Instead, leaders need to develop “cultural intelligence”—a flexible intercultural fluency for adapting to culturally complex situations. I have spent over two decades researching and consulting with leading international organizations on how to manage workers and teams in different cultural contexts. My research shows that honing cultural intelligence is an unending discipline, refined through a lifetime of work and experience. But a good starting point is to understand the most common mistakes that derail Western leaders and learn how to use cultural intelligence to avoid them.