What actually makes global teams perform and why do so many fail despite having top experts?

In this episode of Dear Global Leader, Tiphaine Coste sits down with Kasper Lohse Nørup Jelsbech, PhD anthropologist and cross-cultural leadership consultant at Implement Consulting Group, to unpack what truly drives collaboration in complex international organizations .

If you lead across borders, manage remote stakeholders, or work in global projects this conversation will change how you see performance.

We explore:

• Why competence is not what makes or breaks global teams
• The hidden cost of ignoring culture in high-performing environments
• How “professionalism” can blind leaders to cultural misalignment
• The difference between a group of experts and a real team
• Why global teams are often called “after performance breaks down”
• The powerful “mirror exercise” methodology to surface blind spots
• How silence (not conflict) is often the biggest red flag
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Kasper shares real cases from Scandinavian, Indian, and Romanian corporate collaborations and reveals why cross-cultural leadership is not a “nice-to-have” it’s a business necessity.

💡 Key insight: The more professional teams believe they are, the more they tend to underestimate cultural impact.

If you're building global projects, leading distributed teams, or navigating international stakeholders this episode will give you a new operating system.

🎧 Listen now and discover how to transform cultural friction into performance.

Follow Dear Global Leader for Part 2, where we dive into trust, identity, stereotypes, and communication through an anthropologist’s lens.