(upbeat music) Coming up on the Leadership Growth Podcast.(upbeat music)- As a leader, it is our ultimate focus and goal to lead because individuals that we are working with or are instructing want to have adoption of what we're talking about. You can't be a leader unless there's adoption of your leadership. How do you do that? You have to do that through communication. You have to do that throughout through the idea of seeing things through their own eyes, walking in their shoes, understanding those connective points that are readily apparent, and those that you need to dig down a little bit deeper into by having conversations and discussing. So again, back to this idea about assumptions. Stereotypes equally put groups in boxes that are disruptive towards true communication and towards true leadership.(upbeat music) Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast, where we talk about tools and ideas to help you grow your leadership capabilities. So today, we have a fantastic guest. Oh, and by the way, hi, I'm Daniel Stewart, joined as always by my wonderful brother, Peter Stewart. And our guest today, we're honored, especially because we can dive into a topic that is so relevant today. leading through cultural differences, looking at how we as leaders can manage and understand and strengthen our cultural competence, our cultural intelligence here. So Kerim Kfuri, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Leadership Growth Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it and looking forward to a very positive conversation about this important topic. Absolutely. OK, folks, so let me just share a brief background bio for Kerim. Fantastic background, ideal to then dive into this topic. So for more than two decades, Kerim Kfuri has served as president CEO of the Atlas Network, a global supply chain enterprise offering comprehensive end-to-end services. He is a thought leader, public speaker, author of "Supply Chain Ups and Downs." Go check it out, "Supply Chain Ups and Downs." And the founder of the "Supply & Demand Show" on YouTube. You need to go check that out too. He makes an otherwise boring industry sound fun, and those are his words. So you need to go, okay. He holds a BA in finance, international business and marketing from Washington University in St. Louis, an MBA in business law and finance from American University, and an artificial intelligence and business strategy certification from MIT. So Kerim, again, fantastic to have you join us. So here is a beginning question for you. When you hear the topic, leading through global differences, what comes to your mind as you hear that? What comes to my mind? Right off the bat, it's all about learning who you're working with. It is all about understanding the other side and a true vested interest in trying to determine what makes the other side the other side and where those differences may lie. And those differences could be wide ranging and significant or in some ways, very minimal and inconsequential, but could lead to big impacts, depends upon what we're really talking about. But more than anything else, I think it comes down to looking at understanding and mutual understanding. This is how we start to lead through differences. And the key there is understanding, communication, collaboration. These are key factors to sort of bridge those differences and those divides.- I think that's such a key part is you're looking at that perspective of understanding. As you think about that and as we interact with others, we all have our biases and we have assumptions. How do you help ensure that our assumptions are not leading and directing our interactions, but truly a quest for understanding?- The short answer is no assumptions.(laughs) The reality of it is, is that I believe when it comes to leading with differences, cultural differences and globally, you really have to have a, you know, when in Rome do as the Romans do type of mentality. You need to go into this as a student of the process because any biases that you come into such a process with, will only disrupt the ability to truly make connections and to therefore truly create scenarios of proper communication. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that the street doesn't go both ways, and you can't be learning as well as teaching, because both of those are important and create levels of value between the parties involved. But you want to come into all of these kinds of scenarios with a very open mind, a very open heart, willingness to learn, and as little biases as possible, because it only just disrupts or creates obstacles towards probably your end goal. So let's go one more step. How do you balance the stories that we will already tell ourselves? And it's almost like two different kinds of stories. One is a story, and I love how you're talking about understanding the differences of the other person, because there's always going to be somebody else. And so on the one hand, we might go in with a very ethnocentric, very egocentric perspective, and that's the story that we're saying. What we know is the right approach, clearly, because that's what we do, and you, the other, needs to adapt. The other is maybe just as bad, I don't know. It's when you think you do know the other person. And, oh, I've been to that country, or I've worked with people from that general area, or something, and I know how it works, trust me. And you have a very distinct idea— how do you, in both of those cases, balance and keep that openness to keep learning? because we ain't got it. You know, it's not, we never know all that we need to know. Anyway, how do you balance that to stay open to learn?