The Culture Map

by Erin Meyer

  Now I was a little confused, because the question I’d asked was about confrontation, not about trusting—and there were no Hungarians in the case study we just read. I pushed the earpiece closer to my ear to make sure I was hearing the translator correctly. Lilly Li continued to talk for several minutes about trust, hierarchy, and her experiences in Hungary, and the Chinese participants listened carefully. After several long minutes of interesting comments that had—from my perspective—absolutely zero to do with the question I’d asked, Lilly Li came to the point: “In this case, if the team leader had spent more time helping the team build relationships outside of the office, that would have been very helpful during the meeting. The team would have been much more comfortable dealing with open debate and direct confrontation if the relationships on the team had been stronger.”

  Then another participant, Mr. Deng, raised his hand, I restated the specific question: “What steps should the team leader in this case take to manage different attitudes toward confrontation on the team?” Mr. Deng began:

  Let me give my perspective. I have been working in the technology industry for many years. In my company, we have lots of young people who are very eager and hardworking. Yet hierarchy is still strong in our company. During a meeting, if a young person is asked a question, he will look to his boss first to see if the boss’s face indicates approval. If the boss approves, the younger employee will also express approval.

  By now I was thinking to myself, “Mr. Deng, please don’t forget the question!” After several long minutes’ worth of comments about the role of hierarchy in his own organization, Mr. Deng observed, “On a global team, such as in this case, Chinese employees may confront their colleagues, but they will certainly never confront the boss. The team leader could remove himself from the meetings in order to allow for more comfortable discussions amongst his team members.”

  All morning long, the students’ comments followed a similar pattern: After taking several minutes to discuss peripheral information, during which they would loop back to topics we had already discussed, they would then get to their point and come to a conclusion about the topic at hand. Gradually it became clear to me that this behavior did not reflect the idiosyncratic style of one person or even of one group, but rather a wider cultural norm—one that has been revealed by some of the most intriguing research in the cross-cultural field.

  Professors Richard Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda presented twenty-second animated video vignettes of underwater scenes to Japanese and American participants (see an illustration of one of the vignettes in Figure 3.2 on page 108).1 Afterward, participants were asked what they had seen, and the first sentence of each response was categorized.

  The results of the study were remarkable. While the Americans mentioned larger, faster-moving, brightly colored objects in the foreground (such as the big fish visible in the illustration), the Japanese spoke more about what was going on in the background (for example, the plants or the small frog to the bottom left). In addition, the Japanese spoke twice as often as the Americans about the interdependencies between the objects up front and the objects in the background. As one Japanese woman explained, “I naturally look at all the items behind and around the large fish to determine what kind of fish they are.”

  FIGURE 3.2

  In a second study, Americans and Japanese were asked to “take a photo of a person.” The Americans most frequently took a close-up, showing all the features of the person’s face, while the Japanese showed the person in his or her environment instead, with the human figure quite small in relationship to the background (see Figure 3.3).

  In a third study, Nisbett and Masuda asked American and Taiwanese students to read narratives and watch videos of silent comedies—for example, a film about a day in the life of a woman, during which circumstances conspire to prevent her from getting to work—and then to summarize them. In their summaries, the Americans made about 30 percent more statements referring to the central figures of the stories than their Taiwanese counterparts did.2

  FIGURE 3.3. Left: American portrait. Right: Japanese portrait

  PHOTOS BY MELISSA VERONESI

  Notice the common pattern in all three studies. The Americans focus on individual figures separate from their environment, while the Asians give more attention to backgrounds and to the links between these backgrounds and the central figures. I have found these tendencies to be borne out in my own interviews with groups of multicultural managers. While Western European and Anglo-Saxon managers generally follow the American tendencies of specific thinking patterns, East Asians respond as the Japanese and Taiwanese did in Nisbett’s research.

  In addition, I’ve often watched Westerners and Asians discuss these studies. Here’s a bit of dialogue taken directly from a classroom debate about the photo study:

  Western participant: But the instructions said to take a photo of a person, and the picture on the left is a photo of a person. The picture on the right is a photo of a room. Why would the Japanese take a photo of a room when they have been asked to take a photo of a person?

  Asian participant: The photo on the left is not a photo of the person. It is a close-up of a face. How can I determine anything about the person by looking at it? The photo on the right is a photo of the person, the entire person, including surrounding elements so you can determine something about that person. Why would the Americans take a close-up of a face, which leaves out all of the important details?

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that Westerners and Asians tend to display these different patterns of interpretation. A common tenet of Western philosophies and religions is that you can remove an item from its environment and analyze it separately. Aristotle, for example, emphasized focusing attention on a salient object. Its properties could then be assessed and the object assigned a category with the goal of finding rules that governed its behavior. For example, looking at a piece of wood floating in water, Aristotle said that it had the property of “levity,” while a stone falling through air had the property of “gravity.” He referred to the wood and the rock as if each was a separate and isolated object in its own right. Cultural theorists call this specific thinking.

