Facilitating Leadership in a Global Community: A Training Tool for Multicultural Team Leaders

Recent events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia highlight the role of US commanders leading multicultural coalition forces. Leaders of multicultural teams experience many diversity-based challenges such as communication barriers and trust. To facilitate effective team performance, the leader must understand how cultural differences affect team dynamics. Although these effects often lead to costly mistakes, current training methods are deficient (Pierce, 2002; Bennett, 1986). Training tools that will facilitate effective leadership within multicultural teams can greatly increase success for military and organizational teams. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is threefold. First, to provide a set of theoretical and operationally based principles that can assist in developing training programs for leaders of multicultural teams. In doing so a brief review of the relevant literature on team training, cultural diversity, and training is presented. Second, to provide a brief description of such a prototypic tool and, in doing so, illustrate how the state-ofthe-art in training and human learning can be put into practice. This prototypic tool is grounded in the science of teams and human learning, experiential, practically based, and adaptable to different contexts. The approach used combines elements of self-learning (e.g., community links), awareness training, role play, guided facilitation, and SBT. The approach also incorporates existing Army Leader training while focusing on multicultural aspects of team leadership. Finally, we offer some initial validation evidence with regard to the training approach taken within the developed tool.