Paul Saunders

Paul has over 25 years' experience working with a wide range of global organizations around the world, enabling leaders and their teams to identify, understand and leverage the potential of cultural differences to drive innovation, change, growth and high performance. He has lived in six different countries and works in many more as a cross-cultural consultant, facilitator, trainer and coach. This gives him current and relevant first-hand experience inside large, global organizations of the challenges of working cross-culturally in a virtual, matrixed and ever-accelerating world – it also gives him the opportunity to get on and off a lot of planes.

Paul works at all levels within organizations, using his broad set of skills to work with clients to develop strategies, frameworks and tools which will enable cross-cultural issues to be tackled and resolved both quickly and pragmatically. His particular focus is on enabling global leaders to drive innovation, collaboration and growth in their global teams and businesses, for which he uses two proprietary diagnostic tools with great success. Renowned for his dynamic, interactive and thought-provoking style, Paul has the ability to engage people in challenging their perceptions and behaviors when working cross-culturally and to develop them into more effective global performers.

Paul believes strongly in taking an experiential approach to the challenges of working across cultures and his approach is very much hands-on, dynamic and engaging with powerful debriefs and learning actions designed to make a real and positive difference. He has a first degree in French and German, an MBA and is an active member of SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research). He is currently researching the challenges of virtual collaboration in driving creativity and innovation in multicultural teams and is also much in demand as an energizing and entertaining speaker at global meetings and corporate events.