by Erin Meyer
But evidence from the cross-cultural trenches shows another story. When people begin managing internationally, their day-to-day work reveals quite different preferences—and these unexpected, unconscious differences can make leading across cultures surprisingly difficult, as a Mexican manager named Carlos Gomez discovered when his work for the Heineken brewing company brought him a continent away, to Amsterdam.
Teaching a group of Heineken managers feels at first a little like entering a sports bar. The classroom walls are covered with advertisements for various beer brands and there are life-size cardboard cutouts of cocktail waitresses serving up a cold one as you enter the room. Given the overall spirit of relaxed friendliness, I was half expecting the participants to lurch into a round of the Dutch drinking song “In de Hemel is Geen Bier” (In Heaven There Is No Beer) as I started my session.
Heineken, of course, is a Dutch brewing company with a market presence in seventy countries. If you like beer, it’s likely you know one of the international Heineken brands, not only the eponymous Heineken but also Amstel, Moretti, or Kingfisher. When you visit Heineken’s headquarters in Amsterdam, in addition to finding a beer-tasting museum around the corner, you will find a lot of tall blond Dutch people and also a lot of . . . Mexicans. In 2010, Heineken purchased a big operation in Monterrey, Mexico, and now a large number of Heineken employees come from northeastern Mexico.
One is Carlos Gomez, and as our session began, he described to the class his experiences since moving to Amsterdam a year earlier.
“It is absolutely incredible to manage Dutch people and nothing like my experience leading Mexican teams,” Gomez said, “because the Dutch do not care at all who is the boss in the room.”
At this, Gomez’s Dutch colleagues began breaking into knowing laughter. But Gomez protested:
Don’t laugh! It’s not funny. I struggle with this every day. I will schedule a meeting in order to roll out a new process, and during the meeting my team starts challenging the process, taking the meeting in various unexpected directions, ignoring my process altogether, and paying no attention to the fact that they work for me. Sometimes I just watch them astounded. Where is the respect?
You guys know me. You know I am not a tyrant or a dictator, and I believe as deeply in the importance of leveraging creativity from every member of the team as any Dutch person in this room. But in the culture where I was born and raised and have spent my entire life, we give more respect to someone who is senior to us. We show a little more deference to the person in charge.
Yes, you can say we are more hierarchical. And I don’t know how to lead a team if my team does not treat me as their boss, but simply one of them. It is confusing for me, because the way they treat me makes me want to assert my authority more vigorously than I would ever want or need to do in Mexico. But I know that is exactly the wrong approach.
I know this treating everyone as pure equals is the Dutch way, so I keep quiet and try to be patient. But often I just feel like getting down on my knees and pleading with them, “Dear colleagues, in case you have forgotten—I . . . am . . . the boss.”
GEERT HOFSTEDE AND THE CONCEPT OF POWER DISTANCE
Carlos Gomez finds managing a team of workers from Holland terribly frustrating because of the enormous gap between Mexican and Dutch cultures when it comes to power distance. This concept grew out of an ocean journey taken at the age of eighteen by Geert Hofstede, who would eventually become the most famous cross-cultural researcher in history.
Hofstede traveled to Indonesia as an assistant engineer on a ship and was struck by the cultural differences between the people of Indonesia and his fellow Dutchmen. Later, when he got to know an English woman on a different voyage, he realized that strong cultural differences can exist even between countries that are geographically close. These differences fascinated Hofstede. Eventually, as a professor of social psychology, Hofstede was the first person to use significant research data to map world cultures on scales.
Hofstede developed the term “power distance” while analyzing 100,000 management surveys at IBM in the 1970s. He defined power distance as “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” Hofstede also looked at power distance in families and in various other social structures, such as tribes or communities.1
In a more recent study, a group of academic scholars from around the world led by Professor Robert House conducted thousands of interviews across sixty-two countries during which they tested and calibrated Hofstede’s data on the power distance scales again.2 This project is often referred to as the Globe Project. House and his colleagues looked at the degree to which inequality in a society is both supported and desired and considered the impact on egalitarian versus hierarchical leadership preferences in various countries.
The Leading scale takes Hofstede’s idea of power distance and applies it specifically to business. Power distance relates to questions like:
•How much respect or deference is shown to an authority figure?
•How god-like is the boss?
•Is it acceptable to skip layers in your company? If you want to communicate a message to someone two levels above or below you, should you go through the hierarchical chain?
•When you are the boss, what gives you an aura of authority?
As the last question in this list suggests, power distance is related, in part, to the signals that are used to mark power within an organization or other social group. Such signals, of course, may be interpreted very differently in different parts of the world. Behavior that shouts “This man has the leadership skills to move mountains and motivate armies” in one society may squeak “This man has the leadership skills of a three-footed mouse” in another.
In an egalitarian culture, for example, an aura of authority is more likely to come from acting like one of the team, while in a hierarchical culture, an aura of authority tends to come from setting yourself clearly apart.
