As a developing global manager there may come a point where you have an opportunity to work abroad.  I have worked and do work with many senior managers that have lived and worked throughout the world.  They have all encouraged me to take this opportunity if it arises but to be careful and plan for the family.  A few years ago an opportunity presented itself.

I was working and living in west Michigan at the time and was approached by my director about being relocated to the Netherlands to lead global engineering standardization projects centrally.  My wife and I were both very excited about the opportunity.  We live near Holland Michigan and much of her family are of Dutch descent.  We started learning Dutch and investigating the culture to see how our family would have to adjust to live there.

While doing business in  another country or with people from another country we think about the cultural differences between our home country and the other country.  We use tools like Hoefstede Dimensions (hofstede-insights.com, 2020).

Netherlands (blue) vs U.S.A (purple) 

Hoefstede Insights.com

It is easy to see and understand academically that the differences between the U.S. and Netherlands would pose certain challenges in business.   For instance the Dutch and the U.S. have a big gap in the masculinity dimension.  The Dutch are much more likely to do something to enjoy it rather than to be the best at it, and Long term orientation of Dutch culture vs U.S. culture could lead to different priorities between coworkers or conflict on teams.

However, being fully immersed in the culture and society is a very different proposition than just working with someone from a different culture.  As we started to explore and plan a potential expat assignment my wife and I learned to appreciate the Dutch in a much different way.

As my wife began learning dutch and exploring international schools for the kids, I began looking at housing and transportation.  In Michigan we have a house that is 3200 square feet (297 sqare meters) including the finished basement but not including the attached two car garage and the 3.6 acres of yard.  However, what I found was that in Breda, NL we would be able to get an apartment of 80-100 square meters (861-1061 square feet) in the neighborhood near the international school in the same budget.  It would have probably have 1 parking spot and no yard but possibly a garden on a porch.  It most likely would not have  an oven in the kitchen and would only have room for a small refrigerator rather than the tremendous one we were used to stocking.  (not to mention two freezers full of frozen foods, meat, and wild game).  We went to Ikea on our visit to the Netherlands to plan the trip and this was an eye opener for my wife.

Example of kitchens we saw at Ikea and in appartments in Breda, NL

(Ikea.com, 2020)

While on the trip to Breda to explore, my wife visited the school and the grocery store which was oddly one of her favorite stores here in Michigan, and she found both to be reasonable to walk to and from and simple to communicate though her Dutch was limited.  The teachers at the school said that many expats had trouble making friends outside of work because while the Dutch people are very friendly and open they do not typically form deep relationships with outsiders.  To help with this we visited a church and talked to other families in the area.  Some of the people we talked to said very plainly that they thought it would be best for us to find an English-speaking church for expats rather than come to a Dutch church and learn the language.  At first, I thought they were saying we were not welcome but as we talked it became clear that they were just stating the logical conclusion they had come to and did not mean it personally.  While I had been to the Netherlands several times for work and worked regularly with Dutch coworkers and project teams, this was the first time that the very direct communication of the Dutch struck home for me as more than just constructive debate when trying to make a collective decision.  In this case they knew we were not asking their advice or looking for help on a collective decision, but they felt obligated to share their thoughts anyway.  My impression was, that they considered it to be important to share their thoughts constructively and did not consider that it could be taken as offensive.  I intentionally did not take it as offensive because of my work experience, though I think in the U.S. a similar situation would have been taken as offensive.

Expatica.com says, “The Dutch directness in the communication with foreigners regularly causes misunderstandings (Breukel, 2020).”  They go on to say that the Dutch may not trust someone speaking very politely for fear that they are trying to hide something.  I have found this too when I was going out of my way to be polite.  Had we moved to the Netherlands I expect one result is that I would be more blunt in my social dealings as well as work.

If we had relocated our kids would have learned to ride bikes to school, and travel on trains more frequently, we would have had to get rid of much of the “stuff” we fill our houses with as Americans, and learn to live much more efficiently in such a small apartment.  We would have seen new sites, met new people, and experienced parts of Europe usually reserved for the wealthy traveler from the U.S.  We decided we would accept an offer with some negotiation on housing, transportation, and schooling for the kids.

