Lupe Edition No. 19, Liebich & Partner Magazine for Clients, Article about cross-cultural understanding

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2. LuPe 19 Liebich & Partner LuPe 19 Liebich & Partner
One person or a group of people come up with an idea.
Seems like a good idea at first. Then you just can’t get it out
of your head. And eventually the crucial question comes
up: »And how is that going to work?« What impresses
about some start-ups or, for example, the Urban Garden-
ing Movement where city dwellers fill up public space with
vegetation, is that the people involved are not put off by
this killer phrase. Their answer: »No idea, we’ll have to try
it.« Are they declaring their imprudence, their naivety, or
perhaps their natural feeling for reality?
The fact is that we are used to scrutinizing our ideas from
back to front, and to planning their implementation whilst
taking into account all the possible ifs and buts. We want
to avoid uncertainties and achieve the perfect solution. This
doesn’t work very often. Especially in innovative or larger
projects, it’s working less and less often. And it’s not usual-
ly due to lack of competence but to increasingly complex,
fast-changing circumstances.
So can we learn something from start-ups and social initi-
atives? Maybe that it is not a mistake to admit you don’t
always know the perfect solution or the perfect way to
reach it. And that this is absolutely no
reason to discard a good idea.
If they do not see the big picture, to-
day’s entrepreneurs simply let loose
in small steps. They gather expertise,
look at what works and what doesn’t,
step by step, and this way they can
keep their options open to turn back
any time. This doesn’t promise stag-
gering success in one swoop, but it
does help to prevent severe failure.
And it also meets the
demands of a changing environment.
What’s right today may be wrong even
next week. It’s better to assess what
Do it
We all need to learn how to deal with uncer-
tainties. According to Tomas Schiffbauer having
confidence helps, even if there is only a rough
plan, using your own skills and those of your
employees to reach your goal.
liebich-partner.de/tomas-schiffbauer
The word power has rather negative connotations in our culture,
yet in others it sounds positive. This is one of the challenges for
managers in globally active corporations.
With or without ?
» The British and the Germans can
manage without a boss.«
The stages of intercultural competence: I don’t
know that I don’t know anything. I know that
I don’t know anything. I know that I conscious-
ly act differently. I unconsciously act differently.
According to Andreas Kambach the last stage is
virtually unreachable. You will never really be-
long to of a different culture.
liebich-partner.de/andreas-kambach
Asking someone in India for directions to some-
where is meaningless, says Felix Pliester. Even if
an Indian person doesn’t know the way, it would
be a bad deed if he didn’t help. Thus, the in-
quirer is sent in the same direction he is going
anyway, or one that looks nicer.
liebich-partner.de/felix-pliester
»And how is that going to work?«
»You’ll land the perfect solution along the way.«
A classic corporate conflict: Sales needs
a small batch of a special product for
a key customer. Production blackballs
the request; the set-up costs are too
high. There is no solution. Who’s to
blame? The French would say: The
boss should have listened to both sides
and made a decision. The British would
say: The heads of sales and produc-
tion ought to train their negotiat-
ing skills in a workshop. The Ger-
mans would say: Something’s
wrong, we need to examine
our processes.
This came out of a case study
led by Owen James Stevens at
the INSEAD Business School in
France. And what we notice is, the
British and the Germans can manage
without a boss, the French expect
the boss to provide the solution. For
social psychologist Professor Geert
Hofstede the responses relate partly
to the different Power Distances of
the cultures. Power Distance indicates
the extent to which societies accept or
expect inequalities and hierarchies −
in the German language there are 2
ways ( formal levels ) to address some-
one (»du« and »Sie«), in Malaysia
there are 33 different levels. The cul-
tural Power Distance is particularly rel-
evant to leadership. It influences the
leadership style that managers prefer,
the leadership style employees accept,
and how they behave if they disagree
with their boss.
In England, Germany or the US, the
Power Distance is low. In these coun-
tries things are discussed openly and
a manager relies on the expertise of
the employees. In many Latin Amer-
ican, Asian or Arab countries this is
quite different: These are cultures
with a high Power Distance and here
the staff just nod and keep quiet. The
boss must know what he wants and
must tell them, or he is seen as weak
and disoriented. He needs to have op-
erational knowledge and the ability to
acquire detailed knowledge of numer-
ous topics.
Managers and HR decision-makers
need to be aware of the culturally
quite diverging notions of leadership
and power: If you are managing a
multicultural team, it is pointless to
keep switching between more and less
power-oriented leadership styles. Your
best chance is to draw on your own
extensive international experience
and allocate tasks within the team on
a culturally based system. Should you
need creative exploration, employees
from low Power Distance cultures will
be the right choice. When it comes
to checking feasibilities by applying
predetermined rules, people from cul-
tures with high Power Distance will
demonstrate the right skills. Ideally,
the team members then perceive the
leadership style within the sense of
their own cultural identity.
When a German manager heads a
team from another country, the depth
of his/her intercultural experience is
more important than the breadth. Be-
the next step should be out of the current situation. You’ll
land the perfect solution along the way.
Moreover, and ahead of time, entrepreneurs are using
communities to debate whether and in what way their
ideas may be useful. Based on the belief that the perfect
solution will not be found in the specifications of the com-
pany, but only in cooperation with the users. The motto
being: democratization of product development. This can
be complicated and irritating. But it’s better if users express
their criticism in advance than as an afterthought when, at
the expense of market success, nothing can be changed
anymore.
Can we transfer these new thought and action patterns to
established companies? How is that going to work? You’d
have to try it on a small scale, for example, in the context
of innovative or creative projects. The Fiat Group proved it
could work in 2006 when they used crowd-
sourcing on the design and features of
their new Fiat 500.
A plan ,
a good
plan …
cause the manager usually has to be
more that just a leader. In Russia and
Spain, for example, the manager has
got to be a »friend«, in Asia the »head
of the family«. If a manager does not
play these roles properly, there may be
the risk of inner rejection, especially
in some countries with high Power
Distance. Fatal for the manager, who
realises this way too late.
The power of cultures