- I think the key is to be ever curious. You need to start with the right mentality from the very, very beginning. And it really comes down to these fundamentals that our parents taught us at a young age of you know what it means to assume something. You know, it makes a something out of me and you, right, this ideology around assumptions and what they bring. It is extremely, extremely valuable to come into these types of relationships and these types of situations with a complete open-mindedness to regardless of what you know or have done historically, the willingness to learn and/or know how the other side operates and does what they do and how they do what they do and what their value sets are and so their morality, all of these different components that come together to really be able to get a true picture of how this relationship is going to go forward. And when you have that openness and you're not trying to sort of bend the other side to your will, you get a more accurate picture as to what the dynamics of that relationship are really going to look like. Because if you let it all loose and just kind of allow the other side to showcase for you what it is that they truly are, can do, are capable of and so on, you're either going to be surprised very quickly in a good way or you're going to be surprised very quickly in a bad way. But either way, you're going to get an appropriate filter. You're going to get an appropriate picture of what this really looks like, as opposed to coming into a scenario with a bunch of preconceived notions and saying,"Oh, you know, one day they'll get it," or "One day they'll figure out the way that we do things." That will never really showcase for you what that relationship is going to be, could be, could potentially be, because you're already putting it in some level of a preconceived box. And when it comes to this type of work, and it comes to this cross border or cross cultural relationships and creating leadership, you need to not be in a box. You need to understand what makes them tick, what makes yourself tick, and then figure out if there are dots that can be connected or not at all. But I feel like the more preconceived notions you come into with, the more assumptions you bring and sort of trying to paint the picture that you want to see, the less likely you're gonna get at what's the true fundamentals of that relationship.- Yeah, those core principles of curiosity are powerful. That seems to be a theme that comes up on many of these episodes, is we're trying to interact and understand this fellow human, or this fellow team of humans across a table, across an ocean, whatever it might be, what makes them tick. So I'm curious, Kerim, a little bit of— let's jump back into your backstory a little bit. Elementary school kids, as you interview them, typically they don't say, I'm going to go into supply chain or logistics.- Yes.- Like what led you to this field and why are you so passionate about it?- Well, I think most entrepreneurs don't have a straight forward path. They do a lot of different things and they sort of figure it out along the way. but there's some kind of a fundamental component that is going to allow them to be successful in their ultimate task, even though they may have done things that were in different industries or different interest areas, but something pulls it together. And for me, it was always languages and it was having a multicultural type of experience, being the son of immigrants, speaking many languages at home, being on my first plane when I was probably three or four months old, these things all sort of came together to give me a sense that the world was not just my city or my state or my country, but it was a much bigger type of place to live in and to operate within. And that began again from just my background, who I am, who I was. And then through time in my various experiences that I had both entrepreneurial and corporate, I always was a problem solver. I always was a person who was looking to find the best pathway forward, the more efficient outcome, the way to solve problems that may or may not even exist yet and connect the dots that many others may or may not see. Again, back to this curiosity side of things and not just being curious, but let's do something about these things that we find out that we determined through our curiosity. And this reverberated through, again, most of my life. Whether it was starting to sell blueberries on the street corner at a young age, or shirts in the mall, or creating my first dot com, or working in a consulting firm and creating new initiatives and programs, or at large scale regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, or NASD, where I built programs and created efficient protocols and so on. And ultimately, somewhere in your experiences, you start to connect those dots and say, I love tech and I love languages and people and cross border and efficiency and some level of regulation. And then you then start to apply it. Well, in my case, the industry was the supply chain because it had been overly fragmented for so long, continues to be disrupted very, very easily by things that are controllable and things that are not controllable and touches every single one of our lives in so many different ways. And we know that when we don't have toilet paper on the shelves. We know that when we can't get the products when we need them, or when there's major disruptions because of tariffs or a pandemic or whatever it may be. And I found this to be a very fascinating industry and pulling together these various experiences that I had both entrepreneurial and multicultural and business-wise, corporate and so forth to then apply it to this industry which continues to still have challenges, continues to still have disruptions because that's innate to what this industry is. And so I've spent more than two decades working on best practices, protocols, methodologies and now a lot of thought leadership and educational mechanisms to promote the thought processes and the ideas that I have stood by and have allowed us to be successful with for the past, more than two decades in this space.