In the end, the company was re-organized and this offer disappeared.  Although we never actually moved to the Netherlands the exercise of trying to fit my world into another culture was eye opening and helped me to think very differently about the many people I work with globally every day.  I may or may not take an expat assignment if it comes up again, but I would certainly recommend to anyone to consider it seriously if the opportunity.  The simple act of trying on a different culture to see how it fits can awaken you to things you never new about yourself or your own culture.

References

Breukel, E. (2020, October 14th). Netherlands – A guide to Dutch etiquette. Retrieved from Expatica.com: https://www.expatica.com/nl/living/integration/dutch-etiquette-101736/

hofstede-insights.com. (2020). Compare Countries Netherlands and the U.S.A. Retrieved from www.hofstede-insights.com: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/the-netherlands,the-usa/

As an IT Manager in a Multinational Enterprise a few years ago I had an interesting opportunity to address.  I had a distributed team of application support people covering a group of applications used globally within our organization, a group of infrastructure support people for managing the underlying systems in those applications and responsibility for a few project managers overseeing projects related to these applications as well as change management for the applications.  However, we had a few gaps in this organization.  For one we had no one in our support team with strong Chinese language skills capable of supporting mainland china for our applications, and we were short project managers.  There was not enough support work in China alone to keep a support person busy full time, however the lack of support was holding back standardization efforts in the region.  The need for an additional project manager was an ongoing need but funding and executive support for adding headcount in other regions for our global team was not readily available.  The combination of these opportunities lead me to hire a senior support person with certification as a project manager in China, with the intent of them working very close with my international team including a large number of team members in India.

Jinji Lake, Suzhou, China (钉钉, 26, March 2020, Under Creative commons)

The outcome was not entirely successful, and in hindsight I see some of the mistakes I made.  At the time I primarily was considering my need for additional Chinese language support skills, general support labor, and project management skills.  This turned out to be one of the biggest cultural mistakes I made. I did not put a great deal of consideration into the fact that a single person in china would have to span multiple roles when interacting with our global team or how the cultural aspects of the various team members may hamper this.  In some of these roles the person would need to act as a leader giving direction and holding team members accountable as a project manager.  In other roles this person would have to be collaborative or subordinate to more senior technical support people as a regional support person with less company specific support experience. By looking at comparisons between China and India where the majority of my team was located through Hofstede’s six dimensions of Culture I am now able to shed some more light on this mistake.

According to PennState World Campus, both China and India have similar power distance scores, 77 for India, and 80 for China, however compared to the global average of 59.31, China is almost a full standard deviation above average (PSU World Campus, 2020). Along with a tendency for a hierarchical structure of authority figures (PSU World Campus, 2020) the power distance rating also describes the expectation of role fulfillment or the desire to fit into a specific role and have “bosses” or leaders fit into that specific role of leader (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 416).  However in the situation I set up I was expecting this new Chinese employee to work very flexibly treating coworkers as peer’s or senior technical people in some situations and alternately leading those same coworkers as a boss in the project manager role in other situations.  This flat collaborative organizational structure is not uncommon in many U.S. organizations, and I myself had been in very similar support/technical/project management roles simultaneously in the past and would just “put on a different hat” when I was working in each role, but this was not easy for my Chinese employee to do.

Mysore Palace, Mysuru, Karnataka, India (Harshitha Ravikumar, February, 2018, under creative commons)

In fact, this role complexity was difficult for the team in India to handle too.  The less senior manager in India that all of my support people India reported to Locally was not the manager for the Chinese employee who reported to me directly.  This meant initially the team members in India would not assign him any work to do because they saw him as their superior it seemed.  Then I told the Chinese support person that he was the first one in, in the morning due to the time zone differences between Suzhou and Bangalore, and he could just grab all the tickets he thought he should work on and get to work.  I had worked closely with HR in China to find an employee who was self motivated and had a strong tendency to drive his own individual goals which I thought would work well for a project manager and a single person in China versus the normally collectivist cultural score of 20 on Hofstede’s Individualism score (PSU World Campus, 2020).  However this individualism combined with the role complexity and the separation from the hierarchy of the primary support group made for conflict and alienated the other team members in India from the Chinese support person/project manager.  In one on one discussions the Indian manager told me the Chinese team member did not follow protocol, and was taking the most interesting problems for himself.  The Chinese team member told me he thought he was doing the rest of the team a favor since he had very few Chinese support requests most days and needed to learn more technical support, he would take the most difficult ones.  He also thought that this way the Indian team would not accuse him of taking the easiest tickets, since typically more senior support people in India would assign tickets to the rest of the team there rather than everyone grabbing their own, and they were not in yet.