I met Anne-Hélène Gutierres when she was the teaching assistant in my advanced French course at the University of Minnesota. I sat behind her in class, admired her long smooth brown hair and her lightly accented English, and tried to imagine what it would be like to leave the Parisian City of Lights for the long, cold winters of midwestern America.
As luck would have it, I bumped into Gutierres again years later, when we had both moved to Paris. She told me about some of the surprising things she had encountered while working at a small Minneapolis-based consulting firm—her first job outside of France.
One morning Gutierres arrived at work to find her computer wasn’t working. As she had an important presentation to finish, she turned to her American colleagues for advice. She recalls: “Imagine my surprise when they responded, ‘Pam isn’t here today, why don’t you use her computer? She won’t mind. She has an open door policy.’ Pam was the president of the company!”
Gutierres still remembers the feeling of opening up the big glass door to Pam’s office, approaching her desk, and touching the keyboard. “Even though Pam was out of the country, I could feel the power of her position hovering over that space. Later, when I told my French friends about the experience, we all laughed trying to imagine how our French bosses might react if they knew we had made ourselves comfortable sitting in their chairs and using their things.”
Gutierres’s story suggests the aura of authority that surrounds the material possessions of a boss in French culture. More broadly, it suggests the important role symbols play in defining power distance. Thus, if you are the boss, your behavior may be speaking volumes without your even recognizing it.
Take a simple action like riding a bike to work. In countries like Jepsen’s Denmark, when the boss rides a bike to work (which is common), it may symbolize to the egalitarian Danes a strong leadership voice: “Look, I’m one of you.” Something similar applies in Australia, as explained by Steve Henning, an executive in the textile industry:
One of
my most proud lifestyle choices back in Australia was the fact that I was a near-full-time bicycle commuter. My Surly Long Haul Trucker bike wasn’t just a toy; it was a fully equipped workhorse that was used for shopping, getting around, traveling to and from work, weekend leisure rides, and anything else I needed.
I’m a senior vice president in our company, and my Australian staff thought it was great that I rode a bike to work. If anything, they liked that their boss showed up to work in a bike helmet. So I decided to bring my bicycle with me when I was assigned to a new job in China.
Henning had been using his bike during his daily commute in Beijing for a while when he discovered that the tactic had certainly attracted attention from his team members. “Just not the type of attention I was hoping for,” Henning sighs. While sharing a dinner and drinks with a Chinese colleague and friend, Henning learned what his staff was saying about him:
My team was humiliated that their boss rode a bike to work like a common person. While Chinese bike to work infinitely more than Australians, among the wealthier Chinese, bikes are not an option. There are plenty of bikes on the road, but biking is for the lower classes only.
So my team felt it was an embarrassment that their boss rode a bike to the office. They felt it suggested to the entire company that their boss was unimportant, and that by association, they were unimportant, too.
Well, I love my bike, but I was in China to get my team motivated and on track. I certainly didn’t want to sabotage my success just to arrive sweaty at the office every morning. I gave up the bike and started taking public transportation, just like every other Chinese boss.
Once you understand the power distance messages your actions are sending, you can make an informed choice about what behaviors to change. But if you don’t know what your behaviors signify, you’ll have no control over the signals you send—and the results can be disastrous.
HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL FACTORS THAT AFFECT THE LEADING SCALE
Our placement of cultures on the Leading scale, which positions cultures from highly egalitarian to strongly hierarchical (Figure 4.1), draws heavily on Hofstede’s work and the Globe Project research. It also incorporates data from my own work with hundreds of international executives. On the scale and from now on we’ll use the word egalitarian instead of low power distance and hierarchical instead of high power distance.
A glance at the Leading scale reveals a number of interesting and important anomalies.
FIGURE 4.1. LEADING
One relates to the placement of European cultures on the scale. Once, while doing some work for an Ohio-based food producer, I worked with a group of executives who frequently sold products and services via telephone to clients from many countries. When I spoke to the participants on the phone during my planning for our session, several told me that they would like to learn more about the “European culture.”
Take a good look at the Leading scale and see if you can identify the location of “European culture.” As your eye scans from Denmark and Sweden on the extreme left of the scale all the way down to Italy and Spain in the middle-right, you’ll realize that what it means to be “culturally European” on this scale is not very evident. Although Europe is a small geographical area, it embraces large differences in opinion about what it means to be a good boss.
These variations within Europe have been examined by a number of different researchers. For example, in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, my colleague Professor André Laurent polled hundreds of European managers about a number of leadership issues.3 One of the questions he asked was, “Is it important for a manager to have at hand precise answers to most of the questions subordinates may raise about their work?”
