by Erin Meyer
Throughout the world, friendships and personal relationships are built on affective trust. If you were to consider why you trust your mother or your spouse, you would likely use descriptive explanations linked to affective trust. But the source of trust in business relationships is a little more complicated.
Roy Chua, a professor at Harvard Business School, surveyed Chinese and American executives from a wide range of industries, asking them to list up to twenty-four important members of their professional networks, from both inside and outside their own workplaces. Then participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they felt comfortable going to each of these contacts to share their personal problems and difficulties as well as their hopes and dreams. “These items showed an affective-based willingness to depend on and be vulnerable to the other person.” Chua explains. Finally, participants were asked to indicate the extent to which the contact could be relied on to complete a task that he or she has agreed to do as well as to have the knowledge and competence needed to get tasks done. These items captured a more cognitive-based willingness to depend on the other person.1
The survey revealed marked differences between the American respondents and the Chinese. Chua found that Americans, in business, draw a sharp dividing line between cognitive trust and affective trust. “This finding makes sense given culture and history,” Chua explains. The United States has “a long tradition of separating the practical and emotional. Mixing the two is perceived as unprofessional and risks conflict of interest.”
Chinese managers, on the other hand, connect the two forms of trust. As Chua puts it, “Among Chinese executives, there is a stronger interplay between affective and cognitive trust. Unlike Americans, Chinese managers are quite likely to develop personal ties and affective bonds when there is also a business or financial tie.” One consequence is that, for a Chinese manager working with Americans, the culturally based preference to separate cognitive trust and personal trust can indicate a lack of sincerity or loyalty.
During a research project I worked on with my longtime collaborator Elisabeth Shen, we interviewed Jing Ren, a thirty-five-year-old Chinese sales manager, who was taken aback to learn how little a personal relationship meant when working in the United States. “In China,” Ren says, “if we have lunch together, we can build a relationship that leads to us working together. But here in Houston, it doesn’t work like that.”
Ren hadn’t been looking to develop a friendship when he bumped into Jeb Bobko at the gym:
I was working out on the rowing machine when I asked him what time it was. We started talking, and I learned that he was preparing for an upcoming monthlong trip across China.
We had a great first connection, and he invited me to his house for dinner several times with his wife and children, and I invited him back. I got to know him and his family well. We developed a great relationship.
Just by chance, his organization was a potential client for us, and I have to say that initially I thought that was great luck. But when we started discussing how our organizations would work together, I was taken aback to find that Jeb wanted to look at every detail of the contract closely and negotiate the price as if I was a stranger. He was treating me as if we had no relationship at all.
In Ren’s culture, personal trust fundamentally shifts the way the two parties conduct business. By contrast, American managers make a concerted effort to ensure that personal relationships do not cloud the way they approach business interactions—in fact, they often deliberately restrict affective closeness with people they depend on for economic resources, such as budgeting or financing.
After all, in countries like the United States or Switzerland, “business is business.” In countries like China or Brazil, “business is personal.”
TASK-BASED VERSUS RELATIONSHIP-BASED CULTURES
Of course, China and Brazil are not the only cultures where affective and cognitive trust are mixed together in business relationships. On the Trusting scale, countries are rated from high task-based to high relationship-based (Figure 6.1). The further a culture falls toward the task-based end of the scale, the more people from that culture tend to separate affective and cognitive trust, and to rely mainly on cognitive trust for work relationships. The further a culture falls toward the relationship-based end of the scale, the more cognitive and affective trust are woven together in business.
FIGURE 6.1. TRUSTING
As you look at the Trusting scale you see the United States positioned far to the left while all BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) fall far to the right. When it comes to building trust, the center of gravity in the global business world has fundamentally shifted over the past fifteen years. Previously, managers working in global business may have felt themselves pulled toward working in a more American manner, because the United States dominated most world markets. Building trust in a task-based fashion was therefore one of the keys to international success. But in today’s business environment, the BRIC cultures are rising and expanding their reach. At the same time, countries in the southern hemisphere such as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are growing in global weight. All of these countries lie markedly toward the relationship-based end of the Trusting scale. Today if you are a manager aiming for success at an international level and your work brings you to the BRIC cultures or really anywhere in the southern hemisphere, you must learn how to build relationship-based trust with your clients and colleagues in order to be successful.
On the other hand, for those who work frequently in North America, you may be skeptical about the accuracy of the United States on the left-hand side of the Trusting scale. Are Americans really so task-based? What about the client breakfasts, the golf outings, and the team-building activities and icebreaker exercises featured at so many American-style training programs or conferences? Don’t these suggest that Americans are just as relationship-based as the Brazilians or the Chinese?
Not really. Think back to those icebreaker activities—those two-to-three-minute exchanges designed to “build a relationship” between complete strangers. What happens when the exercise is completed? Once the relationship is built, the participants check it off the list and get down to business—and at the end of the program, the relationships that were so quickly built are usually just as quickly dropped.
What’s true in the training or conference center is true outside of it. In task-based societies like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, relationships are defined by functionality and practicality. It is relatively easy to move in and out of networks, and if a business relationship proves to be unsatisfactory to either party, it’s a simple matter to close the door on that relationship and move into another.
By contrast, icebreaker exercises in relationship-based societies are rare. Relationships are built up slowly, founded not just on professional credibility but also on deeper emotional connections—and after the relationship is built, it is not dropped easily.
As an example, consider what happens when the boss fires someone on your team. Will you continue your relationship with the person who has been fired even though he is no longer part of your company? Responses to this question vary dramatically from one culture to another.
A Spanish executive working in an American firm told me:
I couldn’t believe the way my American colleagues reacted when one of our team members lost his job. That guy was our friend one day and out of our lives the next. I asked my teammates—all of whom I respect deeply—“When are we going to have a party for him, meet him for drinks, tell him he is on our minds?” They looked at me as if I was a little crazy. They seemed to feel, since he was underperforming, we could just push him off the boat and pretend we never cared about him. For a Spaniard, this is not an easy thing to accept.
If a Spanish manager finds the American attitude strange, a Chinese manager is likely to find it unthinkable. John Trott, a Canadian working in pharmaceuticals and living in Shanghai, explains, “In China, business relat
ionships are personal relationships. The loyalty is to the individual and not to the company. If someone leaves the company, the personal relationship would be much stronger than the severance between that person and the organization.”
The ramifications for someone managing a Chinese team are immediately apparent. If you fire a salesperson, the client who had a relationship with him may also choose to leave. Likewise, if you fire a sales manager who has strong affective trust with his team members, the best are likely to follow him to his new company.
This difference between the way Americans react to a firing and the way those from relationship-based cultures react underscores the reality that Americans are, in fact, highly task-based—no matter how many “relationship building” exercises they may perform at conferences or seminars.
PEACH VS. COCONUT: FRIENDLY DOES NOT EQUAL RELATIONSHIP-BASED
Just as it is easy to misinterpret the reason for an icebreaker activity, it’s easy to mistake certain social customs of Americans that might suggest strong personal connections where none are intended. For example, Americans are more likely than those from many cultures to smile at strangers and to engage in personal discussions with people they hardly know. Others may interpret this “friendliness” as an offer of friendship. Later, when the Americans don’t follow through on their unintended offer, those other cultures often accuse them of being “fake” or “hypocritical.”
Igor Agapova, a Russian colleague of mine, tells this story about his first trip to the United States:
I sat down next to a stranger on the airplane for a nine-hour flight to New York. This American began asking me very personal questions: did I have any children, was it my first trip to the U.S., what was I leaving behind in Russia? And he began to also share very personal information about himself. He showed me pictures of his children, told me he was a bass player, and talked about how difficult his frequent traveling was for his wife, who was with his newborn child right now in Florida.
In response, Agapova started to do something that was unnatural for him and unusual in Russian culture—he shared his personal story quite openly with this friendly stranger, thinking they had built an unusually deep friendship in a short period of time. The sequel was quite disappointing:
I thought that after this type of connection, we would be friends for a very long time. When the airplane landed, imagine my surprise when, as I reached for a piece of paper in order to write down my phone number, my new friend stood up and with a friendly wave of his hand said, “Nice to meet you! Have a great trip!” And that was it. I never saw him again. I felt he had purposely tricked me into opening up when he had no intention of following through on the relationship he had instigated.
Kurt Lewin2 was one of the first social scientists to explain individual personality as being partially formed by the cultural system in which a person was raised. Authors Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner later expanded on Lewin’s model to explain how different cultures have different layers of information that they divulge publicly or reserve for private relationships.3 These models are frequently referred to as the peach and coconut models of personal interaction.
In peach cultures like the United States or Brazil, to name a couple, people tend to be friendly (“soft”) with others they have just met. They smile frequently at strangers, move quickly to first-name usage, share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know. But after a little friendly interaction with a peach person, you may suddenly get to the hard shell of the pit where the peach protects his real self. In these cultures, friendliness does not equal friendship.
When conducting a workshop in Brazil, one of the German participants who had been living in Rio de Janeiro for a year explained,
People are so friendly here. It is unbelievable. You might be buying groceries or simply crossing the street. People ask you questions, speak about their families, and they are constantly inviting you over for a cup of coffee or suggesting that they’ll see you tomorrow on the beach. At the beginning I felt so happy to receive so many invitations of friendship. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that all those people who invite me over for coffee keep forgetting to tell me where they live and those constant suggestions that we’ll meet on the beach the next day simply never materialize. Because the beach is, of course, many miles long.