I thought this cant be that hard to resolve, I had already been to India several times and China to onboard the new project manager.  I thought during the next project kick off I will have the Chinese project manager come to India with me to kick off the project with the team and get to know them.  We can build comradery and get to know each other.  This did help for that project, and it helped with understanding accents and even a better understanding of verbal communication on conference calls between culture.  The white board time for planning the project was very valuable with technical team members leading discussions on technical architecture and the Chinese project manager leading the discussion about workstreams, scheduling and project planning for the team collaboratively.  It did not help with support, and it did not help resolve the issues we had with more senior technical resources in several other countries that were not able to join the kickoff meeting in person due to travel restrictions.

Eventually I accepted a more senior position in another part of IT and this team was re-organized with the Chinese support person/project manager reporting into the support organization in India.  This clarified the role significantly however it conflicted with the project managers individualistic self-motivating aspects and he eventually chose to move on in his career.  (I wrote him a recommendation.)  We did get a lot of work done, and we did further our standardization in China, and the senior leaders that encouraged me to do this also wanted me to develop as a global manager.  From those perspectives this was a very successful endeavor.  Some of the projects took longer, and there was certainly strife in the organization due to the cultural conflicts created by these decisions, and I think if I had it to do over again I could do a better job of architecting the organization to function more clearly in designated roles fitting with the hierarchical tendencies of the Chinese and Indian cultures to achieve reduced stress on the team involved.

References

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences, 9th Edition. Routledge.

PSU World Campus. (2020, Nov 2). OLEAD 410 – Lesson 10: Asia Focus on China and India. Retrieved September 12, 2020, from PSU WC: https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2075490/modules/items/29697204

I work for a multi-national corporation formed from many acquisitions and mergers of legacy companies.  For many years, these lines of business were able to run autonomously, and in some cases, they competed despite being part of the same organization.  In contrast locations and lines of business that developed common standards did obtain advantages such as negotiating common supply contracts and being able to shift work around from one facility to another related to labor costs, or fluctuations in currency and local supply/demand.  This advantage was due to standard processes, tooling, and common design practices.  This standardization was driven by mid-level management for many years without a clear top down push to standardize, it was primarily an effort of convincing everyone to follow agreed upon standards.  Due to the historical differences and cultural differences this required significant time and effort to negotiate compromises, agreements, and political leverage to reach consensus despite geographic, cultural, and language barriers in addition to legacy competition.  When standardization efforts occurred they were often reminiscent of a Dilbert comic strip, I can not tell you as an example how many times we discussed drawing naming conventions for file names, and for publishing in the border of drawings/designs.

(Adams, 2011) 

In one instance a former director I reported to was working with multiple lines of the business to develop one of many needed global engineering standards.  Due to re-organization a new Dutch employee had recently been shifted to this director’s team.  The new director was making his way through Europe working with each location to reach a consensus on the standard and went to the Netherlands.  The director and the new employee had worked with each other in the past but only recently took on this new relationship of leader follower.  So, the director spent a full day in person with this new employee explaining the strategy for the standards he was working to implement.   The Dutch employee did not agree with the standard that his new boss was pushing for and the day was a heated debate.  This is an example of an expectation of low power distance in Dutch society.   Barbara Bartczak PhD, MA, says, “…Dutch, typically tend to prefer an egalitarian approach, so called lower power distance. This means more equality between people regardless of status or seniority. A good leader would be a person who for example consults everyone before making a decision, and who doesn’t point out her/his position in the hierarchy (Bartczak, 2020).“  However, the vision was already set and in progress and the director had been working remotely with teams in Europe to lay the ground work for an agreement to hopefully be finalized on this trip.  He did not have the luxury at that point of letting the new Dutch employee participate as part of the decision-making process, but instead needed his help in pursuing consensus among his peers in the Netherlands.