- That's such a great story to see how it emerges. And it's always fun when you look back on one's own story and you can see some of the paths. However, in the middle of it, you're like, I'm not sure what exactly.- You could never have planned it. You could never have been sitting in that one experience and that one situation and said, I know what I'm gonna do when I grow up. And it just never really works out that way. And for most entrepreneurs, it's exactly that way too. There's a divine hand that may be guiding you along this pathway, regardless of your belief systems, that you end up where you're supposed to end up and doing what you're supposed to do and, you know Part of that is who you are as a person because you could take two people and put them through exactly the same experiences and have them show up completely differently at the end. So a big part of that is who you are but you can't really plan this you really can't and I think that the more you try to the less ultimately successful you are and I don't even mean monetarily I mean, fulfillment being a key driver of success as well. Yeah. And so, what I love about what you're illustrating is how personalized so many of our own experiences are. And that actually is a great way of kind of getting at this topic of respecting the individuality of each person. And yet, we often as humans like shortcuts, we like generalizations, we like stereotypes because to a certain degree, it can help inform us. However, how do we find the balance between this? So for example, I was just talking with a client yesterday, a general manager over Europe. And you know, it's easy to say, yeah, our sales guys, our sales office in Denmark, well, you know, he is a Dane. Or you know, our Spanish office and well, you know, he is a Spaniard, you know, and those sorts of now in this case, he is very respectful of trying to know how to balance that while still being open to the individuality. However, that can be such a temptation for any of us to go too far and to use these stereotypes in an unhelpful way. So Kerim, how do you balance so that a leader can use some of this in both ways to his or her advantage? Don't read a book by its cover. Back to these simple ideas. It's this simple concept that regardless of a person's background and ethnicity and so on and so forth and experiences, each person has their own story. And they're either going to be as related to you as you could ever imagine, as if you are two brothers or sisters from just different parts of the planet, to completely polar opposites where you have nothing in common whatsoever. And it all comes through the great leveler, which is communication. And that is where you really be able to connect the dots and know exactly who and how and what each person's experiences are. And as a leader, it is our ultimate focus and goal to lead because individuals that we are working with or are instructing want to have adoption of what we're talking about. You can't be a leader unless there's adoption of your leadership. How do you do that? You have to do that through communication. You have to do that throughout through the idea of seeing things through their own eyes, walking in their shoes, understanding those connective points that are readily apparent and those that you need to dig down a little bit deeper into by having conversations and discussing. So again, back to this idea about assumptions, stereotypes equally put groups in boxes that are disruptive towards true communication and towards true leadership. And they're not helpful. And even though you may seek to have some kind of a more convenient manner by placing generalizations, as you said, in some ways, it ultimately backfires for you because we're not generalizations. We're each our own story. We each are our own human beings. And so that's pretty much what I can say about that.- Your comment, Kerim, I mean, so many great thoughts you're sharing, but that notion that communication is the great leveler. It's powerful. And so as I hear that, and I also think what many leaders I've worked with and coached and probably many listeners are saying, it's the yeah, but. Yeah, but now we have the great limiter, time. So what are tips that you could share with individuals that feel pressured? They feel like I don't have the time. How do you efficiently communicate and understand and build relationships?- Survey right off the bat. In other words, if you are trying to work with a group and you would like to just get a quick understanding of the things that make them tick and not be able to go into a significant conversation or be able to do the things that we would love to do more and more, which is sit down and have a meal with someone or have a conversation, you know, what otherwise, you send out a survey and you create it with the things that you believe to be the most important that you would get out of a conversation. What are the things that are most important to you with regards to this? What are some of the values that are most, you know, are critical? How do you feel about deadlines and timeframes? How do you feel about a quality process? I mean, whatever are the mechanisms that you would like out of a person so you know if you could work together and operate together and so on and get that information back. You know it's kind of like a pre-interview questionnaire and from there you quickly, efficiently as you said, can be able to say, "Hey, you know what? I don't like the way that they write this and I don't feel like they really kind of get what I'm trying to get at here and I don't see the key bullets that at least align with my value propositions and so forth. And that's a way to quickly be able to get a sense of things, I would say. I like this idea of survey. And whether it's an actual digital survey, or it's a few questions in an email, or it's even a phone call, the point is, there is some pre-work that can be done to learn and gather information instead of just going into the meeting with your own preconceived notions and then just like learning it in real time, which can sort of be done, but let's minimize some of this. And I love some of the questions that you were framing up. In fact, is there...