The not so culturally intelligent colleague - a true story
You are a sales representative for a large global software company in United Kingdom. You consider yourself culturally intelligent as you have worked in many countries around the world in many different industries. Imagine you going to a sales meeting with a potentially new promising client. You will bring your colleague along with you to the meeting because she possess valuable industry knowledge and have experience from previous projects. You are well prepared. You know your products fit the client's need. The person who you are going to have the meeting with is an italian engineer, who is in charge of this project. You know your price is right and you know you have a good reputation. So you feel confident about the meeting and our colleague can easily cover all the more technical questions the client might have. You are already thinking about how to celebrate this new deal - Champagne with colleagues.
You arrive at the meeting a bit too late and as you are about to apologise for the delay your colleague interrupts you and say it is ok to be late when you have meetings with italians as they are always late themselves. You are chocked and you can see your host is something between confused and angry. You finally manage to express your apologies as you walk towards the meeting room from the reception. But you can already feel that this meeting is going in the wrong direction. You colleague keeps talking about her vacation in Italy - how dreadful and inefficient the service was at the restaurants.
Minutes later when you do your sales presentation you can see that your host is not even paying attention and when you are finished there are no questions or comments. You are escorted to the exit of the building without a word - except your colleagu who keeps talking about all the great features of your product and that she will start working on the agreement. At the door your colleague gives your host her business card. On your way out to the parking lot you can see that he throws your colleague's business card in the bin in the reception before going back to his office.
Why can things like these even happen?
The above story is true and was told to us (Gugin) by the sales representative when we facilitated a number of cultural intelligence workshops for her company. We were brought in because they wanted to avoid things like the above ever to happen again. But why did it happen in the first place? The sales representative's colleague wasn't deliberately trying to obstruct the deal. Unfortunately we couldn't interview her as she got fired shortly after this incident as there had been several other incidents like this with her. The sales representative told us that her ex-colleague didn't feel she was doing anything wrong. She felt, that by telling the annekdotes about her vacation in Italy she would bond better with the Italian guy with whom they were going to have a meeting. She also said that even the italians were complaining about the ineffective service at the restaurants so she didn't feel there was anything wrong in telling an italian in a foreign country.
This incident happened because she had no cultural intelligence. She assumed that everything she found amusing everybody else would find amusing as well. Furthermore she was only focused on talking and paid no attention to what was being said (or not said in this case) and she didn't pay any attention to the non-verbal communication.
Unfortunately this happens a lot and I am almost certain that you - the reader - can recall stories in the same category from either your professional or private life.
From a HR and business perspective it is far from sufficient to make that people have the proper professional qualifications. They also need to possess very good interpersonal skills and a high level of cultural intelligence. Are they not culturally intelligent then there is a very high risk of having them obstructing valuable deals and business opportunities with all the best intentions.
How can we check if our colleagues are cultural intelligent?
Cultural Intelligence is about entertaining a thought or an idea without having to accept it. It is quite challenging but very rewarding once you master it. When you are culturally intelligent you also know and acknowledge that there are as many realities as there are human being. There are not 2 human being that share the same set of realities. This also means that the "I am right - you are wrong" approach soon will make you very lonely.
So you have to look for signs that a person accepts that there are more than one (equally valuable) reality. Another characteristic about culturally intelligent people is that they tend to focus more on the commonalities than the differences when they meet new people. And they don't stereotype!
To test that capability you can use the image below that we have created.
Are you Cultural Intelligent?
Ask a person what he or she sees first. Give them only a couple of seconds to answer. It is about getting the first impression. If the see 3 different colors first their brain focuses on the differences before the commonalities. If they see 3 squares first then their brain focuses on the commonalities before the differences.
This will give you a brief indication of how culturally intelligent a person is - but only a glimpse. In the Gugin workshops we use several different tools to assess cultural intelligence. The one above is entertaining too and easy to use to test your colleagues, friends and family for fun.
What separates a good leader from one who truly moves people? Research — and decades of cultural intelligence practice — point to one word: charisma. And unlike talent, charisma can be learned.
In 1979, Warner Records refused to send Prince on tour. Not because of his music — they knew he was exceptional — but because he lacked charisma. He couldn't yet move an audience. Fast forward one year, and Prince had transformed himself into one of the most commanding performers in the history of popular music. He didn't wait for charisma to arrive. He worked at it, systematically, studying and adopting the techniques of the performers he admired.
That story is not just about rock and roll. It is a precise metaphor for leadership. At Gugin, we have spent over two decades helping leaders across cultures and industries make exactly this kind of transformation — not by telling them to "be more confident," but by equipping them with concrete, learnable strategies rooted in emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence, and communication science.
Why Most Charisma Advice Fails
The most common advice leaders receive about charisma is frustratingly vague: project confidence, be warm, be present. These qualities do matter. But they are nearly impossible to "just do" on command, especially under pressure, across cultures, or in unfamiliar organisational contexts.
Research by Professor John Antonakis and his colleagues at the University of Lausanne Business School has shown that charisma is not a personality trait reserved for the few — it is a set of communicative behaviours that can be identified, taught, and practised. In their studies, randomly selected middle managers who underwent structured charisma training were subsequently rated by peers and subordinates as more charismatic, more competent, and more trustworthy. The training worked.
At Gugin, we have built on this science and gone further — weaving it together with emotional intelligence (EQ) and cultural intelligence (CQ) to create a leadership development approach that is both evidence-based and globally applicable.