  Chinese religions and philosophies, by contrast, have traditionally emphasized interdependencies and interconnectedness. Ancient Chinese thought was holistic, meaning that the Chinese attended to the field in which an object was located, believing that action always occurs in a field of forces that influence the action. Taoism, which influenced Buddhism and Confucianism, proposes that the universe works harmoniously, its various elements dependent upon one another. The terms yin and yang (literally “dark” and “light”) describe how seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent.

  With this background in mind, let’s reconsider my class of seventeen Chinese executives. Here’s a comment from one of the Chinese participants after we’d discussed the fish and photo research studies:

  Chinese people think from macro to micro, whereas Western people think from micro to macro. For example, when writing an address, the Chinese write in sequence of province, city, district, block, gate number. The Westerners do just the opposite—they start with the number of a single house and gradually work their way up to the city and state. In the same way, Chinese put the surname first, whereas the Westerners do it the other way around. And Chinese put the year before month and date. Again, it’s the opposite in the West.

  It’s easy to see how these differences in the characteristic sequence of thinking may cause difficulty or misunderstanding when people from Asian and Western cultures are involved in conversation. A typical example is that Westerners may think that the Chinese are going all around the key points without addressing them deliberately, while East Asians may experience Westerners as trying to make a decision by isolating a single factor and ignoring significant interdependencies.

  This difference affects how business thinking is perceived in Western and Asian cultures. In the eyes of Asian business l
eaders, European and American executives tend to make decisions without taking much time to consider the broader implications of their actions. As Bae Pak from the Korean motor company Kia explains, “When we work with our Western colleagues, we are often taken aback by their tendency to make decisions without considering how their decisions are impacting various business units, clients, and suppliers. We feel their decisions are hasty and often ignore the surrounding impact.”

  INCREASING YOUR EFFECTIVENESS

  In a specific culture when managing a supplier or team member, people usually respond well to receiving very detailed and segmented information about what you expect of each of them. If you need to give instructions to a team member from a specific culture, focus on what that person needs to accomplish when. If you explain clearly what you need each person to work on, that allows them to home in effectively on their specific task.

  In holistic cultures if you need to motivate, manage, or persuade someone, you will be more influential if you take the time to explain the big picture and show how all the pieces fit together. When I interviewed Jacek Malecki, an unusually big man with a friendly round face and quiet voice, he was working for Toshiba Westinghouse. He provided this example of how he had learned to manage his staff in a more holistic manner.

  I had recently been promoted and for the first time I was managing not just Europeans and Americans but also Japanese. I have managed teams for sixteen years, and I’ve learned over the years to do it well. When I took my first trip to meet with my Japanese staff, I managed the objective-setting process like I always had. I called each person on the team into my office for a meeting. During the meeting we discussed what each individual on the team should accomplish. I outlined each person’s short-term and long-term goals and the individual bonus plan for meeting and exceeding expectations.

  But as Malecki later realized, his approach had not worked well for his Japanese team. “If they don’t understand what others are working on and how the pieces fit together, they don’t feel comfortable or persuaded to move to action. Although I noticed they asked a lot of peripheral questions during the meetings, none of them actually explained to me that my approach was not ideal for them so I went back to Poland with a false sense of comfort.”

  When Malecki returned to Tokyo several weeks later he saw that the way he had divided up the tasks and set individual incentives didn’t match the way his team was working.

  The team had spent a lot of time consulting with one another about what each person had been asked to do and how their individual objectives fit together to create a big picture. The team was now making good progress but not in the way I had segmented the project. I learned that the type of specific division of tasks as well as individual incentive plans don’t work well in a Japanese environment.

  The lesson Malecki learned is a good one for anyone who needs to manage or influence holistic thinkers. If you need to explain a project or set objectives or sell an idea to a holistic audience, begin by explaining the big picture in detail. Outline not just the overall project but also how the parts are connected before drilling down what specifically needs to be accomplished and when.

  AVOIDING THE PITFALLS, REAPING THE BENEFITS

  With words like “diversity” and “global” all the rage, many companies are seeking to create multinational, multicultural teams in an effort to reap benefits in the form of added creativity and greater understanding of global markets. However, as we’ve seen, cultural differences can be fraught with challenges. Effective cross-cultural collaboration can take more time than monocultural collaboration and often needs to be managed more closely. Here are two simple tips that can help you realize the benefits of such collaboration while avoiding the dangers.

