Beyond Diversity Metrics: How Global Leaders Can Build Multicultural Companies

Drawing on decades of German-Japanese business experience, veteran CEO Stefan Sacre shares his practical strategies for cultural integration.

Somewhere between (German-speaking) Switzerland’s direct communication style and the Japanese approach of layered interaction lies the secret to leading global teams. Stefan Sacre spent nearly 30 years finding and refining it.

The path to that discovery wasn’t straight. Through four round-trips between Europe and Japan, leadership roles at industrial giants like Bosch Rexroth, Freudenberg, and his experience as former CEO at Carl Zeiss Japan, Sacre learned that managing global teams is less about mastering individual cultures and more about building a shared one.

“If you want to hire the best people, you cannot afford to have a monoculture,” he tells GLOBIS.

Leveraging multiculturalism into a competitive advantage requires both strategic vision and practical frameworks. To understand how leaders can make this happen, here are Sacre’s actionable insights from three decades of bridging European and Japanese business practices.

The Talent Imperative

The most compelling argument for multicultural teams starts with talent acquisition. “If you restrict yourself in any way, be it by passports or by color, or whatever, you are excluding potentially a major part of the global talent pool,” Sacre points out.

This is particularly critical in sectors facing skilled worker shortages. The STEM sector exemplifies this challenge. “Many countries are suffering from a deficit of educated STEM students,” he points out. “If you don’t consider countries with active talent pools in both quantity and quality, you risk falling behind.”

While acknowledging the operational complexities inherent in managing multicultural teams, Sacre emphasizes that benefits must outweigh practical costs to drive sustainable value. “Managing a multicultural company is more challenging,” he acknowledges. “It makes things easier if you have got all the same type of people around you. This type of diverse background is a kind of cost to the company, and therefore it needs to be compensated by the bigger benefits.”

Group size matters. For leaders, smaller groups are more advantageous for identifying and managing different backgrounds. But a few management principles can help further reduce the scope for friction.

• Ask team members to write down thoughts before meetings or in discussions to ensure all voices are heard and to avoid speaking competitions in meetings
• Define clear roles and goals: everyone should know their part in the bigger picture
• Build trust, mutual learning and esprit de corps through informal team activities that can serve as icebreakers: from coffee chats to team games

Breaking Through Groupthink

The benefits of diverse teams extend beyond access to talent. “Decisions get better,” Sacre explains. “There’s a risk of coming to wrong decisions if you just have a collection of the same type of people around you. It potentially makes meetings very fast, and everybody agrees very easily. But diversity is meant to give more options, and also raise more concerns.”

This perspective proves particularly valuable in addressing organizational patterns, as companies often struggle due to “sticking to old patterns and not seeing the signs of the time.” A diverse team composition helps organizations identify and overcome such operational blind spots by developing a variety of options for leaders to explore.

The key, Sacre suggests, lies in actively encouraging different perspectives during the decision-making processes, particularly by asking each team member directly for input and leaving more time for closing discussions. A simple but powerful rule guides this process – the leader speaks last – ensuring every voice is heard.

Managing Communication Patterns

Communication pattern variations present significant operational challenges, particularly in German-Japanese business contexts. Germany, together with (German-speaking) Switzerland, ranks on the one extreme of being explicit in wording. “There’s literally nothing in between the lines,” Sacre illustrates. “Japan’s on the complete other side, where your true intention is sometimes wrapped into many layers.”

These divergences intensify during high-pressure situations. “If things are getting kind of tight, German people perhaps start talking more, Japanese people start talking less, then the communication breaks down,” he notes. Likewise, while Germans can tend to take direct critical feedback as constructive, Japanese workers may take it more personally.

His practical solution is decisive: pause meetings before they become counterproductive, switch to written communication, or reschedule for another day. This simple but effective approach can help teams navigate cultural communication challenges. He also notes that leaders with cross-cultural experience can be better placed to anticipate misunderstandings and act on them.

The good news is that cultural awareness has evolved significantly over the last two decades. “The German guy comes to Japan and bows while the Japanese guy extends his hand for a handshake, both trying to anticipate what the other expects,” Sacre observes. This mutual effort to bridge gaps, even when it creates awkward moments, shows how far cross-cultural communication has come.

Measuring Success

Traditional nationality-based diversity measurements require strategic refinement, Sacre advises. “Foreigners who are in Japan for a long time often show surprisingly little diversity from Japanese thinking,” he says, highlighting that true diversity manifests through varied perspectives rather than different passports.

Success in multicultural integration demands comprehensive performance indicators. “The long-term measure is the success of the company,” he proposes, recommending interim metrics including employee satisfaction surveys and staff referral rates. “Look at whether your own team members are recommending the company as a good place to work to their friends,” he suggests.

Implemented properly, these metrics can provide tangible evidence of cultural integration success while avoiding the trap of superficial diversity statistics.

The Path Forward

Rather than attempting to prevent all cultural misunderstandings, Sacre advocates framing them as learning opportunities. “This is not a disaster, but this is a new experience for all of us to learn, a kind of common cultural discovery journey,” he maintains. “The more mistakes you make, the more you improve. I think your own capability is the sum of all your mistakes.”

Currently serving as director for management consulting company 4a Plus and Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Management, GLOBIS University, Sacre continues to champion this balanced approach to multicultural leadership. His experience suggests that success in global business requires neither perfect cultural understanding nor flawless performance metrics, but rather the wisdom to build bridges between them.

As companies increasingly compete for global talent, this ability to create unified cultures while preserving diverse perspectives may well determine which organizations thrive in the decades ahead.