Marina Ibrahim

Multinational teams stall when leaders manage them as if culture were a soft variable. Mergers misfire, talent disengages, decisions slow, and the gap between an inclusion policy on paper and how teams actually behave widens. The work is to turn cultural difference into a performance asset rather than an ongoing source of friction.

Marina Ibrahim is a cultural agility and inclusive leadership specialist who helps senior leaders and multicultural teams perform across borders, languages and identities.

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Why organisations work with Marina Ibrahim

She has run cross-cultural integration work inside named multinationals including BMW Group, Bentley, Nike, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, BP, UBS and Deutsche Telekom, across automotive, FMCG, financial services and life sciences.
Her own biography (British-German, born to a German mother and Egyptian father, bilingual in English and German) is the lived case study behind the work, which lands with international audiences in a way a single-culture expert cannot match.
She brings instrument-led rigour, not opinion. GLOBE+, her signature framework, integrates Country Navigator, Wiley Everything DiSC Certified Partner, Wiley Five Behaviours Certified Partner (Lencioni’s Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team), GlobalDISC and ICQ Growth 2.0 into diagnostic data on team performance.
She has worked the British-German interface specifically, including post-merger cultural integration, where most cross-cultural speakers stay at a generic level.
Externally judged: FSB West Midlands Diversity and Inclusion Award 2024 for the consultancy she founded, and Professional Speaker of the Year Staffordshire 2025.

Biography highlights

Founder of Globility Insights, the West Midlands-based cultural agility and inclusive leadership consultancy she established in 2011.
Creator of GLOBE+, her signature cultural agility framework, used with multinational clients across automotive, FMCG, financial services and life sciences.
Senior Culture Coach at Country Navigator, the cultural intelligence training platform.
Federation of Small Businesses West Midlands Diversity and Inclusion Award 2024; Professional Speaker of the Year, Staffordshire 2025; Cartus Service Excellence Award 2020.
Client organisations include BMW Group, Bentley, Nike, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, EMI, Commerzbank, BP, UBS, Deutsche Telekom and Wood PLC.
Wiley Everything DiSC Certified Partner; Wiley Five Behaviours Certified Partner (Lencioni’s Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team); Country Navigator, GlobalDISC and ICQ Growth 2.0 Coach; MirrorMIRROR Certified Team Coach; NLP Practitioner; MCIM Chartered Marketer.
British and German national with Egyptian heritage; bilingual English and German.

Biography

Most multinational organisations treat culture as a soft variable. Strategy is hard, culture is decoration. The teams running the actual work know better. They are the ones absorbing the friction when a German engineering function tries to land a project inside a Brazilian commercial team, or when a British acquirer tells a Japanese subsidiary that “nothing will change”.

Marina Ibrahim has spent more than 25 years inside that gap. Through Globility Insights, the consultancy she founded in 2011, she has worked with BMW Group, Bentley, Nike, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, BP, UBS and Deutsche Telekom on the parts of cross-cultural collaboration that do not show up on a strategy slide: trust between merged teams, decision-making across British and German operating styles, the difference between an inclusion statement and a multicultural team that actually functions.

Her own profile is part of the credibility. Born to a German mother and Egyptian father, British-German, bilingual in English and German, she is the lived case study behind the work. The method is not. GLOBE+, her signature framework, runs senior teams through Country Navigator, Wiley Everything DiSC, Wiley Five Behaviours, GlobalDISC and ICQ Growth 2.0, so leaders leave with diagnostic data on how their teams actually operate, not a set of stories.

In 2024, the Federation of Small Businesses named Globility the West Midlands Diversity and Inclusion Award winner, an externally judged signal that the practice she built holds up under scrutiny. For senior teams trying to make global structures actually perform, that is the relevant test.

Key speaking topics

Cultural agility as a competitive advantage
Inclusive leadership in multinational organisations
High-performing multicultural teams
Post-merger cultural integration
British and German business cultures and operating styles
Unconscious bias and inclusive decision-making in practice
Leading internationally distributed and hybrid teams

Ideal for

CHROs and DEI leads embedding inclusion beyond policy into team behaviour
Executive teams running cross-border integrations or post-merger collaboration
Global function heads managing multicultural and internationally distributed teams
Leadership development programmes for senior leaders preparing for international roles

Audience outcomes

A working definition of cultural agility that names what behaviours actually shift performance across borders
A diagnostic view of where their own multicultural teams break down, drawn from established cultural instruments rather than opinion
Specific moves leaders can use the next day to manage British, German and broader European operating differences
A sharper sense of where current inclusion efforts are stalling and what to do about it

Talks

Between Accents & Assumptions: Amplifying Your Voice Across Cultures

A keynote on how accents, assumptions and communication biases shape trust, inclusion and leadership impact across multilingual and multicultural teams. Delivered as a headline keynote at the Toastmasters District 107 Spring Conference 2026 in Málaga, to roughly 300 leaders, professionals and communicators from across Europe and North Africa.

Key takeaways:

Where accents and linguistic assumptions create real friction in international teams, and where the friction is imagined.
How leaders can read communication bias inside their own organisations before it surfaces as a retention or performance issue.
Practical moves to convert linguistic and cultural difference into trust and decision speed across borders.