-And I was going to say one more thing on this point. I also think that in those questions, You also need to have questions that are not so pointed, but those that actually allow the person to elaborate in a way that you can also get a sense of who they are or what they're all about without guiding it so much. So a question that's open-ended like that would say like,"What's the most important thing to you in your working relationships?" That's very open."What's the most important thing to you in your personal relationships?" Very open and allows you to kind of be like get a sense of who the person is and what they really care about as opposed to tell me about what metrics around this matter or how you deal with these kinds of problems or these issues to get a sense of their problem solving. I mean, there's different parts that you could tap into to be a little bit more formulaic about it or to be a little bit more, you know relationship based about the answers that are coming back Yeah. And building on that you may or may not have a suggestion around this. I just want to get you get your thoughts. Is there a good model, framework, you know, of like topics, like three or four or five topics that we should keep in mind to then just jog our thoughts around key points such as how we view time. Because how we view time and how we view deadlines is a fundamentally, often culturally informed approach. Another one is how direct are you comfortable in being in group settings or with me? Because that directness that has direct relationship with the individual versus collectivist nature. You know, I think of Hostetter or others in the past. Any kind of rule of thumb of different topics for us to keep in mind as we begin to survey either before or in the moment? I think it's more categories than topics because I think the topics end up being very industry specific and very product or whatever it may be. Like for example you discussed the matter of time. There are some industries that are about innovation that don't care about time. They say, "Hey, how do you view innovation?" And in this way, are you quick to market or are you coming up with the best solution? Those are two different methodologies on how to basically innovate. Quick pace type of scenario or quick innovation and prototyping or you know a lot of polling and testing and ideation and things of that nature. So I really think it comes down to larger scale categories and those categories I believe at the most general level are who are you as a person right and and some questions around how you gather that you know the person. How do you base, what do you value? What are your values? And then from a work standpoint, you know, output, production, efficiency, timeliness, so on, get a sense of that. And I think that between who they are and their value sets and their sort of like formulaic work process, those are the three big categories. And you could ask 50 questions or three questions within each one of these areas to then get a sense of, is this person and what they do and how it matters to people or them or otherwise, jive with what we're trying to do? Or are we even learning new things about the way that they do what they do that we don't even do? And in this way, we need to change our mentality about how we're going to work or operate in this market, especially if you pull different people from a similar region. Maybe you start getting a similar type of an idea or a trend that's running between them that you are totally missing. And I look at things like Euro Disney and these other business case scenarios that we've had in the past, where if it worked in the United States, it's gotta work over there, and you just miss the boat entirely with regards to the culture and with regards to the products and what they care about. And these people don't like really salty things or really sweet things or they look at the color red in a very negative way versus a color yellow. These different ideas that you could have never thought of or understood unless if you kind of asked questions first before sort of mandating a particular level of behavior or output or sort of creativity.- Yeah, I like that notion of categories of thought, areas to consider, areas where information would be helpful to determine the course of future progress and how the relationship can take place. And I think as you're proposing this idea of a survey, of asking the questions and those sorts of things, I think the way we set that up and kind of the background and the rationale for why we do that, I think is also going to play a factor into how that is received. It's not an assessment of, we're trying to determine who you are. It's a, I have a desire to work well with you. I wanna understand where you're coming from.- Yeah, no, I mean--- That's why I'm, there's a sincerity that needs to be in that process.- Absolutely, absolutely. It's not a, hey, do you get the job or do you not get the job? It's more of the nature of relationships are important. And because relationships are important, and that's our first step here, communication around what's important to you and the way that you like to do or do do the way you do things is key for us to know and understand. And by the way, give us your own survey. Let's have the road go both ways. We don't have to be in this situation of dominance. As a matter of fact, leadership today does not exist through exerting force and dominance. Rather, I believe it's more about being collaborative and communication and interconnectivity between people. So again, you get to that place of adoption. So to do that, they need to know about you, you need to know about them, and then everybody sort of figures out if this works or not. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because sometimes we can think that what we're talking about is really for when we have interactions with folks who are in a different country or speak a different language or look different than us in any way. And yet, how does this apply within our own country? Because some of these practices need to apply to somebody if you're in Chicago, you're calling to somebody in Atlanta, or you're in Orlando and you're talking to somebody in Sacramento. And each of these people have their own stories, and they may not have even grown up there, but that's where they were right now. Anyway, how do we take some of this and apply it to a domestic situation while still respecting cultural differences? Yes, I mean I think you that needs to be done during the interviewing process, especially when you're doing hiring. And I know that some companies like Google and some other large scale organizations like that take a long time to make hiring decisions because they do exactly that. They essentially say, hey, we're gonna have a first meeting just to kind of get to know you. Then we're gonna have another meeting, which is going to be about sort of a little deeper. Then we're going to get into a scenario with like a situational type of a meeting and then we're going to get into a meeting where it's not just one person one-on-one, it's like one-on-five in a group and see how you interact, talk and dialogue. And so you end up having five or six different quote-unquote interviews until they can truly get a sense of who you are and how you sort of operate and work. And there are companies that do a very extensive interviewing process to do this. This doesn't even just apply to the workforce, it also applies to some universities. You know, we all have children that are maybe of college age or getting close to it, and the interviewing process has also dramatically changed, where they want to see that you go there, they want to see that you've met with people, that you've gone to some different sessions, that you've expressed interest, that you've done different things than just having good grades, filling out an application, and sending it in. And this is a way that they are trying to get to know you and see what kids really have a vested interest in getting to know them. So it exists. It exists domestically. And I find it to be more so in those interview places. And then if you're a really good organization, you do this every year. And you do this as part of your sort of annual review process where you give a survey and an employee gives a survey to their managers as well and the dialogue takes place there domestically to make sure that everybody's sort of on pace with expectations and how people think that they're doing and areas of improvement and then a dialogue comes about because a manager may say, I see that and you have to write it on those things and say this will have no negative impacts, this is blah blah blah, so everyone feels like safe space about doing this. But some of the best conversations could come about in those meetings where a manager will say, "Hey, I never really realized that when I talk about this, where I thought it was efficiency, that you believe it to be that, which is scolding," or whatever you want to say. And you make a connective point by having a dialogue that was based upon some level of a polling or a survey or a an impetus to then have a communication and discussion. Yeah, it sounds like so much of this comes down to the willingness to invest the time and to prioritize the relationships and to really learning the background and perspective of others. As we're beginning to close this episode out, Kerim, is there a particular incident or moment in your professional career where this really became salient to you? I'm gonna tell you every day.(laughing) Because I operate in a global economy, in global supply chain, and we work with over 2,000 suppliers. And sometimes when we're working on a project, it's not a project of just one supplier, it's five different suppliers. Some of them we've worked with before, some of them we've never worked with before, and so forth. And so I have been building and my team has been building into the process, this sort of interviewing part of these relationships with these suppliers, where we have these kickoff calls, and truly get to understand before an engagement even goes forward, that the group that we're working with understands our needs, our goals, our values, our accountability requirements, and how they operate, how we operate, and having this two-way street type of conversation because the biggest mistake you can make in the world of global supply chain is picking the wrong supplier. If you do that because it's based upon cost or some fancy pictures or whatever else it is, and the fundamentals aren't there, and the fundamentals are what is important to them, what is important to you, how they do what they do, and how that maps up to what you need done. If those things aren't in place because there was a flash in the pan moment or something else that took you in that direction, you are gonna have a world of challenges, defects, efficiency, timeliness, costs, a rollercoaster ride that already is a rollercoaster ride to begin with that you wanna avoid. So we deal with this daily, absolutely daily in all of our productions and every single relationship.- Wow, Kerim, thank you. Thank you for the insights. Thank you for your comments here today. Thank you for being a part of the Leadership Growth Podcast. Well, folks, it's been a pleasure, all of you listeners. We hope you've enjoyed this conversation as we've talked about tools and ideas to help you develop your leadership, especially on the global stage. So please like and subscribe and send us at podcast@stewartleadership.com any reactions and suggestions for future episodes as well. All the best and good luck on your leadership journey. 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