  First, on a multicultural team, you can save time by having as few people in the group work across cultures as possible. For example, if you are building a global team that includes small groups of participants from four countries, choose one or two people from each country—the most internationally experienced of the bunch—to do most of the cross-cultural collaborating. Meanwhile, you can leave the others to work in the local way that is most natural to them. That way, you can have the innovation from the combination of cultures, while avoiding the inefficiency that comes with the clash of cultures.

  Second, think carefully about your larger objectives before you mix cultures up. If your goal is innovation or creativity, the more cultural diversity the better, as long as the process is managed carefully. But if your goal is simple speed and efficiency, then monocultural is probably better than multicultural. Sometimes, it is simply better to leave Rome to the Romans.

  4

  How Much Respect Do You Want?

  Leadership, Hierarchy, and Power

  What does a good boss look like? Try to answer the question quickly without giving it much thought. When you picture the perfect leader, is he wearing a navy Armani suit and a pair of highly polished wingtips, or khaki trousers, a sweater, and comfy jogging shoes? Does she travel to work on a mountain bike or driving a black Ferrari? Is the ideal leader someone that you would naturally call “Mr. Director,” or would you prefer to address him as “Sam”?

  For Ulrich Jepsen, a Danish executive in his early thirties who has spent the past ten years on the management fast track working for Maersk, a Copenhagen-based multinational container-shipping company, the answer is clear:

  In Denmark, it is understood that the managing director is one of the guys, just two small steps up from the janitor. I worked hard to be the type of leader who is a facilitator among equals rather than a director giving orders from on high. I felt it was important to dress just as casually as every other member of my team, so they didn’t feel I was arrogant or consider myself to be above them.

  Danes call everyone by their first name and I wouldn’t feel comfortable being called anything but Ulrich. In my staff meetings, the voices of the interns and administrative assistants count as much as mine or any of the directors. This is quite common in Denmark.

  Jepsen does not have an open-door policy—but only because he doesn’t have a door. In fact, he chose to not have an office (they are rare in his company’s headquarters). Instead, he works in an open space among his staff. If any team members need a quiet place to talk, they can slip into a nearby conference room.

  Jepsen continues:

  Managing Danes, I have learned that the best way to get things done is to push power down in the organization and step out of the way. That really motivates people here. I am a big fan of tools like management by objectives and 360-degree feedback, which allow me to manage the team from more or less the same level as them.

  The belief that individuals should be considered equal and that individual achievement should be downplayed has been a part of Scandinavian society for centuries, but it was codified in the so-called “Law of Jante” by Danish author Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks). Sandemose’s writing was intended as a critique of Scandinavian culture as reflected in the homogeneity and repression characteristic of the fictional small town of Jante. Nonetheless, the rules of equality Sandemose described seem to be deeply etched into the Danish psyche. Jepsen observes:

  Although a lot of Danes would like to change this, we have been bathed since childhood in extreme egalitarian principles: Do not think you are better than others. Do not think you are smarter than others. Do not think you are more important than others. Do not think you are someone special. These and the other Jante rules are a very deep part of the way we live and the way we prefer to be managed.

  Jepsen’s egalitarian leadership style was so appreciated in Denmark that he was promoted four times in four years. But the fifth promotion put Jepsen in charge of the company’s recently acquired Russian operation, his first international leadership position.

  Relocated to a small town outside of Saint Petersburg, Jepsen was surprised by the difficulties he encountered in managing his team. A
fter four months in his new job, he e-mailed me this list of complaints about his Russian staff:

  1.They call me Mr. President

  2.They defer to my opinions

  3.They are reluctant to take initiative

  4.They ask for my constant approval

  5.They treat me like I am king

  When Jepsen and I met to discuss his cross-cultural challenges, he provided a concrete example: “Week two into the job, our IT director e-mailed me to outline in detail a problem we were having with the e-mail process and describing various solutions. He ended his e-mail, ‘Mr. President, kindly explain how you would like me to handle this.’ This was the first of many such e-mails from various directors to fill my inbox. All problems are pushed up, up, up, and I do my best to nudge them way back down.” After all, as Jepsen told the IT manager, “You know the situation better than I do. You are the expert, not me.”

  Meanwhile, the members of Jepsen’s Russian management team were equally annoyed at Jepsen’s apparent lack of competence as a leader. Here are some of the complaints they offered during focus group interviews:

  1.He is a weak, ineffective leader

  2.He doesn’t know how to manage

  3.He gave up his corner office on the top floor, suggesting to the company that our team is of no importance

  4.He is incompetent

  While Jepsen was groaning that his team members took no initiative, they were wringing their hands about Jepsen’s lack of leadership: “We are just waiting for a little bit of direction!”

  How about you? Do you prefer an egalitarian or a hierarchical management approach? No matter what your nationality, the answer is probably the same. Most people throughout the world claim to prefer an egalitarian style, and a large majority of managers say that they use an egalitarian approach themselves.