When Two Good Leaders Just Can’t Connect

You know the pairing. Two capable, well-intentioned leaders in the same organization who somehow can’t get on the same page. One comes across as blunt, maybe even cold. The other comes across as vague, like they’re circling the real point instead of landing on it. Neither would describe themselves that way. Both would tell you they’re simply doing their job the way it should be done.

So what’s actually going on?

According to Erin Meyer, author of The Culture Map, it’s rarely a personality clash. It’s a culture clash and you don’t need a passport to run into one.

Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading international business schools, and her research focuses on why people from different backgrounds can say the exact same thing and be heard in completely different ways. Her original work centers on global business — executives navigating deals and teams across continents, each operating from different defaults for communication, feedback, trust, and decision-making. She built a framework of eight scales to map those differences: how explicit or implicit people communicate, how bluntly or diplomatically feedback gets delivered, whether trust is earned through demonstrated results or through personal relationship, and more.

It’s easy to assume this only applies if you’re managing an international team. But you don’t have to cross a border to hit a culture gap. You just have to walk down the hall.

Consider the different norms between how your finance department delivers feedback and how your parks and recreation team does. Consider a new hire straight out of graduate school sitting across from a colleague who’s spent three decades with the organization. Consider a newly elected official trying to understand why staff won’t simply say what they think. Each of these is a genuine culture gap: different defaults for directness, for context, for how trust gets built. When that gap goes unrecognized, it gets read as a personal failing instead of what it actually is: a predictable, learnable pattern.

That’s exactly why this framework matters so much in local government. Few professions sit at the intersection of as many cultural fault lines. Career staff work alongside political appointees. Departments with entirely different professional norms have to coordinate constantly. Residents from every background expect to be heard in the way that makes sense to them, not necessarily the way that makes sense to you. Without language for why these gaps happen, they get chalked up to difficult people instead of understood as something you can actually navigate.

Inside the MLDC, members are spending this week working through five specific, applicable takeaways from The Culture Map, built for the realities of the job you actually have, not a boardroom in another country. From why a technically sound decision can still land badly, to two very different ways people learn to trust a new leader, to what happens when disagreement never gets said out loud.

If a conversation has ever gone sideways in a way you couldn’t quite explain, this is exactly the kind of thinking local government leaders are working through together inside the MLDC.

Secure your 2027 MLDC membership at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC, and apply to participate in one of our limited Masterminds: small, high-trust cohorts of leaders working through exactly these types of challenges together.

The Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC), led by Seth Winterhalter, is a community for city and county managers, administrators, and local government leaders who believe leadership shouldn’t be carried alone. Through trusted peer relationships, candid conversations, and practical leadership development, the MLDC creates space for municipal leaders to think differently, grow intentionally, and navigate the challenges of leadership alongside people who understand the weight of the work. Learn more at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC.