Susie Gleeson-Byrne, Chief People Officer at financial services firm Pollination, began her career in recruitment consulting where she discovered her interest in shaping organisational culture. Her path led her through pivotal roles across Europe and Asia, but it was during her tenure as HR Director for Uber in the Asia Pacific region that her passion for cultural diversity truly deepened.

Today, Susie is a fervent advocate of cultural dexterity, a concept she believes is critical for effective leadership in today's interconnected world. She engages business audiences by exploring how this concept translates into practical strategies for global organisations.

In our exclusive interview, we spoke to Susie about demonstrating a nuanced approach to leading diverse teams across cultural boundaries:

You've advised companies on how to understand organisational culture better, and we know that diversity, equity, and inclusion are integral to it. What's your approach to such a complex and nuanced topic?

First, I had to really educate myself on the cultural nuances of each of our core markets. I think we all have inbuilt biases based on stereotypes or small pieces of learning that we've done over the years, but I really wanted to go into the data and go into the research and try to understand more about our key markets.

There's always the data and there's the research that you can do, but every team is different. There are so many nuances in different teams and different companies. It's really something you have to invest some energy in and always seek to understand what you don't know.

Go into the data and understand more about your key markets.

What are some of the marked differences that you found across geographies?

We know in APAC, the importance placed on status and hierarchy in India, South Asia, and Japan is the highest in the world if we look at the global scale of the importance of these things.

But then, we also have Australia and New Zealand. That is where the importance placed on hierarchy and status is the lowest in the world. Inclusion has had to mean different things, and we've had to understand each other's perspectives and languages on all these dimensions to move forward in our commitments to DEI.

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How do you incorporate communication practices into your culture strategy?

I would advise people to take guidance from local experts and do the reading and the research on the cultural standards and norms in each of the markets you operate in. I would turn to your in-country leadership teams on what is culturally appropriate.

Sometimes the communication is often nonverbal and extremely subtle.

For example, [in some cultures] if you ask if there are any questions after a presentation, you will very rarely get people to raise their hands. But if you look closely, you can see people who appear a bit uncomfortable. You may approach them and say, "Is there something about that last topic that you'd like me to go deeper on?"

So, you're giving them the opportunity to ask you to go deeper or to say more about a topic. That has more success in getting people to speak up and acknowledge that perhaps they do have questions or need to understand more.

How can global HR and business leaders adapt their leadership styles to the cultural diversity of organisations?

As we've learned from Korn Ferry, cultural dexterity is a process of discovery and adaptation. It's a quote from Peggy Hazard of the Korn Ferry Institute. I've found that we very much need to understand what style of leadership resonates in each market.

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HR leaders are truly accelerators of business. How do you describe this mission from your point of view as an HR leader?

What I see as my mission is to make sure that we are building an environment that is psychologically safe, where people can be their authentic selves and where they can develop their talent and people can succeed.

If our people succeed, our businesses succeed. The most innovative and successful companies in the world can't succeed if they have a disengaged workforce or an unsustainable turnover rate, for example.

I think that it's important for us as people and culture professionals and leaders to be clear on what our mission means and the value that you and your team bring to an organisation.

If our people succeed, our businesses succeed.

There are people around the leadership table whose primary purpose is to drive towards growth and profits. We do need to be part of that conversation. We do need to contribute to that, so we are credible, and we are driving towards the company's overarching goals.

However, I think it's important that we always remember that we are the advocates of our people and the people experience, be that internal or even external-facing business decisions.

We don't need another voice advocating for the same outcomes as all the other leaders in the room. We need to value our own diversity of thought and our slightly different mission, which is to ensure the business is successful through its people, not in spite of its people.

I like to ask leaders to think about what they think the impact of their decisions would be on their people; to put themselves in their people's shoes or external stakeholders' shoes, if you will, to remind them that all of our decisions have consequences on real-life individuals. It's not just about charts, data and profits at the end of the day.