Available for

Speaking Themes

Languages

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Videos

Testimonials

We were delighted to engage Marina to speak at our Care Managers Conference. I’ve been following Marina for many years on social media and when we were formulating the agenda for our conference, Marina was the obvious choice to speak about diversity and inclusion. Marina has been a pleasure to work with. She engaged with us early on to ensure she understood the audience and the aims and objectives of the event. We do a lot of conferences for our members and its very obvious to us whether or not our audience engages with a speaker. I’m pleased to say that Marina smashed it. We were really impressed with the level of engagement with the audience and the allotted speaking time flew by before we knew it. I’d definitely recommend having Marina speak at one of your events

Keiron Broadbent

Chief Executive Office, West Midlands Care Association

Marina Ibrahim provided CIPD Shropshire’s first webinar of the new academic year on 13th September 2023 and delivered a topical and thought-provoking session with the intriguing title: Easy EDI for HR Professionals. Marina was a professional and engaging presenter who delivered an informative and interactive session. She shared her wealth of experience and gave our members useful ideas and tools to help establish a positive and integrated EDI strategy. Our members really enjoyed this webinar, finding it both insightful and relevant. We would be happy to work with Marina again.

Branch Committee, Shropshire CIPD

I had the pleasure of participating in the first CIM 'Diversity & Inclusion in Marketing Communication' course, expertly facilitated by Marina. She is very knowledgeable in this complex field and is an engaging presenter who welcomed contributions and ideas from the group. It was a great course and I highly recommend working with Marina and benefiting from her expertise!

Marketing Leader

Engaging Marina as cross-cultural coach has been a transformative experience. Her role was crucial in navigating my cultural journey from Germany to the United Kingdom, impacting both my personal growth and professional development. Marina’s exceptional cultural insight and ability to connect across diverse backgrounds were pivotal. Her support was not just comforting but also enriched with knowledge that enhanced my performance in a new environment. The transition was smoothed by her variety of practical strategies and enlightening approaches that eased the integration process. Marina’s guidance was a beacon that facilitated my adaptation and made the cultural nuances more accessible and less daunting. I am deeply grateful for the breadth of her expertise and the depth of her encouragement throughout this significant phase.

Head of CLM Client Lifecycle Management, Commerzbank

Marina was an absolute pleasure to work with, she has helped me with my move from South-Africa to the UK, every step of the way. I must say her guidance and understanding of relating to different cultures is outstanding. She was extremely supportive and patient with me. Having support with cultural change makes things so much easier to absorb. She has many techniques and informative ways that helps put things at ease. Thank you, Marina for all your support and guidance.

Commercial Finance Specialist, BMW Financial Service

Dear Marina, Thank you for time and guidance last week. We both now feel much more confident about recognising and understanding the reality of everyone’s “deeper” cultural differences and have a good insight of what to expect when we are in South Korea. We really appreciated the training, and both feel that it was your energy and engagement, and how you found examples and anecdotes closer to own personal situation, that made the day very enjoyable and fun for us too. We are looking forward to our overseas adventure. Thanks again!

Executive Manager, Fortune 500 electrical supply brand

Today’s webinar by Marina Ibrahim was of a very high standard.

Director, PMI UK Chapter

My first encounter with Marina was while attending a PMI-sponsored webinar titled “Cultural Pitfalls in International Project Management: Communication”. As my own background includes 20+ years working on multicultural and multinational engineering projects, cultural awareness is a particular interest. Both Marina’s knowledge of the wide range of cultural behavioural models and her own personal experience makes her a passionate advocate and coach for global awareness. What sets her apart is that she also understands that while the cultural models help to indicate potential behaviours, ultimately successful teams and projects are built by also taking individual members’ personalities and life experiences into consideration.

Systems Delivery Consultant, Wood PLC

Marina recently supported our 2020 Kick Off Conference in delivering workshops to our international senior management and sales team on ‘Cross-cultural Leadership’. The workshops were aimed at improving understanding and engagement with one of our core values “Open Mind”. Marina is very knowledgeable on this subject and her experience on developing global leaders in their cultural agility and cross-cultural communication was evident throughout her workshops. She was able to successfully translate our brief into the workshop concept with high impact: focused, energising, and insightful. The delegates really enjoyed Marina’s highly skilled delivery and the buzz created that left everyone with something valuable to apply an ‘open mind’ back at work. Marina has been a great pleasure to work with. We experienced her as a creative team player, committed and reliable. We would be delighted to engage Marina again for future cross-cultural teambuilding and communication training to leverage high-performance, problem-solving and innovation, so crucial for the competitiveness of our international organisation

Sales & Marketing Manager Europe, Oil & Energy

Marina prepared me perfectly for my job in Egypt with an intercultural training. She knows how important an international mindset, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast", is and has an excellent background and in-depth knowledge and experience. Thank you again for the perfect preparation in this complex topic and time for answering all my questions Marina! I can highly recommend her!

Engineering & Construction Manager, Oil & Energy