5 minutes read

The biggest mistake international leaders make isn’t ignoring culture anymore. They already know that Germans value preparation, Italians thrive on relationships, and the Dutch are remarkably direct.

The biggest is assuming that success is transferable without understanding context.

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I still remember one particular conversation from early in my career. I was 26 when a regional director came to Bulgaria with a very simple message:

“This is how we do it in Italy. Let’s copy/paste here, and it will work.”

At first, it sounded reasonable. After all, if something works in one country, why shouldn’t it work in another? Except it doesn’t, or at least not always.

And certainly not when the markets, customers, politics, economy, expectations and ways of working are fundamentally different.

Even back then, with far less experience than I have today, I remember thinking that something about this approach felt deeply wrong.

It was that failure to understand context.

Great leadership doesn’t travel by default.

Today, this challenge is becoming increasingly common. Organizations are consolidating markets, expanding regional responsibilities, and creating international leadership roles at an unprecedented pace.

A country manager suddenly becomes responsible for three countries or a regional director inherits five different cultures. A leader who has spent twenty years succeeding in one market is now expected to replicate that success across an entire region.

The assumption is simple:

“If you’re an excellent leader in one country, you’ll naturally become an excellent international leader.”

In reality, that’s rarely how it works.

International leadership is not simply a promotion. It’s an entirely different capability.

Context always wins.

One of the biggest misconceptions in leadership is believing that people need to be managed in the same way everywhere. They don’t.

Some cultures expect direct feedback. Others perceive the same behavior as disrespectful. Some teams appreciate autonomy. Others initially expect much more guidance. Some organizations reward fast decisions. Others value consensus before action.

The goal isn’t to become a different leader in every country but to remain consistent in your values while adapting your leadership to the context.

That distinction makes a huge change.

What we teach leaders at SISTEMMA

When we work with newly appointed regional leaders, we don’t teach them cultural stereotypes but we focus on how to diagnose a system before trying to improve it.

Some of the questions we encourage leaders to ask before making any major changes include:

• What makes people successful in this organization today?
• Which behaviours are rewarded—and which ones are quietly discouraged?
• How are decisions actually made, beyond the organizational chart?
• What motivates people here: autonomy, security, recognition, achievement or something else?
• Which practices exist because they truly create value, and which survive simply because “this is how we’ve always done it”?
• If I changed nothing for the next 30 days and only observed, what patterns would I notice?

One of the most valuable leadership skills isn’t making faster decisions, but rather resisting the temptation to make them before you truly understand the environment you’re leading.

The best international leaders spend less time introducing their own methods and more time learning how the system already works.

Only then do they begin changing it.

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Recently, our trusted partner Anastasia Stoyanova-Dragoeva published an entire book dedicated to this topic: Leading in Context.

It couldn’t be more relevant.

If you work across countries, cultures, or international teams, we genuinely recommend reading the full book.

You can order the printed edition in Bulgaria by sending us a direct message here.
The Kindle edition is available worldwide on Amazon here.

I’m also particularly proud that I had the privilege of writing the endorsement featured on the back cover.

But before you dive into the book, we asked Anastasia one simple question:

If you could give one practical piece of advice to a leader who has just taken responsibility for multiple countries, what would it be?

Excellence Perspective by

Anastasia Stoyanova-Dragoeva

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Understanding people begins with understanding the context that shapes their choices, influences their behaviour and gives meaning to their actions.

One of the greatest leadership risks lies in reaching conclusions before we have developed a sufficiently deep understanding of the context in which those conclusions will unfold.

Every context emerges from the interaction of multiple layers, including the organization’s history, strategy, business model, market conditions, customer expectations, leadership legacy, decision-making patterns, informal networks, relationships, levels of trust and the many unwritten assumptions that quietly influence everyday behaviour.

A leader’s presence creates the conditions for perceiving those layers with greater clarity. Presence brings together attention, curiosity and awareness, allowing leaders to notice what is not immediately visible, to recognize the assumptions shaping their own thinking and to explore questions such as: Which parts of this context remain invisible to me? Which assumptions am I bringing from previous experiences? Which layers have I not yet understood well enough to anticipate the consequences of my decisions?

Leadership ultimately depends on the depth of our perception and on our willingness to understand the context before we attempt to reshape it, enabling wiser decisions whose impact reaches far beyond ourselves and shapes the work, opportunities and future of many people.

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Final thought

The higher leaders climb, the more they discover that leadership isn’t about having the right answers but about asking better questions in unfamiliar environments.

Because what works in Italy may fail in Bulgaria; what inspires a team in Romania may frustrate one in Greece; and what made you successful in one country might be exactly what heavily limits you in another.

Great international leaders shouldn’t export best practices but learn the context first and build excellence from there.