I work with American leadership teams operating internationally. My job is to surface the assumptions your leaders are running on without knowing it, and to show you where those assumptions are steering decisions, trust and execution across borders.
Same facts. Different interpretations. Different decisions.
Nobody calls me because they have diagnosed an intercultural problem. They call because something important in the business is not working, and the usual explanations do not fit.
Headquarters and the regional team give different accounts of the same situation. A decision everyone thought was settled gets reopened.
One leader sees appropriate caution. Another sees a lack of ownership. The reporting gets more polished and the trust gets thinner.
Everyone involved is capable. Working together still costs far more effort than it should.
The strategy makes sense. The product is strong. But the way you talk about value, expertise and credibility is not landing the way it lands at home.
What earns trust in one market does not always earn it in the next.
So the question is not only what should we adapt? It is what assumptions are telling us what needs adapting in the first place?
The company is growing. More countries. More nationalities. More people who were not there when the business was built.
When the team was small, most of how you worked could go unspoken. Now words like autonomy, urgency, accountability, leadership, trust, even being supportive, may not mean the same thing to everyone in the room.
And lack of disagreement is not always real agreement. No one is arguing, and that tells you less than you think.
Different business situations. The same question underneath them:
What meaning are people assigning to what is happening, and how is culture shaping that meaning?
When a high-performance machine starts misfiring, a good mechanic does not swap parts on a hunch. They run the diagnostic. They read the signals. They find what is producing the symptom.
Then they decide what to change.
International organizations tend to work the other way round.
Any of those can help. But the symptom you can see rarely names the mechanism underneath it.
If capable leaders are reading the same situation differently, more communication just transmits the different readings faster.
Before we prescribe, we diagnose.
I am not there to tell your leadership team it has the problem wrong. I am there to make the picture sharper.
Every experienced leader carries an internal rulebook. Most of it was never written down.
Those rules do not feel cultural. They feel normal. That is what makes them so hard to see.
Two leaders can look at the same facts and reach different conclusions.
The same business reality, read through two different rulebooks
One sees speed and commitment.
Another sees unnecessary risk.
One sees candor.
Another sees aggression.
One sees autonomy.
Another sees lack of control.
One sees careful analysis.
Another sees hesitation.
Neither side has to be incompetent or acting in bad faith. They may just be reading the same business reality through two different rulebooks.
Where culture actually acts
Culture works on that middle layer. When the interpretation stays invisible, leaders debate the decision at length and never look at how they got to it.
A disciplined way to make the invisible part of international leadership visible.
I use the Culture Interpretation Lens to test how cultural expectations may be shaping the way people read an important business situation. It does not start from the assumption that culture is the answer. It starts from what happened.
What objectively happened?
Separate the event from the explanation attached to it.
How did different stakeholders understand the same event?
Identify where meanings begin to diverge.
Which cultural expectations, assumptions and mental models shaped those interpretations?
Look beneath the conclusion to understand what made it feel reasonable.
How are those interpretations influencing leadership, trust, decisions or business performance?
Culture becomes relevant when it changes what happens next.
What now needs to become explicit so leaders can move forward together?
Turn previously implicit expectations into practical agreements.
The Lens does not reduce people to national stereotypes, and it does not assume culture explains every business problem. It gives you a way to examine interpretation before you act on it. That discipline is built into the method.
Strong executive teams disagree. They should. Different perspectives and different experience are part of what makes an international leadership team worth having.
The trouble starts when they disagree without knowing why they landed in different places.
When assumptions remain implicit, disagreement can quickly become personal
Once interpretation becomes visible, the questions change
That shift changes the quality of the conversation.
That gives leaders room to:
The organization does not get less diverse. It gets better at using the difference instead of being blindsided by it.
The Culture Interpretation Lens runs through four phases that move from the business situation to practical leadership agreements.
The process adapts to the situation. The analytical discipline remains consistent.
We start with the business. What triggered this? Which decisions, relationships or outcomes are at stake? Who needs to be in the room? How does the executive sponsor read the situation today? And what would have to change for this work to be worth doing?
The job here is to get the question right before anyone tries to answer it.
I talk confidentially with the leaders involved and look at the situation from every side. I am not collecting complaints. I am comparing readings.
I look for the patterns that repeat. I separate what is systemic from what is one bad week. I test the cultural explanation against other possible causes. Then I tie what surfaces back to the business situation.
You get a diagnosis of the patterns, not a report card on individual executives.
This is a working session, not a presentation. The leadership team looks at the patterns together. The different readings come out into the open. Assumptions that never had words attached to them finally get some.
Nobody has to leave agreeing. The team needs enough common ground to decide what has to be said out loud from here.
We turn the insight into working agreements and next steps. Decision rights. Accountability. Reporting. Transparency. Challenge and disagreement. Escalation. Autonomy. How headquarters and the regions deal with each other. Whatever the evidence says needs spelling out.
Implementation, not documentation.
Not another 100-page consulting report. Something short enough that your leadership team will open it twice.
Four outputs. Each one changes what happens next.
This does not end with your team being more aware of cultural difference. It ends with clearer information, decisions on the record, and agreements your leadership team can hold each other to.
1What you get
A clear read on what is driving the business situation. Not a pile of interview notes.