In Minnesota, where I was raised, we learn at a very young age to smile generously at people we’ve just met. That’s one characteristic of a peach culture. A Frenchwoman who visited with my family was taken aback by Minnesota’s “peachiness.” “The waiters here are constantly smiling and asking me how my day is going! They don’t even know me. It makes me feel uncomfortable and suspicious. What do they want from me? I respond by holding tightly on to my purse.”
On the other hand, coming from a peach culture as I do, I was equally taken aback when I came to live in Europe. My friendly smiles and personal comments were greeted with such cold formality by the Polish, French, German, or Russian colleagues I was just beginning to know. I took their stony expressions as signs of arrogance, perhaps even hostility.
In coconut cultures such as these, people are more closed (like the tough shell of a coconut) with those they don’t have friendships with. They rarely smile at strangers, ask casual acquaintances personal questions, or offer personal information to those they don’t know intimately. It takes a while to get through the initial hard shell, but as you do, people will become gradually warmer and friendlier. While relationships are built up slowly, they tend to last longer.
When you travel to a coconut culture, the receptionist at the company you are visiting will not ask, “What did you do this weekend?” and the hairdresser who is cutting your hair for the first time will not remark, “An American married to a Frenchman? How did you meet your husband?” If you are a peach person traveling in a coconut culture, be aware of the Russian saying “If we pass a stranger on the street who is smiling, we know with certainty that that person is crazy . . . or else American.” If you enter a room in Moscow (or Belgrade, Prague, or even Munich or Stockholm) and find a group of solemn-looking managers who make no effort to chat, do not take this as a sign that the culture does not value relationship building. On the contrary, it is through building a warm personal connection over time that your coconut-culture counterparts will become trusting, loyal partners.
The point, of course, is that different cultures have different social cues that mark appropriate behavior with strangers as opposed to cues that indicate a real friendship is developing. People from both task-based cultures and relationship-based cultures may be affable with strangers, but this characteristic does not in itself indicate either friendship or relationship orientation.
STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING TRUST ACROSS CULTURAL DIVIDES
As a general rule of thumb, investing extra time developing a relationship-based approach will pay dividends when working with people from around the world. This is true even if you both come from task-based cultures, such as the United States and Germany. Once an affective relationship is established, the forgiveness for any cultural missteps you make comes a lot easier. So when you work internationally, no matter who you are working with, investing more time in building affective trust is a good idea. But knowing exactly how to build affective trust may not always be so obvious.
One productive way to start putting trust deposits in the bank is by building on common interests. Wolfgang Schwartz, from Austria, used this simple way of connecting with people to great success during two decades of work in Russia. “When I retired and left Moscow,” he said, “I was replaced by a younger Austrian colleague, Peter Geginat, who had an extraordinary track record in Austria but knew nothing about how people outside of Austria work. His task-based approach was effective for Austria, but not at all suited for Russia.”
Geginat worked diligently for months to close an attractive deal with a potential client. He invested countless hours in making his presentation
outstanding, his brochures polished, and his offer generous and transparent. Yet the client dragged his feet, and, six months into the process, his interest seemed to be dwindling. At this point, the young Geginat called Schwartz up and asked for advice, given the latter’s success during all those years in Russia.
Schwartz came to Moscow and met directly with the client:
The first thing I noticed when I saw him was that he was about my age—we both have white hair. So I spoke of my family, and we spent the first half hour talking about our grandchildren. Then I noticed he had a model of a fighter plane on his desk. I also flew planes in the military, and I saw this as an incredible opportunity. We spent the next hour talking about the differences between various military planes.
At this point, the Russian client signaled that he had to leave. But he invited me to go with him to the ballet that evening. Now, in truth, I dislike the ballet. But I’m not stupid. When an opportunity this good comes along, I jump on it. The evening went beautifully and ended in a drink with the client and his wife.
At 10:00 a.m. the next day, Schwartz met again with the client, who said, “I’ve looked through your proposal, I understand your situation, and I agree with your terms. I have to get someone else to sign the contract, but if you would like to take the plane back to Austria today I will fax you the signed contract this afternoon.” When Schwartz arrived at his office in Austria the next Monday morning, the €2 million down payment was already in his account. Schwartz was able to accomplish more in twenty-four hours with a relationship-based approach than his task-based colleague was able to accomplish in six months.
You might protest that Schwartz was remarkably lucky. Just by chance, he happened to have several things in common with his Russian client, from grandchildren to fighter planes, and in fact, Schwartz did end his account by exclaiming, “It was my white hair that saved me!” But Schwartz found these similarities because he was looking for them.