Leadership development upgraded with Cultural Intelligence

When a company goes international or merge with another company the leadership skills need to be upgraded in order to be able to tackle the new level of diversity. Gugin facilitates leadership development in small as well as large corporations, non-profit organisations and government agencies. Gugin has 11 years of experience in leadership development with the focus on giving the leaders the necessary tools for them to successfully manage, develop and lead multicultural teams. 2/3 of all mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their original objectives due to cultural clashes. This is a too high percentage and one of Gugin’s core objectives is to help our clients smoothly through that transition process. Preparing the leadership team is a crucial part of this.

Gugin’s Leadership development offerings include:

• Dedicated corporate training programs
• Workshops to address a specific management issue
• A set of cross-cultural management courses that can be integrated into the company’s existing curriculum
• e-Learning modules
• Open courses and workshops held at key locations around the world

Most cross-cultural training is outdated and harms your organization

A lot of the cross-cultural training is still focused around dividing people into national cultural clusters. In Gugin we believe that such a perspective create a lot of conflicts instead of promoting synergies and results. It is like if the only tool you can use is a hammer, then everything you see is a nail. When you see people as national stereotypes you start looking for characteristics that supports your learning. This way you focuses on the differences instead of the synergies between the differences. In Gugin we have a different view. First of all we have to acknowledge that each of us have many different identities, where the national identity is only one of them. And who says the national identity is the most dominant one. You as an individual decide for yourself which identity you want to flash at a given point in time. Most of the more than 100 integration assignments Gugin has been involved in the most significant challenges to resolve has been between different corporate- or profession cultures, not differences in the national cultures. That is why global leadership development has to be much more holistic than the old-fashioned division in national cultures. When you choose Gugin as your partner for leadership development you get a fresh approach based on experiences from hundreds of consulting assignments, thousands of hours of research and put together by a global team. Your organization has an untapped potential in taking advantage of the cultural diversity. It is like eating with a knife and a fork. They are two very distinct tools, but because you have the cultural intelligence you know how to use the knife in one way and the fork in another. Doing that together gives you the opportunity to eat a huge variety of food compared to eating with a pair of chopsticks. You can use this metaphor on our leadership development programs. We teach you how to take advantage of the cultural diversity in your organization in the broadest possible sense so that you will never again fall into the trap of cultural stereotyping.