What had I truly understood, and what had she actually told me? For the bond between us, it seems, that was never the point.

I can recall only vaguely the moment of leaving South Africa. As a child, I didn’t understand the magnitude of it all: the house packed into boxes, saying goodbye to Flora and to friends. There was no real farewell. I suppose I thought I was just going away for a while. I had no idea that one chapter of my life was ending for good, and a new one was about to begin.

I remember the night flight to Germany with great clarity. We watched a film – remarkable in itself, as we children had grown up without a television. Films were therefore doubly striking to us. In those days, passengers didn’t have individual screens in the seat in front, nor could they choose what to watch. Every few rows there was a large screen, towards which everyone craned their necks. We were seated right there – in front of the great screen itself. Someone in the film had a nosebleed. Huge blood on a huge screen. I felt almost part of the scene – as if the blood might drip straight down onto me. I shuddered. I didn’t want to go to Germany. It was far too disgusting.

When we arrived, it was winter. Winter in the late seventies. It was dark and cold – colder than anything I had ever known. It rained most of the time, and sometimes it never seemed to get light at all. We now lived in a small village in Lower Saxony. When we walked along the street, people would pull back their curtains to get a better look at us, pointing their fingers: Those are the ones from Africa. It was a strange feeling. And where, I wondered, was Flora?

At that time, I was preoccupied with noticing the contrasts between my two worlds, constantly comparing the old with the new. True, it was no longer warm, the days never seemed to grow properly light, and people rarely smiled. But I had my very own bicycle. Orange! And I was allowed to ride it to school on my own. That was new to me – in South Africa, our playground had been limited to our own garden. Now we were even allowed to walk alone to the little shop at the end of the street and spend our pocket money on sheets of edible rice paper. All by ourselves! Germany, I began to think, had its charms too. And yet, I struggled to feel I belonged – and in truth, I never really did, not even in the years to come. Too much of what I loved was absent: the warmth, the embrace of life, the colours, the playfulness. I finished school, enrolled at university in Freiburg, and knew that at the first opportunity, I wanted to go abroad. Anywhere at all.

As so often in my life, serendipity played its part. During a lecture, I met a middle-aged Mexican with deep roots in his country’s cultural life. He knew the dean of a Mexican university and helped me draft a letter. I didn’t speak Spanish. There was no formal exchange programme with my university in Freiburg. But in Mexico, personal connections matter more than bureaucratic barriers – especially when those connections are at the very top. The reply came quickly. My parents, though far from keen, made it financially possible, and I was free to begin my adventure.

When I landed in Mexico City, I had no idea how to get my suitcase. I couldn’t speak the language or read the signs. So I simply followed the crowd from my flight, hoping they were heading for the right baggage belt. Outside, it was already darkening, though it was still early evening in midsummer. The noise hit me straight away – louder than in Germany, and brighter too. People laughed, shouted to each other, and greetings were effusive when friends or family managed to slip in through the arrivals doors to meet those still waiting for their bags. Finally, my suitcase appeared, and I made my way out. For the international airport of one of the most crowded cities in the world, the place felt small, even cosy – nothing like the huge, bewildering terminal I had imagined. Still, I was excited, overtired, and overwhelmed. Everything sounded, smelt, and looked different. I stepped out into the darkness. The night had fallen completely. I inhaled deeply – and caught my breath. It was not only that the air was thin at more than 2,000 metres. It bit sharply in my lungs as though it had come straight from a truck’s exhaust pipe.

II.

How to inspire people in cross-cultural teams

CONNECT. TRUST. CARE.

1 COMMUNICATING

My university was located in Puebla, about a two-hour drive south-east of Mexico City. The Universidad de las Américas Puebla was a campus-style university inspired by the American model. Access to the grounds was controlled by gates and security staff at the entrance. Wide pathways lined with plants and flowers connected the various faculties with central facilities like cafeterias, libraries, student residences, large assembly halls, and sports areas. The gently curved, subtly decorated one-storey buildings in natural tones, with their many archways, created a warm and welcoming atmosphere. And on clear days, visible in the distance at the edge of the Mexican highlands: the snow-capped peak of Popocatépetl, soaring over 5,000 metres, with its characteristic plume of white smoke. Until, a year later, a sudden eruption of ash – after decades of inactivity – covered the entire campus.

In the first few weeks, I was very quiet and spoke little. I couldn’t yet express myself in Spanish, and many people didn’t understand English well. When the semester began and I took my seat in class, I was just glad I had found the right room. At the end of the first week, a student from the International Office went from class to class, checking attendance lists against course registrations. I had already noticed him in the days before, as he seemed to turn up in every class I’d enrolled in. And always, someone appeared to be missing. He called out the name ELISABON, but once again, no one responded. He asked the lecturers if everyone was present or if someone was missing. Then he looked at his list again, glanced around the room and said loudly and clearly, “ELISABON. Is she here? She must be here.”

What a beautiful name, I thought. Sounds like the German version of the Portuguese capital – Lissabon – only pronounced a little more softly in Mexican Spanish: Elisabon. I hadn’t known that Elisabon could also be a girl’s name. Paris, Ireland, Florence – fair enough. But Elisabon? Rather charming, actually.

It went on for quite a while; he didn’t give up easily.

ELISABON. He clearly wouldn’t leave until he had identified her. Then it occurred to me – he was referring to me. I hadn’t recognised myself. I raised my hand slowly and said quietly in English, “I think that’s me.” Everyone turned to look, and some laughed. They were probably thinking, ‘You don’t recognise your own name?’ As it turned out, the Mexicans had creatively abbreviated my full name – Melanie Eva Elisabeth – by taking ‘Elisa’ from the final first name and combining it with the first part of my double surname, pronounced in Mexican style: VON became BON. And so, ELISABON was born. Not exactly obvious. I wasn’t able to explain any of this at the time, so I just let it be. But from that point on, everyone in my courses knew who I was. The one who didn’t know her own name. But they smiled kindly. That helped.

It took me a few weeks to properly adjust to my new surroundings. My Spanish was improving in the beginner’s class – I was starting to follow most of it, and slowly I began to speak. I shared my campus room with a Mexican student called Mónica, who was studying psychology. Moni was full of expression and energy. Mornings took her a while – hair perfectly blow-dried, make-up done to the last detail – always with red nails, oversized earrings, and lipstick, even for bedtime. She was about the same age as me, in her early twenties, and had recently met someone at a social event. She was already talking seriously about marrying him. They’d only seen each other a few times, never just the two of them. Occasionally we’d go shopping together, and she would look for pretty things for her wedding chest. At first, I thought she was having a laugh, but she couldn’t have meant it more sincerely.

After six months, I felt truly at home. I knew every corner of the campus by then, was managing my university courses well, and felt happy in the shared accommodation with my Mexican roommate , with whom I could now chat fluently. I sometimes went to the market in the neighbouring village, Cholula, and in many ways, I already felt quite Mexican. I had fully adopted the tone of voice, body language, and even clothing style. At last, even my height seemed to fit in – unlike in Germany, I was no longer the shortest around. Unfortunately, my blonde appearance continued to reveal me immediately as a gringa, which I found frustrating. American girls were popular with Mexican men, always present at parties and generally seen as approachable. They received a lot of attention as a result. As soon as I explained I wasn’t American, the next hopeful guess was Swedish. Swedish girls were even more sought-after than Americans – seen as adventurous and good drinkers, according to the stereotype. I ended up identifying myself as South African. That came with no particular expectations, which made things much easier. Still, I found myself scanning the supermarket shelves for dark hair dye. There wasn’t any – but the selection for blondes was huge.

A few friends of mine – all of them guys – didn’t live on campus but just outside it, in flats along the main road leading to Cholula. It was cheaper, not subject to access restrictions, and for that reason, my housemates chose not to mention it to their parents at all. Paradoxical but true: the better I became at speaking the language, the more misunderstandings seemed to occur. The following story is a good example of just how different communication styles can be.

MEXICAN INVITATION

“What is it about Mexico that interests you – what would you like to see?” asked Alex one day, a dark-haired guy with curls and a strong presence, part of the group I often hung out with. I didn’t really know much of the country yet – just the university, Cholula and Puebla. “I don’t know,” I said, vaguely, hoping he might offer a suggestion, “what’s out there?” Today it seems almost unthinkable, but in the early ’90s the world was still analogue. Travellers relied on guidebooks or people with local knowledge. I’d found exactly such a person. Alex, who studied communications, had a captivating energy, was at the centre of every party, and known for his vivid storytelling. He was a chilango, born and raised in Mexico City. It didn’t take him long to paint me a whole picture: markets, squares, events, parks, museums, the UNAM, floating gardens, pyramids. Each one came with a colourful description. As he mentioned the pyramids last, that’s what stuck with me.