I have spent most of my career building and coaching teams that span continents, languages, and belief systems. Ten years ago, the hardest part of that work was almost always logistical: time zones, translation, the awkwardness of a joke that doesn’t land the same way in Nairobi as it does in Paris. That is not the hardest part anymore.
What I am seeing now, across UN agencies, INGOs, and corporate teams alike, is something different. The political and social tensions that used to stay outside the office are walking straight into it. A disagreement over a news story becomes a Slack thread that goes quiet in a way that feels loaded. A team that used to collaborate without friction is suddenly navigating fault lines nobody named out loud. Recent workplace research backs up what I am hearing in the room, conflict tied to political or social tension has risen close to 10 percent in the last year, and researchers are now calling it an “empathy recession,” less understanding, less patience, less benefit of the doubt between colleagues who used to give each other plenty of both.
For teams that are already intercultural, this lands differently. Difference was already present, in how people communicate, how they show deference, how directly they disagree. Now that difference is being asked to hold political and ideological weight too, often without anyone having built the muscle for it.
Why This Isn’t the Same Problem as Before
Cross-cultural management has always required a certain fluency, knowing that a Spanish colleague’s directness is not rudeness, that silence in a meeting with your Japanese counterpart might mean something closer to respect than disengagement, that a French team member arguing with you passionately is often a sign they are invested, not a sign the relationship is in trouble. That fluency still matters enormously.
But polarization adds a second layer that cultural competence alone does not solve. It is not just “how do I communicate across differences,” it is “how do we keep working together when the difference itself has become emotionally charged.” I have watched capable, experienced managers who have led global teams for years suddenly hesitate, because the skill set for navigating a values clash is not quite the same as the skill set for navigating a communication style clash, even though the two show up looking almost identical on the surface.
The recent conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, or Gaza have made it impossible to leave the news at the door. It looks like a sharp disagreement about immigration policy between two people, one of whom has family directly affected by it, or a conversation about Iran that surfaces history neither of them planned to bring into the room that day. None of these are communication-style clashes, and none of them have a tidy resolution a manager can hand out at the end of the meeting.
Academic research is starting to catch up with what practitioners like me have been navigating for a while now. A recent framework on political polarization in organizations points to something I see constantly in the field, people retreat toward those who think like them and quietly distance themselves from those who do not, inside the team and outside it. Left unaddressed, that pulls a team apart from the inside, long before anyone files a complaint or names a conflict directly.
What This Looks Like in the Room
A few of the situations I get called in to help with most often: Political statement said out loud. A team member raises it in a meeting or on Slack. A colleague says nothing in the room, then tells you afterward, quietly, that the moment left them feeling unsafe and unseen on a team they thought was safe. Neither person is wrong to feel what they feel, and the room is not served by being asked to pick a side.
Ukraine and Russia, seated at the same table. Two colleagues who used to work together without a second thought now carry that morning’s news into a planning meeting neither of them can fully set aside, even when the agenda has nothing to do with either country.
Iran, or any conflict with a diaspora in the room. A passing reference to the news lands as something far more personal for a colleague whose own family history is bound up in it, in ways the rest of the team may not know.
Immigration, close to home. A policy debate turns pointed because it is not abstract for one person at the table, it is a parent’s visa, a sibling’s asylum case, a border that runs through their own family.
None of these resolve in one meeting, and it is not a manager’s job to referee the underlying conflict or decide who is right. What they ask of a manager is the ability to hold two things at once, the legitimacy of what each person is feeling, and the team’s ability to keep functioning together. That is exactly the muscle the practices below are built to develop.
What Actually Helps
None of what follows is theoretical. It comes from delivering ethics, leadership, and culture work across more than 50 countries, including some of the more fractured operating contexts humanitarian and development teams work in.
Name the water you’re swimming in. Teams do better when leaders acknowledge, plainly, that the world outside is tense and that it is reasonable for that tension to show up inside the team too. Pretending a team is immune to what is happening around it usually makes people more guarded, not less.
Separate the person from the position, out loud. One of the more useful moves I coach leaders through is helping a team distinguish “I disagree with how you see this issue” from “I no longer trust you as a colleague.” Those are two very different sentences, and polarized environments make it easy to collapse one into the other without anyone noticing it happened.
Build the skill, don’t just state the value. A values statement about respect and inclusion does very little on its own. What moves the needle is practice, structured conversations where people rehearse disagreeing well, facilitated dialogue that gives a team language for tension before it becomes conflict. This is the same principle behind the coaching curriculum I have been building this year for humanitarian partnership contexts, skills have to be practiced somewhere lower stakes before they are needed in a high stakes moment.
Give managers more support than they currently have. This is the gap I would flag most urgently. Recent data on inclusion learning shows a real gap in how supported managers feel compared to individual contributors when change and tension hit, managers are often expected to hold the emotional weight of a divided team with far less preparation than the moment requires. If your organization is investing in inclusion or culture work this year, your frontline and middle managers are the highest leverage place to start.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Before your next team offsite, retreat, or planning session, ask yourself honestly: if a genuine disagreement about something outside of work showed up between two people on this team tomorrow, does this team have a way to hold that? Not avoid it, not paper over it, actually hold it and keep working well together afterward.
If the honest answer is “I’m not sure,” that is not a failure. It is simply the starting point for the work. Cultural intelligence, psychological safety, and conflict fluency are learnable skills, not fixed traits, and teams that invest in them now are going to be considerably more resilient than the ones who wait until the fracture is already visible.
