The World Cup is on, which means over here in soccer-mad Europe, much of the population has spent the last ten days trying to figure out how to watch four matches a day while still maintaining a bare minimum of productivity and day-to-day functioning.

In America interest might be slightly less obsessive, but even if you didn't sneak out of work to watch Tunisia play Poland, there are plenty of reasons for business leaders to catch at least a few matches.  

And not just because of patriotic support of team USA or the incredible athleticism on display. Recent research out of European business school INSEAD, MIT and Columbia showed that football coaches can teach leaders something important about how to lead diverse teams to success. 

International experience pays off big time

The series of studies looked at the international experience of managers in a variety of contexts, but it started with examining 25 years of data on the performance of coaches in the English Premier League, one of the world's most prestigious soccer leagues.

Crunching numbers, the researchers found that the more international experience a coach had, the more points his team racked up over the course of a season. 

"For every additional foreign country a manager had worked in, the team scored 3.42 points more," reports INSEAD Knowledge. "This could be game-changing since in some seasons, only one point separated the winner and runner-up."

This international advantage wasn't just true of soccer coaches tasked with managing big egos from around the world.

Other experiments looked at managers in an Australian construction company, hackathons in China and Covid policy brainstorming sessions.

In each case the researchers observed the same thing – the more experience a leader had living and working in other countries, the more effective they were rated by colleagues and direct reports.  

Why traveling abroad makes you a better leader back home

To explain why even relatively brief exposure to foreign cultures can be so wildly beneficial, INSEAD Knowledge quotes legendary Premier League manager Arsène Wenger, who coached in England, France and Japan at different times:

"Being on time isn't the same for a Japanese man as it is for a Frenchman – when a Frenchman arrives five minutes late, he still thinks he is on time. In Japan, when it's five minutes before the set time, he thinks he is too late."

This might sound like a small if useful observation, but the ability to spot, understand and adapt to differences in culture and style can add up to huge advantages for leaders.

As INSEAD professor Linda Brimm has argued elsewhere, living and traveling abroad helps professionals develop flexibility, creativity, empathy and agility.

Other experts insist that one of the best (if not always most comfortable) ways to develop self-knowledge is to spend time in foreign countries. 

"Leaders with broader multicultural experiences are more likely to speak and behave in a way that a contact can understand and use language and gestures that are more appropriate to a particular situation. They also tend to be more mindful of cultural differences that can make people think, act and work differently," concludes INSEAD Knowledge. 

Years as an expat not required  

The takeaway here isn't particularly complex – if you want to be the best leader you can be, take every opportunity you can to travel to new places and experience people from different cultures.

You don't need to live for years in foreign locales to improve your leadership skills. 

"The studies consistently showed that the breadth of multicultural experiences (the number of foreign countries in which someone has lived or worked), but not the depth (the duration of time spent abroad), predicted leadership effectiveness," INSEAD Knowledge reassures those whose lives are not set up for expat adventures. 

As the World Cup reminds us every four years, the globe is a huge, beautiful place full of incredibly talented people who often think and behave in ways subtly different from what we're used to back home.

It's far easier to get the most of all the talent available to you if you understand more about ways people can differ and adapt your approach to suit the situation.

That goes for soccer coaches, but it's also very true for entrepreneurs. 

 

Inc