Whenever we work in cross cultural environments, particularly in Asia, we are told that we will have trouble getting participation. The story goes that in Asian cultures people will be deferential and keep their ideas and feelings to themselves.
This is not our experience and I was mindful of this story on our recent trip to China where we found again that this was not the case. When people from different backgrounds are put in the right environment, given the right encouragement and supported in the right way, they openly share ideas, information and themselves. So what does the right encouragement, support and environment look like?
Strategically the environment has to be challenging; there has to be a good reason to go through the discomfort of change. Excelling in a fast growing emerging market, keeping up with the pace of change and integrating a range of diverse cultures is always a challenge - a challenge that will not be met by doing the same things in the same way. Having a challenging strategic goal is always the starting point.
To reach such a goal people need to be motivated to stretch themselves personally to achieve personal and group objectives. Leadership involves getting people to voluntarily grow. To role model this, leaders have to grow themselves.
As environments often change, it is essential to build relationships and get buy in, so that people work together to solve emerging issues. The temptation is to do this reactively. Being strategic takes courage, sticking to your goals, managing people’s uncertainty and fears as you move forward. While we were in China global markets crashed. The temptation was to scrap the strategic workshop we were there to run and react to the crisis. The leader didn’t waiver from the goal. We focused on long term strategic breakthrough. True leadership takes courage.
Good leaders model difference. This can look like the leader sharing some personal insights about themselves. The leader we were working with (a non-mandarin speaker) opened the workshop by reading a well-known Chinese poem in mandarin. Their pronunciation wasn’t perfect, their leadership was. They revealed a willingness to try something new, even when to do so involved making mistakes. It spoke of caring enough about people to go and find out something that mattered to them and then share it in their own language. It modeled humility and humanity which then became the hallmarks of the whole workshop.
Leaders usually need training before facilitating a session aimed at getting their staff to openly participate. If we judge, reprimand or label people when they do participate, they clam up. If people feel safe to participate, our experience is that people always will. This is true across all cultures in which Zaffyre has worked.
Before the workshop, a cross section of staff was interviewed by Zaffyre consultants to uncover their fears and hopes. This proved invaluable as these fears & hopes could then be addressed, ensuring that the workshop was relevant both strategically and to each participant.
All of this is leadership. Leadership is listening to people, setting challenging strategic targets, letting people have a real voice, anchoring outcomes in action and doing all this in a way that has people walking away feeling they are contributing to something worthwhile and that they are having fun. When all this is done in a way that has people grow and build relationships you have a winning leadership formula. This is the case regardless of the culture in which you are working. Change is change no matter what the environment and if you use the right process you’ll get the right strategic outcome.
