I travelled recently to North East China.
I was there twice in 3 months time and after studying the company and listening to the frank discussions of both Chinese and Foreign Partners I decided to post this generic article hoping that in future no Foreigners will say You can not trust Chinese and no Chinese will say You can not trust Foreigners.As many wondered, why so many joint ventures failed and their stories discourage many potential partnership possibilities.
We may heard many stories about failed co operations between Chinese and Westerners.
Each side comes with a lot of good intentions and what the French call with"Baggage Culturel".
That word means literally Cultural Luggage.It is a cocktail of history, traditions and a particular code of conduct in social environment.
For my Chinese readers I will start with
Western Cultural Luggage:
---------------------------
Western Culture is Universal and shared by a big number of countries.
It comes from the countries where there is more and less a welfare society and the state is able to care about the citizens in variety of degrees depending on the country.The relation within a group of persons inside family, ethnic group is loose.
It is merit based.Performance is the rule.
Giving face or losing face its not important
Individual sign of knowledge and ability is good for competition and it is not considered as showing off.
The team work and tasks are more important than caring about relations.
Boss worker relation is open communication style.
Contradict somebody for common good is tolerated and accepted.
Equal treatment for equal performance is the rule.
When you work for your manager you are not working for him but for the company.Company is not abstract.
In western management everybody can be replaced, that includes the manager.
Chinese Cultural Luggage:
---------------------------
Chinese Culture is Particular.It has its roots in long history, rich philosophy which influence even the youngest generation that most will consider Westernized.It is shared by 1.5 Billion Chinese and in variety of degrees by Asians.
The relation within the group of same family,same clan, same ethnic group and workmates, same company is strong.Stronger than the tasks it is assigned to perform .
Individuals in this cultural context can not survive without these close knitted relations.
So they need to build a network of relation (guanxi) and interest in others welfare (ganqing) within the group is important.
If a reality would disrupt the harmony silence will rule.
The face of a person and of the group can not be lost.
If higher performing individual will attract attention at the expense of his workmates he will slow down in order to save the whole group face.
Every unit leader must act in a paternalistic manner and it is based on personal linkage promotions system.
We all must help each other.I heard this many times.
They see westerners as individualistic persons, for work they will abstain helping their friends.
In this context nobody should be blamed in front of others.And if a person deserves critics he will be invited to a face to face meeting the discussion will be centered mostly on the compliments and for conclusion some critics will be expressed as some little problems need to be solved and some polite suggestions that the listener may have to solve them.
PROBLEMS
-------------
It starts from top management.When people have different culture which is very normal.
But what is essential how not having poor relation at the top of management.
When poor relation exists at the top, and it can not be improved, soon or later the failure will knock the door.
SOLUTION
--------------
When a person is called "Foreigner" he must not only have working relation based on command chain only.
He should let himself involved with local people.Meet them in leisure time.
He must also learn their language as much as he can.
Learning their history and traditions and their manners and the code of conduct prevailing in the host country.
This will help them to build a relation based on trust.
They should organize once a month outing in leisure times.And this will help to create a common company Culture with its own inner calendar.
This will allow them to have the first steps of guanxi.
They should also teach the locals their own culture, their way of life, in order to make them sensitive to the cultural needs that they may have.They should train them on how to improve communication across the language and cultural barriers.
In a cooperation where each side have a very big differences on central issues like, discipline, loyalty and how a work should be done?Both the locals and foreigners must come to term that
if each side insist on their own value of optimal that will endanger the cooperation .
They will both accept to reduce their own demand of optimal to suboptimal level and find a midway which is possible for cooperation to find its own optimal level.
That will allow an optimal level for effective management.
A western manager should not only have technical and managerial skills.
He also must be equipped with flexibility in inter cultural relations and strong desire and ability to learn the language and culture of the people with whom he interact day by day.
No comments:
Post a Comment