Leadership and culture
Why the biggest culture gaps in a team are not about nationality
Csaba Toth argues that leaders who sort people by country miss most of the differences that shape how a team thinks, disagrees and performs.
Uncommon Mindset for Entrepreneurs w/ Csaba Toth
Video from Fail Coach - Miha Matlievski.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
Why are the biggest cultural differences in a team often not about nationality?
Most cultural differences sit within countries, not between them. Each person belongs to 15 or 20 cultural groups at once, from profession and generation to education and hobbies. Csaba Toth says teams perform better when leaders measure how people actually think and behave, build common ground first, and then learn to use the differences instead of widening the gap.
Many leaders still treat culture as a question of passports. Csaba Toth, founder of ICQ Global and author of a book on uncommon sense, thinks that view misses most of what really divides a team. In a live interview for entrepreneurs, he explained why culture runs much deeper than nationality and why that matters for performance.
His starting point is common sense. Most people expect others to reach the same conclusion they would, even when those others have a completely different background. When that expectation fails, disagreement turns personal, egos take over, and a team loses the very perspectives that could have helped it make a better decision.
The alternative he describes is an uncommon mindset: the habit of seeing one situation from several angles before choosing how to respond. For leaders running diverse teams, he argues, this is a practical skill that starts with understanding themselves, and it can be measured rather than left to good intentions.
Key takeaways
- Common sense is a personal set of beliefs, so expecting others to share it creates conflict.
- Most cultural differences exist within countries, so nationality is a weak guide to how people think.
- Teams perform better when leaders build common ground first and then use their differences.
- Leaders need to understand and lead themselves before they try to manage other people.
1. Common sense is personal, not shared
Csaba Toth opened the conversation by turning a question back on the host: what is common sense? The answer, he said, is that it is really a personal checklist. People call something common sense when it matches their own view of the world, and they expect everyone else to arrive at the same conclusion from a completely different starting point.
That expectation becomes dangerous in a disagreement. If there is no psychological safety or trust between two people, each one has to protect their ego. The default position becomes that if one person is right, the other must be wrong. The goal shifts from getting the answer right to being right, and the team stops learning from each other.
His alternative is to ask better questions: what does the other person know that I do not, and what can they see that I cannot? Asked honestly, those questions let diversity lead to innovation. Ignored, he warned, the same differences turn into a painful liability, which is why he sees this mindset as the foundation for any entrepreneur or leader.
2. Culture lives within countries, not between them
Csaba Toth points out that every person belongs to 15 or 20 cultural groups at the same time. Country of origin is only a small part of that. Education, profession, generation, gender, religion and even hobbies all shape how someone thinks, which means that almost every conversation, even within one family, is a cross-cultural one.
Most intercultural models still focus on the country of origin. He told the story of a training for a Fortune 300 company in Germany that employed many Brazilian engineers. Comparing national averages only widened the gap. When the team looked at individual Global DISC results instead, the Brazilian engineers turned out to be more German inside than most of their German colleagues.
That discovery changed the team. Instead of widening the gap, the group built common ground first and then learned to make the most of its differences. He added that 10 engineers from 10 countries are likely to be more alike inside than 10 random people from the same country, because people choose their profession but not their place of birth.
3. Lead yourself before you lead others
To measure these differences, his company uses a short assessment of 15 questions completed in under five minutes, designed to capture the underlying drivers of behaviour rather than the values people like to project. The report is a blueprint, not a box. People are unique, he said, but predictably different, and once they understand that they can work on their comfort zone.
When he works with senior leaders, they usually want to learn how to manage other people. He starts with them instead. Leaders who know who they are and what they stand for do not need to bully anyone to feel important or hide to feel safe. His practical advice is to pop the cognitive bubble and spend time with people and ideas that challenge existing assumptions.
He also asks people to respond instead of react: when someone triggers a strong emotion, stop for a second and ask what they meant. For readers who want to go further, he recommends his hybrid book, Uncommon Sense in Unusual Times: How to stay relevant in the 21st century by understanding ourselves and others better than social media algorithms and people trained in taking advantage of us. Each chapter links to an interactive coaching platform.