The employee expected a very low power distance, I spoke with him about this situation and other projects at some time later and observed this expectation to be included in debate and decision making in other dealings with this person.  The Dutch feel that each person should share their thoughts and its merits compared to other ideas before the decision is finalized, and this new Dutch employee was not concerned with a conflict with his new boss.  In hindsight he may have thought he was helping to achieve a better solution by opposing the boss in these debates.  By the end of the first day the Director thought the new employee had justified reservations that they could work to address through later refinement, and that the employee would work as part of the team to support the boss’s vision when they entered negotiations the next day with other Dutch participants.  The boss hoped to use the Dutch employee’s understanding of Dutch culture, body language and other non-verbal communication to help make his case for standardization, and would depend on him heavily for concepts that were difficult to convey in English to other less fluent participants in the room.    In other words, he hoped to use the new Dutch employee as a “wing man” to help negotiate his own desired outcome since he was the boss and it was his prerogative as boss to make these decisions and expect support from his employees.  This is the result of higher power distance, ad while it is not directly representative of the American culture, it was representative of the organizational culture with in the portion of the organization the Director had been working for many years, and not outside the realm of possible power distance expectations for the u.s. general population (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 22).

The boss’s plan aligned with advice from Moran, Et. Al. (2014, p. 92) on working with an interpreter.  They advise ensuring the interpreter is briefed ahead of time.  He had just used a similar strategy with a French employee assisting him in France.  Although France in general has a much larger power distance than the Netherlands (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 20).  In France they discussed the options and then the two most senior people took a break and decided on the best solution after the debate was over.  The mistake he had made though was to assume that as a leader he could select the his style of leadership and that his Direct reports would follow his direction (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 22).  France and the Netherlands may be close to each other but are separated by more than language and geography. The new Dutch employee/interpreter did not see their own role as interpreter/persuader/assistant/subordinate, but more as a voting member of a committee that was formed to make decisions on a standard.  As such he saw no issue with lobbying for his own perspective among the fellow Dutch attendees.

When they met to discuss the new engineering standard with teams from other sites in the Netherlands, they tracked points of conflict, and looked for common ground, and the director was working towards consensus.  But there came a point where they reached an impasse on a particularly complex issue and the Dutch stakeholders would not budge.  The American boss’s Dutch ‘wing man’ shifted from English into Dutch for many minutes of complex discussion.  The American leader thought this was positive because it meant the Dutch employee would convince the other Dutch teams of the merit of the bosses plan in a common language that they could understand allowing them to get past the impasse and complete the negotiation.

When the Dutch employee was done the full group of Dutch team members all agreed on a path forward and the employee updated the boss to let him know that they had all decided against his strategy. Instead of supporting his new boss he had excluded him thinking that the people at the table in conference room speaking Dutch could reach majority consensus and decide the subject without the boss, and apparently the others in the room felt the same way though they were from other locations and legacy companies they shared the same cultural context.   The boss was livid with his new employee and the audacity of the rest of the attendees to make a decision when it was his job as the corporate leader to determine the strategy for this particular standard and implement a method of allowing different lines of the business to work together on the same standards.

Eventually the Dutch teams were convinced to agree to a global standard, and later many of these facilities were combined to form a larger more efficient hub of manufacturing and engineering across product lines.  Knowing the Dutch perspective on power distance and collective decision making processes could have avoided a lot of conflict and heart ache for the Director at the time.  It was a difficult cultural lesson to learn.

References

Adams, S. (2011, April 23). Dilbert – Saturday April 23, 2011. Dilbert.com. Andrews McMeel Syndication. Retrieved October 12, 2020, from https://dilbert.com/strip/2011-04-23 used in accordance with linking policy https://dilbert.com/terms

Bartczak, B. (2020, October 11). Cultural differences – how power distance in the workplace influences everyday situations. Retrieved from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cultural-differences-how-power-distance-workplace-barbara

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences, 9th Edition. Routledge.