Week 3 – Cross-Cultural Leadership

During my third week at Sephora, I have found the difficulties about leadership and hierarchy in a subsidiary of a company. The work that my boss seeks to do is rooted in large-scale change, but her position is as the leader of Sephora US & Canada. Therefore, in order to create wider change across different parts of the company, she has to collaborate with her counterparts who serve different markets, as well as the leadership across the larger company, LVMH.

I have found through this past week that political and cultural differences in environmental work across the world make different initiatives a priority, which means that not everyone is always on the same page about the best direction to go in. In order to be successful, the leadership in these different areas of the world must coordinate and compromise. To do this, they have to have an understanding of the political and social landscapes of the different countries their counterparts work in. This past week, my boss worked together with her counterparts to pitch a new environmental strategy to the CEO of Sephora. When I was at the planning meeting, I realized how their situations affected their willingness to address certain sustainability issues (for example, China and humans rights violations). However, I also wondered how their cultural differences shaped their leadership styles. Although I was not able to see how they led their own teams, I was able to see that they collaborated well together across cultures. This reminded me of the cultural ILTs that GLOBE tested, and it was interesting to me how leaders with similar leadership styles were picked to be put in the same position in different countries. This could have also been due to the fact that the position is the same, and individuals who collaborate well could be more predisposed to sustainability roles, but I think that it is still interesting to note that at some level, there is a consensus in what defines a leader in this company.

Overall, having the opportunity to sit in on that meeting made me think quite a bit on cross-cultural leadership and the collaboration that is needed at those high-level leadership roles, and I am excited to hopefully be a part of more meetings like that one.