Leading Through Your Lens: Cultural Origins & Leadership
Navigating tensions between tech culture & your own culture
I’m deviating from the usual tactical advice and focusing on feelings. If you’re Canadian/immigrant/child of immigrants and you currently have a leadership role in tech. Keep reading. I hope this sounds familiar and I’m not alone.
While mindlessly scrolling TikTok one evening, I came across a video describing the Lewis Model — a framework for understanding cultural difference and their impact on communication and behaviour in various settings, including corporate environments. For weeks, I've been contemplating a topic about how one's cultural upbringing influences their leadership approach. My cultural value system shows up in my work every day. Every day it helps me or it hinders me. More often than not, it hinders me. And this one random weekday evening last week, the algorithm knew it was time for me to dig deeper.
The Lewis Model is comprised of three descriptive buckets in which specific cultures fall. I’ve taken these descriptors from this source to summarize the differences:
Linear-Active Cultures: are factual decisive planners.
Multi-Active Cultures: are warm, emotional, loquacious, & impulsive multi-taskers.
Reactive Cultures: are courteous, amiable, and accommodating compromisers.
Each of these three buckets means different cultures/countries fall on a spectrum between them. You see the United States, the birthplace of the modern software company, plotted quite closely to linear active — driven by decisive planning and logic. Canada, where I live, is smack dab in between Linear-Active and Reactive: logical and pragmatic but generally amiable and accommodating. What you probably don’t know about me is I’m the child of an immigrant mother, whose own culture drove my own personal value system. Ask most Canadians whose parents are immigrants and most likely their mother’s culture is a critical part of their identity. My mother’s birth nation? Italy; which falls quite cleanly on the last corner of Lewis’s triangular model: Multi-Active known for emotional and impulsive multi-tasking.
Reading through the literature and understanding the framework I realize in my working life as a product leader at a software company my leadership contains multitudes. I am certain many of you reading this do as well. And maybe you feel like I feel that those multitudes creep into your leadership capacity, capabilities, and style. A tension that exists when tech companies very much preach the mission of — what I’ve come to learn this past week — a linear active culture.
The flip side of this, is that there are so many successful immigrants or children of immigrants in tech. The facts speak for themselves, the opposite is true: many CEOs and founders of Silicon Valley are immigrants or children of immigrants. A perfect example is Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry.com, former product management leader at Meta (she created Facebook Marketplace — this is a fascinating story, read about it here). I’m a big fan of her newsletter, Perspectives. In a recent newsletter, Liu discussed the value of unlearning behaviours that no longer serve us. The story she told to introduce the topic was a learned behaviour she had adopted from her father, a Chinese immigrant. The behaviour was cutting napkins in half to avoid waste and be fiscally responsible. Liu, now an affluent tech CEO raising her own family, realized she is not in the same place as her parents and that learned behaviour was no longer serving her. She doesn’t need to cut the napkins. It was unnecessary labour that wasn’t serving her. I deeply related to her story; I too grew up in a household that “cut napkins in half” so-to-speak, but I hated the lesson. I think there’s more to this lesson than un-learning behaviours taught and valued in our childhoods. The values and discipline instilled from my own immigrant parent turned me into the person I am today. The leader I am today. The question is where does it help? Where does it hinder? And do we need to assimilate to be successful?
Disclaimer: I'll be applying some broad generalizations about the cultures I'm referring to. My generalizations are based on my experiences:
• My Canadian perspective is inherently Ontarian and not representative of the whole country.
• My Italian perspective stems from an Italian-Canadian viewpoint—a snapshot of a country and its culture frozen in time (the post-war Italy of the 1950s & early 1960s).
• My American perspective is derived solely from working at companies striving to emulate successful American tech firms.
My Triangulation
I encourage you reading this to reflect on where you cultural intersections sit in the Lewis model.Consider what values/cultural moraes were present in your upbringing, where you actually grew up/came of age, and what kind of culutral milieu you currently exist in.
I sit at the intersection of all three Lewis’s cultural buckets. I think that’s why it fascinates me so much.
I was raised to believe in….
the values of a Multi-Active culture. Intuition, passion, and family are at the centre of my world. I was taught from a young age to dream that the pinnacle of life exists within a tight-knit familial community and nothing more.
I grew up surrounded by….
the values of a more Reactive culture. Canada is the land of middle-class contentedness. We want for nothing more than food on the table, a roof over our heads, a beer in our hands and a hockey game on the television. Our ethos is: “let’s all get along and we can all live well.”
