When culture awareness becomes a leadership skill

On November 18th 2025, The Gallery Seoul hosted an inspirational talk with Penelope Kim, who took us on a tour de force through Korean history, culture, and the invisible codes that shape corporate life today. It was the kind of talk that could easily have lasted three hours and still felt too short.

While Penelope masterfully decoded Korea, this is not an article about “how Korea works.” That expertise is hers, not mine, and I would hesitate to compress twenty years of cultural intuition into a few paragraphs.

Instead, this is an article about something larger that stood out so clearly after the talk: Why cultural understanding is an essential leadership skill, and how living as an expat gives you a global passport to develop it.

Aha-moments: “Why are they doing that?”

Throughout the presentation, I experienced one moment of recognition after another. Those quiet aha’s where sudden context turned confusion into clarity. It was like watching dots connect between experiences I’ve had in professional settings, behaviours that once seemed puzzling or even “absurd,” and the long arc of history that shapes how people think, lead, and collaborate.

Penelope guided us from the Three Kingdoms to modern boardrooms, showing how traditions that may feel distant to newcomers once made perfect sense. Suddenly, the micro-actions, the way a business card is handed over, when to speak, when not to speak, became part of a larger, coherent narrative.

And gaining this understanding makes you pause. It helps you realise that it does make sense after all, even when it doesn’t make sense immediately. You are the fish out of water, and that feeling is not a failure, but the beginning of understanding. It is, in fact, the first stage of cultural adaptation and cultural intelligence. Understanding why something happens always precedes acting wisely.

When in doubt: Micro-actions matter

What are these actions? Examples?  micro-actions matter more than we think. They influence collaboration and trust. They can be the difference between success and failure because they signal respect, pick up on feedback you didn’t know you were getting, and help you avoid embarrassing your team.

Knowing why they matter makes you a stronger leader in any global context.

In his leadership book The Red Helicopter, James Rhee writes about how cultural clashes can derail even the best intentions if you try to get “their song to fit someone else’s melody.” Cultural understanding is the antidote to that.

Learning to see from the inside out

What made Penelope’s talk so powerful was not only her professional insight but her personal story. A “global unicorn,” as she referred to herself. Shaped by both Korea and the U.S., with a lifetime of moving between worlds.

Her childhood in Korea gives her an intuitive understanding that the rest of us have to learn

the long way around. But being an expat is the next best way of developing this intuition. She reminded us that insider knowledge and outsider perspective are both powerful, just in different ways, and together they form a unique strength.

For those of us living abroad, this is where something important clicks:

Being an expat trains a leadership muscle.

Not because we read culture, but because we feel it.

• The disorienting moments

• The “why are they doing that?” moments

• The quiet adaptations we make every day

• The new intuition we didn’t know we were building

This is how cultural understanding becomes a capability, not just an observation. Research on cultural intelligence (CQ) consistently shows that leaders who can interpret context, history, and behavioural nuance perform more effectively in global roles.  Expat life accelerates this because everyday life becomes practice.

Your expat journey is a global passport

For all of us at The Gallery, the talk became something deeper than cultural analysis. It was a reminder that:

• Our expat journey gives us a unique vantage point, one that can become a real professional strength

• Understanding builds belonging; observing only builds distance

• Cultural intuition is not accidental, it’s a leadership skill earned through lived experience

At The Gallery, we believe leadership begins with awareness: Of ourselves, of others, and of the cultural contexts that shape our decisions. Sessions like this remind us why developing cultural insight is not optional in a globalised world; it is a core professional competence.