Bridging the Gap: How We Building Leaders Create Trusted Teams with Laura Kriska

In this episode, Alan Briggs sits down with Laura Kriska — cross-cultural consultant, speaker, and author of The Business of We — for a conversation about one of the most underestimated challenges in leadership today: the invisible gaps that keep teams from reaching their full potential.

Laura was born in Japan, raised in Ohio, and spent her early career as the first American woman working inside Honda's Tokyo headquarters. What started as a fascinating cross-cultural immersion became a three-decade career helping leaders and organizations bridge the us versus them gaps that quietly undermine collaboration — whether those gaps are cultural, generational, geographic, or simply the difference between how two departments approach a problem.

If you lead a team of any kind, the frameworks Laura shares in this episode are immediately actionable and long overdue.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Laura's origin story — born in Japan to missionary parents, raised in Columbus, Ohio, and what that unique upbringing taught her about cultural differences hiding in plain sight

What happened on her first day at Honda's Tokyo headquarters — and the split-second decision she made that shaped her entire philosophy of cross-cultural leadership

The We Building framework — what it means to bridge an us versus them gap and why the best leaders do it even when they don't agree with or like the difference they're bridging

The trust continuum: stranger → acquaintance → colleague → trusted colleague — and why most teams get stuck at colleague and never make it to trusted

Why cultural differences are inevitable and predictable — and what changes when leaders start treating them that way

The difference between visible and invisible cultural differences — and why the invisible ones cause the most damage

The Team Machine — Laura's 90-minute interactive simulation that exposes the real collaboration behaviors teams bring to work every day

Three categories of action for bridging any cultural gap: safe actions, challenging actions, and radical actions