Managing cultural differences key to success overseas
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, September 3, 2013
Q: Did your surveys reflect patterns about relative cross-cultural communicative strengths of managers of different nationalities?
A: Right now we almost have 20,000 individuals in our database of global mindset. And they come from many parts of the world. We selected the top 10 countries in our database. These are countries where we have large samples of managers, the US, of course, India, Mexico, China, Japan, Brazil and a few other countries.
The question we asked was how do the managers in these countries compare in terms of global mindset. So we compare their average scores.
What we found was that Brazilian managers have the highest average scores of all the 10 countries.
And that makes sense because Brazil is a mix of everything, a mix of religions, ethnicities, background. When Brazilian children grow up, they are exposed to all kinds of diversity.
Chinese and Japanese managers had lower scores compared to the others.
In the case of China, the best reason we can come up with as a result of our conversations is the history of Chinese business. China’s business up to the late 1980s was very much government-run, bureaucracy, internally focused. Not much exposure at all to anybody outside China. So very isolated. Starting in the late 80s and up to today, Chinese business has been exposed to foreign companies, but mostly in China.
The reason for Japanese managers is different. Based on what we heard from Japanese managers, most Japanese managers do not like to work outside of Japan or with non-Japanese. They prefer to work in Japan, and with fellow Japanese.
Q: Do cultural stereotypes hinder managers with cross-cultural leadership?
A: Here’s the difference between cultural stereotype and cultural understanding. Cultural stereotype means 100 percent certainty.
So if you are American, I’m 100 percent certain you are individualistic. If you are Chinese, I am 100 percent certain you are collectivist. In other words, it is a very simplistic view of human beings.
Cultural understanding is this: In general, Chinese managers are more interested in their families, much stronger family ties, family values than American managers. Now suppose I’m sitting in front of a Chinese manager, I’m not saying this Chinese manager is 100 percent family-oriented. I’m paying attention. I’m going to ask you questions about family, about relationship, to confirm you as a Chinese manager are closer to that stereotype.
When I’m sitting with an American manager, I’m going to figure out how family-oriented is that person.
In other words, the difference between cultural understanding and cultural stereotype is that I start with questions in cultural understanding. I have a hypothesis that I’m going to test.
In cultural stereotyping, I don’t have a question. I only have an answer.
Q: Management gurus caution foreign managers against lecturing locals. But sometimes outsiders do know better. An example is Carlos Ghosn, who turned Nissan around. How to strike the balance between the two practices?
A: Let’s take it to a simple situation. I’m a Chinese manager from Lenovo.
I’m now hired by Huawei as a senior executive. I’ve been with Lenovo for 20 years, very successful.
And now I come and work for Huawei and you are my employee at Huawei.
Every meeting we have I start by telling you at Lenovo this is how we did it, and we were very good. How will you react as a 10-year employee of Huawei? You can get upset.
So this issue of lecturing people is not just about cross-cultures, it’s also from one Chinese company to another Chinese company. No one likes to be told you are bad.
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