Take a look (Figure 4.2) at the percentages of respondents from each country who responded “yes” to this question:
As you can see, the answers varied dramatically from one nationality to the next. While 55 percent of Italians polled claimed that it is important for the boss to have most of the answers, only 7 percent of Swedes thought the same way. In recent follow-up interviews, Swedish managers explained that a conscious approach to leadership underlies this attitude. One commented, “Even if I know the answer, I probably won’t give it to my staff . . . because I want them to figure it out for themselves.” An Italian manager would be more likely to say, “If I don’t provide my people with the answers they need, how can they move ahead?”
Intrigued by these results, Professor Laurent puzzled over the historic factors that might have pushed these various European cultures to have such different identities when it comes to the role of the boss. Here are three clues you might recall from your high school history classes.
FIGURE 4.2.
The first clue is one I recall from my tenth-grade teacher, Mr. Duncan, who told our class about how the Roman Empire swept across southern Europe. He recounted in hushed tones how the Romans built hierarchical social and political structures and heavily centralized systems for managing their vast empire. The boundaries between the different classes were strict and legally enforced. Members of different classes even dressed differently. Only the emperor was allowed to wear a purple toga, while senators could wear a white toga with a broad purple stripe along the edge, and equestrians, who ranked just below the senators, wore togas with a narrow purple stripe. The class of the person was therefore noticeable at first glimpse.
So a first historical point is that the countries that fell under the influence of the Roman Empire (including Spain, Italy, and, to a lesser degree, France) tend to be more hierarchical than the rest of Western Europe. Although your Italian boss is unlikely to wear a purple toga, invisible and subtle remnants of these attitudes still remain today.
The second clue relates to a much later European empire, one that dominated the northern part of the continent to almost as great an extent as the Roman Empire dominated the south. When you think of the Vikings, you may think of hulking muscular men with long walrus mustaches and hats with horns, riding big ships and waging bloody wars. What you may not know is that the Vikings were surprisingly egalitarian. When settling in Iceland, they founded one of the world’s early democracies. The entire community was invited to the debating hall to thrash out the hot topics of the day, followed by a vote, with each person’s opinion carrying equal weight. Legend has it that, when the Prince of Franks sent an envoy from southern Europe to negotiate with the Vikings, the puzzled envoy returned confused and disheartened, complaining, “I couldn’t figure out who to talk with. They said they were all the chiefs.”
The countries most influenced by the Vikings consistently rank as some of the most egalitarian and consensus-oriented cultures in the world today. So it is no surprise that, even today, when you walk into a meeting room in Copenhagen or Stockholm, it is often impossible to spot the boss.
Our third historical clue relates to the distance between the people and God in particular religions. Countries with Protestant cultures tend to fall further to the egalitarian side of the scale than those with a more Catholic tradition. One interpretation of this pattern is that the Protestant Reformation largely removed the traditional hierarchy from the church. In many strains of Protestantism, the individual speaks directly to God instead of speaking to God through the priest, the bishop, and the pope. Thus, it’s natural that societies in which Protestant religions predominate tend to be more egalitarian than those dominated by Catholicism.
Of course, all three of these historical observations are dramatic oversimplifications, as each country has a rich and complex history that helps shape its leadership beliefs. But even in this day of text messaging and video calls, where cross-cultural interactions are commonplace, events that took place thousands of years ago continue to influence the cultures in which individuals are raised and formed—and these historical forces help to explain why European countries appear in such widely different locations on the Leading scale.
Meanwhile, a glance to the right-hand side of the scale, where hierarchical co
untries are clustered, reveals a large number of Asian cultures. Here, again, we can point to a significant historical influence that helps to explain this pattern—the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius.
When I was in my teens, my family had a Chinese doctoral student named Ronan living with us one winter in Minneapolis. My older brother and I were often fighting, and after one of our disagreements, Ronan told me the story of Kong Rong, who was a Han Dynasty scholar, politician, and warlord. According to Ronan, when Kong Rong was four years old, he was given the opportunity to choose a pear from among several. Instead of taking the largest pear, he took the smallest pear, saying that the larger pears should be eaten by his older brothers. Although the story did nothing to change my feelings toward my brother, the oddity of the message stuck in my mind. I didn’t much like pears, but I certainly wouldn’t give the nicest one to my brother just because he happened to be born two years before me.
Obviously, I wasn’t raised with Confucian principles. But in Confucian Asia, the older sibling is clearly positioned above the younger one. Thus, in Chinese families, children are generally not spoken to in the family by their personal names but rather by their kinship titles (“Older sister,” “2nd brother,” “4th sister,” and so on). In this way, they are constantly reminded of their position in the family relative to everyone else’s.
Confucius was mainly interested in how to bring about societal order and harmony. He believed that mankind would be in harmony with the universe if everyone understood their rank in society and observed the behaviors proper to that rank. Accordingly, he believed that the social order was threatened whenever people failed to act according to their prescribed roles. Confucius devised a system of interdependent relationships, a sort of structure in which the lower level gives obedience to the higher, while those who are higher protect and mentor the lower. The structure, which he called wu lun, outlined five principal relationships: