How a leader must reframe their thinking ?

The four areas are: reframing, adaptive work, systems thinking, and consciousness

Reframing refers to a leader’s ability to understand the cultural context and attempt to reframe her thinking to allow for considerations of different perspectives that go beyond her initial impressions, which are inherently conditioned by her own cultural elements. The concept involves trying to move outside of our space of mindfulness and try to occupy different mindfulness that is outside of our original perspective. Leaders who are increasingly confronted with diverse contexts where many cultures intersect must use reframing as an approach to question their perspective, identify its shortcomings and embrace different perspectives to fully understand the nature of the cultural challenges she is facing. Reframing is full-time occupation given that it involves learning continuously about other perspectives in a meaningful way, but if the proper relationships are cultivated the leader will find useful information that will enable productive reframing and help her avoid cultural pitfalls as she tries to steer her team to success.

Adaptive work means confronting values and realities in a constructive way. The concept of adaptive work is to eliminate cognitive dissonances between values and attitudes and their alignment with acceptable behaviors in the relevant context. Adaptive work is a leader’s effort to go beyond simply reframing mindfulness and acting to challenge the team to identify and resolve inconsistencies in their attitudes and behaviors.

Systems thinking is the notion that a leader is responsible for developing points of convergence for the team to coalesce around so that they can function as an interdependent unit. The main concept for this approach is the sense of purpose that a leader can instill and that will help the team transcend its individual perspectives and adopt a system perspective which they all understand and can contribute to.

Consciousness is the most elevated of these approaches given that it considers a mindset where leaders are aware of self and others at various meaningful levels. Being conscious of what each level entails individually and collectively a culturally intelligent leader is able to strike the proper balances between what appear to be life paradoxes and accommodate various inputs and perspectives in so doing.  

A leader must begin by assessing what his own perspective is and determining what idiosyncratic elements are the result of his individual cultural perspective. He must then assess various cultural situations and structure strategies to shift from his identified perspective on the issue to another cultural perspective that is relevant in that situation.

A good example is how thermostats are set in office spaces. It turns out that the system and the regular settings are often determined by men. Since men and women are comfortable at different temperatures, women are often freezing in the office – not to mention the fact that male business attire usually includes a jacket. A culturally intelligent male leader would identify that his comfort with temperature is a function of being a man and would reframe his perspective trying to understand what it must be like to always feel cold in the office. The result would be a solution that accommodates everyone despite their unique perspective.  https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/chilly-at-work-a-decades-old-formula-may-be-to-blame.html

Power distance reduction training entails leader commitment and direction in order to apply adaptive work to challenge team notions of hierarchical links. People in high hierarchical positions need to apply with adaptive work to confront counterintuitive notions about their roles as supervisors and the nature of the relationships they have with their reports. A method to spur adaptive work in a structured way is to practice role-playing and reverse roles so that all parties can understand how hierarchical structures operate.

One of the main obstacles to organizational success is the notion that the organization itself and the organic links it contains are the purposes. Although this may seem systemic in that it can be a concept that all members of the team agree upon, it actually stands in the way of an effective organization. A cultural leader will identify the essence of an organization’s purpose and place that purpose front and center superseding any personal equities and attachments to authority. Ideally, when the leader can articulate clear purpose compellingly, the rest of the team will play down cultural elements irrelevant to the purpose and highlight their most constructive cultural attributes. Like the solar system, made up of planets of different sizes composed of different matters and masses circling the sun at different distances yet unified by the sun’s gravity, a team can become a system if they can find the right center of gravity around which everyone can turn harmoniously despite their differences.  

A culturally conscious leader constantly and proactively cultivates knowledge about different perspectives and is always looking for opportunities to create win-win outcomes for everyone involved. Although she may not always be acquiring information that is specifically relevant to every situation, she is always trying to engage with new experiences in ways where she learns deeper truths about cultural dynamics. A culturally conscious leader would never address an issue without challenging the intuitive assumptions that immediately arise in her mind about work situations. Culturally conscious leaders apply the knowledge they acquire to continuously assess their self and others, understand their limiting thoughts and behaviors and work to adopt optimal attitudes and actions that will maximize their success in various situations. Simply put, a culturally conscious leader has a more comprehensive perspective on key elements of the work environment that are essential to organizational success and she adapts her approach to respond to changes in the environment in a way that is culturally appropriate and, ultimately, most effective.