I came into my career with…
the values of a Linear-Active culture. To work in tech is to believe in manifest destiny — opportunity lies in the idyll of the West and happens when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The bootstraps bit being a false narrative as most who create success out West all are cut from the same cloth: upper-middle class and (Stanford) educated.
I sit comfortably in the centre upper-left of the Lewis model and my working life pulls me ever closer to the bottom-left. Am I more Canadian? Dream medicore! Am I more American? Dream enormously big! Am I more Italian? Dream small! These tensions play into the person I am at work; and who I am for the teams I have led.
There are two places where I feel those tensions play out the most: trusting others and earning power.
On Trust & Power
Canadians trust everyone. We leave our front doors unlocked. Those who own guns do so for hunting and sport, not for protection. We open our hearts & homes easily. Italians trust their own. Blood is thicker than water. Trust is for the inner circle who will come to the rescue when you fall.
I dichotomously trust others to be open with them, for example openly admit mistakes and bare my vulnerabilities, and, at the same time, distrust the intentions of others. I am a product of being raised by an Italian mother but a born and bred citizen of Canada.
Throughout my career I have been praised for my vulnerability; but my lack of trust of others has hindered me. Repeatedly I’ve been given the feedback that I need to “assume good intentions” of my peers in order to succeed as a product leader. Think about it. Americans trust their socio-economic equals; their “communities.” Walk into a tech boardroom of equally well-educated peers and you will start from a place of trust. By trust I mean new ideas are welcome. That heuristic just isn’t true in other cultures.
That being said, I know I need to be more open and leverage the good will of those I work with to succeed in product leadership. Trust is the foundation of a product leader’s ability to be successful. You need the trust of your executive team, whom will only trust you if you have the trust of others. You need trust from your team; they’re executing the vision they have to believe you have their back. And you need the trust of your peers, they will support you in times of need. Product management is inherently a relationship job. I constantly remind myself that I need to play to the rules of the game in the context I find myself in; not the one I was raised in.
Power can be viewed through various lenses. For this discussion, I'm equating power with success. Success is mastery in your domain and power is achieving mastery at the highest level. True success can only be attained if you genuinely belong and gain prominence in your field.
Canadians generally don't prioritize power; they value comfort. Italians seek power on a more intimate scale: fiefdoms within their families, cities, neighborhoods, and social circles. Beyond these spheres, power (defined as success in your domain) loses its meaning. You may gain accolades, but ultimately its empty: Non sei nessuno, you are nobody. Americans on the other hand, seek power at scale. Its power that Silicon Valley greats seek more than anything. Power to change the world through technology.
Working in an industry dominated by American ideals, I've spent my career striving for success while fighting the feelings of being “content” and reminding myself I am just a “nobody.” In my new job and countless times before I’ve found myself just grateful and in awe to be seated at the table next "powerful people.” Which I do not include myself in that group, despite having a seat at that table. I’m reminded of an interview with former U.S. president Barack Obama about finding power in rooms that you feel you don’t belong in:
”…do not let people think you do not belong. Once you sit at these tables at these fancy places, with folks with fancy titles, and they got a a big bank account and you talk to them — and you go, “Oh, they ain’t all that.” This idea that they’re so special, they’re so smart, they’re so sophisticated…not really, they’ve been exposed. They have been given the confidence of feeling like they belong.”
I’ve been playing back Obama’s comments in my mind often at my new job. It’s taken me three full months to feel like I belong at the table with my peers and my leadership. I’ve come to realize in my career it takes time for me to get to that confident state of belonging. No logical argument — like recognizing I was hired for my skills, which I’ve demonstrated consistently — will persuade me until I feel it. I need to remind myself that others will come to the table feeling they belong, and I need to fake it until I feel it or I will fail to step into my power.
On You
Perhaps Liu was right we need to unlearn the behaviours that no longer serve us. I can clearly see what’s not serving me but what about the aspects that do serve me? I know my Canadian humility has served me well throughout my career — to exhibit vulnerability and catch a mistake I’ve made before it became my downfall.
Do these reflections resonate with you? While the technology industry—software in particular—has expanded far beyond Silicon Valley, its founding principles remain deeply rooted in every software company I've encountered, whether Canadian, European, or elsewhere. Where does your background clash with these principles? What cultural tensions do you grapple with in your professional life?
This is just the beginning of a broader conversation I hope to continue. I'd love to hear your stories. Have you experienced a cultural or values disconnect in your tech leadership role? Share your experiences in the comments, let’s start a conversation.