When Your Facilitation Style Becomes Your Blind Spot
A guide for facilitators navigating cross-cultural teams, hierarchical leadership, and decision-making styles
The Cultural Bridge Series
This is part of the Cultural Bridge Series, where we explore the invisible dynamics that shape how we work across cultures. Each month, I take one workplace challenge and unpack the cultural mechanics underneath.
In January, we looked at how Direct and Indirect Feedback creates misunderstandings.
This month: Decision-making styles and what happens when your methods don't fit the room.
Some years ago, I facilitated a workshop with an Italian team. I had designed what I thought was a solid three-phase process: divergence, convergence, decision. I’d even planned an engaging activity for the final phase, something playful to help the group make choices together.
What actually happened was nothing like I’d planned.
Phase 1: The Silence
I opened with divergence. Everyone would share ideas freely. I’d even set up a paperboard where each person could write their thoughts and post them for all to see.
Nobody moved.
Nobody spoke.
The silence stretched. I waited, doing what I’d learned facilitating teams in the Netherlands and France: create space, let people think, trust the group process.
The silence continued.
Finally, the team leader began talking with a stream of ideas, good ideas, actually. But the clock was ticking, and I still had two more phases to get through. I tried, somehow vaguely, to bring others into the conversation. Nothing. So I moved on.
Phase 2: The Automatic Agreement
Convergence. Time to select which ideas to prioritize.
I planned 30 minutes. I took just 5.
Everyone agreed: we should take all of them.
This wasn’t surprising. The team leader had mentioned them.
Phase 3: The Method I Abandoned
I’d prepared a participatory, almost playful method for the final selection. I didn’t even try it.
Instead, I pivoted. I asked about performance: “What can we realistically do quickly?” The leader identified what seemed feasible. The team aligned on next steps.
But then another misstep arrived.
I was determined to assign a deadline and an owner for each action Error.
The group, leader included, became evasive. What was happening?
I’d completely missed how implementation works differently!
In a consensual culture, the time spent making the decision may be longer, but it is compensated for by the quick implementation of the identified actions.
By contrast, in top-down process, the decision is often longer but more flexible. Further information may be added in other phases and the plan revised.
When I seized this nuance, I just proposed to identify someone who would follow up on actions during their lifetime and report to the leader.
Mission accomplished.
But not the way I’d designed it.
What I Didn’t See Coming
Here’s what caught me unprepared: I’m Italian. I grew up in this culture. But I spent 20 years immersed in other cultures. I’d completely forgotten how things work at home.
Years of facilitating international teams had recalibrated my internal compass. My default setting had shifted to something more consensual. I’d internalized a facilitation style where:
The facilitator creates the space
Everyone contributes equally
The group co-creates the solution
That Italian team was operating in a completely different mode:
The leader gives the vision
The team elaborates and implements
Respecting roles is functional and effective to reach to a decision
Neither approach is wrong. They simply weren’t aligned.
And I hadn’t seen it coming.
The Cultural Mechanics at Play
This situation sits at the intersection of two key dimensions:
Decision-making: Top-down vs. Consensual
Italy, particularly in formal organizational settings, leans more top-down than Italians themselves often realize. The person with responsibility has the authority to decide. The team expects guidance before contributing.
The Netherlands, by contrast, operates consensually. The leader facilitates. The team proposes. Everyone contributes actively, regardless of role.
Leadership: Hierarchical vs. Egalitarian
In more hierarchical cultures, the leader’s role is to direct. In more egalitarian ones, the leader’s role is to enable.
When I asked that Italian team to share ideas, I wasn’t just asking for ideas. I was asking them to temporarily violate a cultural norm.
When I invoked performance: “What can we do quickly?”, something shifted. That question was concrete, practical. It allowed contributions at the operational level. The leader could prioritize (his role), and the team could contribute operationally (their expertise).
And here’s where it gets interesting - this isn’t a simple correlation between top-down/hierarchical and consensual/egalitarian. As Erin Meyer explains, the US combines top-down decisions with egalitarian culture. Germany does the opposite. These combinations can create even more confusion!
What I Was Actually Doing
I thought I was only facilitating a workshop with the tools I was familiar with. I was actually imposing a cultural model without realizing it.
There is no culturally neutral facilitation method. Every methodology carries assumptions about power, participation, hierarchy, time, and communication style. The brainstorming techniques we learn, the decision-making frameworks we use, the “best practices” we follow,they all come from somewhere. And that somewhere has a culture.
The question isn’t: “How do I make MY method work?”
The question is: “What does THIS group need to work at their best?”
And sometimes the answer is: let the leader lead. Your job isn’t to democratize at all costs. It’s to create the conditions for the group to succeed, according to their own rules.
Cultural adaptation is about consciously choosing which part of yourself to activate, and when.
💭What facilitation assumptions have you had to unlearn? I’d love to hear your stories,tell me about a time your methods didn’t land the way you expected.
If I Could Redesign That Workshop
Want to know what I'd do differently?
Looking back with clearer eyes, here’s what I would do differently—from pre-framing the leader’s role to asking “safe” questions that invite contribution without challenging authority.
Paid subscribers get the redesign: five specific adaptations that work when your facilitation style meets a different cultural logic.
Want to go deeper? Get the full redesign breakdown PLUS access to the Cultural Bridge Hub, where you’ll find this month’s tool: the Facilitation Adaptation Matrix for the decision-making and leadership dimensions we explored here.
The Hub is our shared space for this work—monthly frameworks and methodologies, templates you can use immediately, and curated resources for navigating leadership across cultures