The Nine Charismatic Behaviours — And What They Really Require
The Antonakis research identifies nine concrete charismatic leadership tactics: using metaphors and stories, showing moral conviction, expressing shared feelings, setting high expectations, using contrast and rhetorical questions, using lists, and animating communication with body language. These are the building blocks. But building blocks need a foundation — and that foundation is emotional and cultural intelligence.
Take metaphors, for example. A metaphor is only powerful if it resonates with the audience. In Gugin's cross-cultural leadership programmes, leaders quickly discover that a metaphor drawn from American sports culture may fall flat in a team from Northern Europe, and that a story invoking individual heroism may alienate a collectivist audience in East Asia. The charismatic tactic is the same; the cultural calibration is everything.
The same applies to moral conviction. Appealing to shared values is one of the most potent charismatic tools a leader has. But whose values? Which moral frameworks? A leader operating across multiple cultural contexts must understand that concepts like fairness, loyalty, duty, and hierarchy carry profoundly different weight in different cultures. High cultural intelligence — the ability to read, respect, and adapt to cultural difference — is what allows a leader to express genuine moral conviction that actually connects rather than alienates.
Emotional Intelligence: The Inner Architecture of Charisma
Charisma without emotional grounding is performance. It can work in the short term, but it rarely sustains trust. The leaders Gugin works with are taught to understand that emotional intelligence is not a soft supplement to charismatic leadership — it is its inner architecture.
Consider the tactic of expressing shared feelings. Antonakis identifies this as key: when a leader says "I feel the same uncertainty you do, and here is how I am holding it," they build identification and trust. But this requires real self-awareness. Leaders must be able to name and regulate their own emotional states before they can credibly reflect the emotions of others. In Gugin's programmes, we invest significant time in developing exactly this capacity — helping leaders identify their emotional triggers, understand how their inner states broadcast outward, and build the emotional vocabulary needed to communicate with authenticity.
Empathy — a core dimension of emotional intelligence — also directly underpins several charismatic behaviours. Setting high expectations while simultaneously communicating belief in others (another of the Antonakis tactics) requires a leader who genuinely sees the potential in the people around them. That kind of seeing is empathic. It cannot be faked over time. When Prince produced the band The Time for Warner Brothers, he did not simply demand excellence — he made each member believe they were capable of more than they thought. That is emotionally intelligent leadership in action.
Cultural Intelligence: Charisma That Travels
One of the most important — and most overlooked — dimensions of charismatic leadership in today's world is its cultural portability. A leader who is magnetic in one cultural context may be perceived as arrogant, shallow, or inappropriate in another. This is not a flaw in those audiences. It is a signal that charisma, like all communication, is culturally embedded.
Gugin's work in over 60 countries has shown us that the nine charismatic tactics are universal in their structure but must be culturally adapted in their expression. Rhetorical questions, for instance, invite participation and create anticipation — but their delivery must match the power-distance norms of the audience. In high-hierarchy cultures, a rhetorical question from a senior leader may silence a room rather than energise it. In low-hierarchy cultures, it may spark exactly the engagement intended. Cultural intelligence tells the leader which dynamic they are working in, and how to adjust.
Similarly, the use of storytelling — one of the most powerful charismatic tools — varies enormously across cultures in terms of what stories are appropriate, how direct or indirect they should be, and what kinds of protagonists resonate. Gugin teaches leaders to build a culturally diverse repertoire of stories and to develop the sensitivity to know which story belongs in which room.
How Gugin Trains Charismatic Leaders
Gugin's leadership development programmes integrate the science of charismatic communication with structured development in emotional and cultural intelligence. The process is iterative and experiential, not theoretical.
Leaders begin by gaining honest self-awareness: understanding how they are currently perceived, what emotional signals they project under pressure, and how their default communication style reads across cultures. This foundation phase often surfaces important blind spots — the technically brilliant executive who speaks too abstractly to inspire, the empathetic manager whose conflict-avoidance reads as a lack of conviction.
From there, leaders move into skill-building: practising charismatic communication tactics in safe, structured environments with real feedback. They learn to craft metaphors that carry cultural resonance, to tell personal stories that build connection without oversharing, to use contrast and rhetorical structure to sharpen their message. They receive coaching on non-verbal communication — the body language, vocal variety, and presence that Antonakis identifies as essential to bringing charisma alive.
Finally, leaders apply these skills in live contexts, with coaching support, and receive 360-degree feedback that tracks their progress. This mirrors the approach Antonakis found to be effective — group training combined with individual coaching — and embeds it within the broader cultural and emotional intelligence framework that makes the development durable and globally relevant.
Charisma as a Leadership Responsibility
There is a deeper point worth making. Charisma is not about making yourself more impressive. At its best, it is about making others feel seen, energised, and capable of more than they believed. It is about communicating in a way that bridges difference, builds shared purpose, and creates the conditions for people to do their best work.
In a world where leaders must navigate unprecedented complexity — technological disruption, geopolitical volatility, multi-generational and multicultural workforces — the ability to communicate with clarity, conviction, and emotional resonance is not optional. It is a strategic capability.
Prince didn't work on his charisma because he wanted to be famous. He worked on it because he knew, instinctively, that the music mattered — and that without the ability to connect, the music would never reach the people it was meant for.
The same is true of leadership. The work matters. Charisma is what carries it across.
About Gugin | Gugin is a global advisory firm specialising in cultural and emotional intelligence. We help organisations build the leadership capability to thrive in a complex, multicultural world. Learn more at www.gugin.com
