When faced with a dysfunctional cross-cultural team we may immediately assume that the cultural differences are the source of the trouble. The Napoleon or layer cake model gives a useful approach to examining the complexity of teams and helps in finding the right angle to take when 'fixing' the team. Fredrik Fogelberg of Nomadic Life explains.

If you order a ‘Napoleon’ in a cake shop in Sweden or Norway, you will be served a layer cake. More poetically, in southern Europe, it is called a ‘mille foglio’ (Italy), or ‘mille feuilles’ (France). The more skilled the baker the finer the cake will be and the more layers it will contain.

The Napoleon is used as a metaphor in this article to help describe and understand the international or virtual team, which is more than just a mix of national cultures.

Defining diversity

Since the late nineties, 'diversity', which has long been a hot topic in North America, has been on the agenda of Human Resources managers in many European corporations. Originally, the term referred to ethnic and racial differences in the workplace. Over the years, the definition has been broadened to encompass a wealth of other differences including gender, occupational background and individual personalities.

This is consistent with our findings; that over-emphasizing cultural differences in a team is one sided and does not lead to the desired results.

Describing the international team using the Napoleon cake model

The thick crust at the base of the cake: The common purpose

When analysing a team first start by looking at its reason for existence. Ask, 'what is this group trying to accomplish?'

A team is a group of individuals working on a common purpose. Repeated research has shown us that the secret to a strong team is a clear common purpose and the identification by each member with that group task (Miller, Katzenbach).

The wafer thin layers of pastry: Cross-cultural differences

Classic authors on cross-cultural aspects of leadership, such as Hall, Hofstede and Trompenaars have emphasized the importance of looking at cross-cultural differences within a team. In the 1980’s, notably Hofstede’s work opened many people’s eyes to important differences in management style, by popularizing concepts such as 'power distance' and 'individualism'.

Since then, related books have become popular reading material and seminars on cross-cultural management have proliferated. It has become mainstream to recognize cultural differences and use them as a framework for explaining team dynamics.

Further thin layers: Individual differences

Peer Gynt described our personality as an onion: when you peel it, you find layer after layer and finally there is no core in the middle; you end up (when peeling onions) shedding tears with empty hands.

Many of the differences that team members bring to a team, are rooted in their personality structure and not in their cultural background. As put by an American psychotherapist in France: ‘an asshole is an asshole in any culture’.

Looking at international teams only from a cross-cultural perspective, we may well fool ourselves into being overly politically correct and as a result show patience for universally ‘bad behaviour’. Cultural difference is not an excuse for misbehaving.

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator, based on Carl Jung’s model of personality type, is a useful instrument for observing individual differences. It gives insight into the constructive use of differences within an international or a mono-cultural team.

The model is based on personality preferences and recognizes the unique contribution of each personality type. Teams tend to benefit from the model as it focuses on what each member brings to the team rather than condemning certain types of behaviour.

Mille feuilles: Other cultural identities

Other ‘partial’ identities that members bring to a team tend to be somewhat underrated in terms of their impact. These include professional identity, gender, sexual orientation, social class and educational background. The cake has as many layers as you are willing to handle.

André Laurent from the French business institute Insead, gives an elegant example of professional identity overriding the impact of national culture. Laurent looked at finance professionals from France and Germany, working for the same multinational corporation, and found them to be more similar in their behaviour than a sample of French finance and French marketing professionals working for diverse companies. This shows how misleading it can be to only look through the lens of national culture.

The following quote from The Art of Travel by Alain De Bottom illustrates well the complexity of cultural identity:

“Ever since he was a boy Flaubert had the habit of denying he was a Frenchman. He deeply detested his home country and fellow countrymen, and had a lifelong yearning for Egypt. He proposed a new way of determining a person’s nationality: not based on the place you are born or the family you come from, but on one’s longing for particular places.

It was only logical for Flaubert to stretch this theory of development of identity to gender and species, so that at one time he declared that in essence he was a camel, a bear and a woman. ‘I feel like buying a painting of a bear, having it framed, hanging it in my bedroom and calling it ‘Portrait of Gustave Flaubert’ in order to represent my moral condition and behaviour patterns’.”

You have a group of highly skilled individuals, who are eager to achieve something together - but somehow the work doesn’t get done, time is wasted, competition within the group begins, games are being played.

You may have experienced or observed this unexpected and irrational phenomenon that creeps into a group and keeps a team from doing its work. As well as their rational side, people bring their other more irrational sides to work with include emotions, primitive ideas and feelings, which can distract the group from the task at hand.

The butter: Systems, procedures and controls

The fatty agent in a pastry keeps all the elements together, and gives it a smooth texture. For any team to function well, there need to be procedures: 'how do we do things around here?' 'How do we communicate?'. And, along with these procedures, systems such as budgeting, project planning and ICT, and control are needed.

Often teams have engaged in teambuilding efforts but later analysis shows that the main problem was the systems not supporting the team’s purpose, which has little to do with cross-cultural or interpersonal issues.

The icing on the cake: The leadership qualities

Successful international management takes a fair degree of life experience. Competencies such as openness, ability to deal with ambiguity, patience, resilience and humour are often quoted by researchers as key to international success and clearly are not learnt at business school.

Wide experience - especially hardship (and recovering from it) - are the best teachers. As CEO of Unilever, Antony Burgmans, states in a recent interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad: “it took us most of the last century to create the cross-cultural awareness that we now have in the management structure."

Developing leadership can also be described using the layer cake model: gradually adding one layer to another as the experience builds up. The international dimension is a particularly delicate and challenging layer to build on top of the leadership skills needed in a mono-cultural environment.

Putting cross-cultural models into practice

In our coaching work with leaders we encounter many executives who struggle with managing international teams, be they virtual or in one location. We have therefore used the layer-cake model to help identify the factors that are of importance for the performance of the team.

Often clients tell us that they have studied cross-cultural models but that they do not really help them to solve their problems and increase the performance of the team in hand. Seminars on cross-cultural management can be useful as an eye-opener but are far too limited in scope to solve the real business issues.

Caution is necessary when consultants or models propose linear solutions to team problems through addressing only one distinct layer or section of the cake. A simple solution may sound very tempting, but over simplifying complexity will generally not yield the wanted results.

Summary

Organizations often have to depend heavily on cross-cultural teams, which, in many cases are geographically dispersed. With diversity being one of the buzzwords of this decade, with emphasis on the cross-cultural aspect, we may look all to quickly from this angle when faced with a dysfunctional team, whether from the manager's or the consultant's viewpoint.

The Napoleon or layer cake model can help us to find the right angle to take when 'fixing' the team.

September 2003

Fredrik Fogelberg is managing partner of Nomadic Life management consultants (www.nomadiclife.nl), which specialises in management and organization development in a cross-cultural context. Nomadic Life is Netherlands-based with associates across Europe. Fogelberg works in six languages.