It shows you where the interpretations split, which assumptions are pulling them apart, where your organization already agrees, and where the gaps are costing you in leadership, trust, decisions or execution.
What that changes for the business
Your leadership team stops treating symptoms and hoping.
You can tell what needs a real change to process or structure, what only needs clearer expectations, what is being distorted by two different readings, and what was never broken.
The impact Executive attention goes where it counts, and the big decisions rest on a sharper picture.
2What you get
The assumptions that matter stop living in people’s heads.
Your leaders choose, on purpose, which expectations get said out loud: decision-making, accountability, reporting, transparency, challenge, escalation, autonomy, and how headquarters and the regions work together.
What that changes for the business
People stop guessing what another leader, region or function meant. Decision rights are clear. Concerns reach the table while they are still cheap.
And decisions stop getting reopened because two different expectations were running underneath the first one.
The impact Clearer decisions, cross-border coordination you can predict, and far less executive time lost to avoidable ambiguity.
3What you get
A short plan naming the priorities, commitments, owners and review points for the next 90 days.
Not thirty recommendations. The handful of changes most likely to move this.
What that changes for the business
This does not end with everyone agreeing the conversation was useful.
There are answers on the page. What changes now? Who owns it? What should look different? When do we check?
The impact A direct bridge from executive insight to execution. Implementation, not documentation.
4What you get
Your leaders leave with more than a fix for this one problem.
They can spot when cultural assumptions may be steering an important situation, ask sharper questions before they conclude anything, and say the critical expectations out loud earlier.
What that changes for the business
You stop finding these differences only after they turn expensive, political or hard to undo.
When the next one lands (a new market, a new executive, an acquisition, a governance change, fast expansion, a hard cross-border call) your leaders have a way to read the situation before they act on half of it.
The impact You reach the real strategic question faster, decisions come out clearer, risk shows up earlier, and coordination holds while you grow.
This is not about your leaders understanding each other better. It is about them spending less time decoding each other and more time making and executing the decisions the business needs.
Schedule a confidential conversationThe Culture Interpretation Lens came out of patterns I kept meeting in very different businesses in over 20 years of working with international companies.
The same report read as responsible caution to one person and as withheld information to another.
Direct challenge was meant as engagement and landed as aggression. The written rules were identical. The expectations about how to apply them were not.
The visible issue was governance. What sat underneath it was two different pictures of what good governance looks like.
The product was not the problem. How value, credibility and trust were being communicated had to be tested against what the receiving market expects.
Evidence mattered. Positioning mattered. The words mattered.
The commercial question stopped being How do we explain what we do? and turned into What does this buyer need to understand before our value makes any sense to them?
There was no crisis. The question was preventive.
As the company went international, were people really attaching the same meaning to the values, behaviors and leadership expectations everyone assumed were shared?
The chance was to get those assumptions on the table before growth turned them into friction.
Three different situations. One thing kept repeating. Capable people can live the same business reality differently, and each of them finds their own reading obvious. Leadership conversations and decisions get better once those assumptions are on the table.
Your leadership team knows your organization better than I ever will. That is not the problem.
The problem is that the people closest to a system are also closest to the assumptions that went normal inside it. Some explanations feel obvious. Some questions stop getting asked. Some ways of working turn into “how we do things here.”
An outsider has the distance to compare how different people read the same situation without having a position to defend.
I am not there to replace your expertise. I am there to show you the patterns you cannot see from inside your own system.
Founder & Executive Advisor | International Leadership Across Cultures
I am American-born and I have spent more than 20 years living and working in France. I built my professional life from inside both business cultures, not from a distance. I have built and run businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, including a 16-person international team spread across 12 countries.
Over my career, I have worked with 500+ companies on transatlantic business, including 40+ companies guided directly across the Atlantic through real international growth and business challenges.
That work has run from founders and growth-stage companies up to leadership and board-level rooms. The issue in those rooms is rarely intelligence or experience. It is usually that equally capable people are reading the same business reality differently.
I have also spent years documenting those patterns: more than 800 published articles and 50+ podcast episodes examining business across the Atlantic, alongside hands-on roles in the wider transatlantic ecosystem.
That mix matters, because this work takes more than knowing cultures differ. It takes hearing two intelligent people describe the same event, seeing why both accounts make sense from where each of them stands, and tying that back to the decisions the business has to make.
I created the Culture Interpretation Lens to turn more than two decades of lived cross-cultural experience into a disciplined executive methodology.
Clients work directly with me throughout the engagement.
You do not need to know whether culture is the issue before we speak. In fact, you probably should not decide that yet.
If your organization is heading into an important international moment and capable people are reading it differently, the first step is finding out what is really going on.
We start with the business situation. We look at what people are seeing. We look at what it means to them. Only then do we work out whether cultural assumptions are part of what has to come into view.
Christina Rebuffet-Broadus
Founder & Executive Advisor
International Leadership Across Cultures
TransAtlantia
The flagship engagement is built for situations that need diagnosis, confidential executive perspectives and sustained work. Christina also works with companies and executive audiences through:
For conferences, leadership meetings, boards, off-sites and virtual executive audiences.
Focused working sessions around a specific international leadership or cross-cultural business situation.
For high-stakes situations that need deeper diagnosis, executive alignment and a practical roadmap forward.
Contact Christina to discuss what format is best for you and your company.
Contact Christina