Let me start this by stating a bit of the obvious. I'm writing my blog from the point of view of a Westerner coming to work in Asia (myself), but I see no reason why this cannot be used by Asians who want to understand better about managing in Western companies or understand better their bosses or peers. I'd love to see people commenting on the shockers people get when getting a foreigner manager here in Asia for the first time. I think it'd make for a fun conversation :)
Personally I've managed teams in countries like India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Thailand, and managed people from many nationalities while I've been here, such as people from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Bangladesh, all of them with cultural differences and the particular idiosyncrasies that are common to their particular country.
One thing was evidently immediately to me, they're a lot more friendly and welcoming than Western people.
If you think my blog will be about bitching about the difficulties of working in Asia, you're partly wrong, there are many things that make managing in Asia both a challenge and a blessing. But now to the subject in hand.
Before coming to Asia, I had contact with people from around the world, via phone, e-mail, issue logs, chat and video chat, that gave me my first taste of the Asian flavor. I enjoyed very much the conversations and their sense of humor - except when the calls were at 3am in the morning - and I found their technical level and understanding of issues was very good. On that time I was working for a company with a very centralized management, so people in regional offices and agencies had little control over systems and the flow of information. I can imagine that being very frustrating for them, but I think that was the moment when I experienced for the first time what people call 'oriental patience'.
My first incursions to the continent were short one week visits (in some cases a lot longer than that), visits in which I was treated extremely well, these visits opened my eyes to the fact that I could enjoy living in Asia, so when an offer from a company to move indefinitely to Thailand came, I took it!
I've gotta say, coming to Asia visiting is not the same as a full time job here :)
When I got to the country - about a week before I had to start my new job - the first thing I did was looking for managerial books related with the country... I found none (I've got no intention of writing a book about the subject), there may have been some, but if they had, they were all in Thai, if you've never seen the Thai alphabet, it looks like Chinese characters made 'italic'.
The main difference from coming in sporadic visits and working full time here was the nature of the tasks (I know I'm pointing out the obvious, but I think I have to anyway). When I came visiting, I normally had a pre-arranged agenda, check this, meeting here, meeting him, meeting her, fix this, scrap that, and that was it, my visit was over. Now, I still had meetings and things to do, but those things were not pre-arranged, now I had to ask people to do things and get me things. That's when my first 'shockers' happened.
The first 'shocker', was in meetings. For my convenience meetings were all conducted in English, which made it pretty hard for the local guys, but also for me, because I wasn't used to English with Thai accent, I had to concentrate very hard to understand, thankfully English is a very forgiving language, and when people talked and misused words, given the context, I was still able to understand pretty much all. I'm pretty sure they had trouble understanding me as well, I tend to speak very fast, and even though I've been told I don't have a heavy accent, I'm sure my slight Italian/Spanish/Latino accent didn't make it very easy for them to understand. This shocker started dissipating quite fast, here I saw glimpses of them working as hard as me, or even harder to understand me. I saw many of the guys who would go into meetings with me, whose English was not so good, with dictionaries and English learning texts, they also started teaching me a few words in Thai. They would crack up every time I tried to speak in Thai, but that was all part of the fun of working with them. After a couple of weeks, we started understanding each other much better.
My advices for this shocker would be: Stick to a person who speaks English well and ask for a quick summary meeting after the main meeting - just in case you missed something, always carry a notebook and take lots of notes. Make sure someone is also generating the MoM (Minute of Meeting) and compare your notes with what was said in the MoM. If your notes are not in concordance with what was written in the MoM, clarify RIGHT AWAY, do not wait!!! As an extra note, one technique that worked well for me in meetings to generate the MoM, is rotating the responsibility, that way besides rotating the responsibility and teaching a bit of accountability, you're also teaching English skills. If you have the time, ask them to generate a draft of the MoM and then review it with you before sending it out.
My next shocker will talk about instructions, and how language and the structure of the same can give you big headaches when asking someone to do something.
See you in my next post!
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