About personal interactions...

Let me start this section by saying I always try keeping a good relationship with everyone, here in Asia I try being as friendly with my staff as my socially awkward personality would let me. So even years after I stop working with them, they still contact me from time to time to ask me for advices or help or just a coffee... and they still call me boss.

I didn't do this as a managerial technique, but just trying to adjust to their culture. Asians in general are more friendly than people in the West, and particularly people in South East Asia, like Thais, Malay, Indonesian, Singaporeans, etc. I think it'd be safe to assume it's because of their tropical nature.

This introduction has a reason, and the reason is, even if you're not a very friendly person by nature, after a certain time, the people closer to you on your daily work will automatically consider you their friend and that brings a whole new set of responsibilities and things you didn't think you had to do when you came to manage a team or a company in your new country.
And like in everything, this can bring you very good things as well as unpleasant surprises, because their highly developed sense of loyalty and solidarity can sometimes play against your best intentions.

I've found that here they may ask you personal questions that you may not even expect from your closest friends in the West, and this is particularly true with people in Indonesia, beware, don't feel ofended and if you feel uncomfortable, try not to show it too much, it is their natural way of wanting to know you better and show interest in you. Be prepared for things such as: are you gay? are your boobs real? have you thought about boob implants? are you working on having a baby? are you faithful? you think local men/women are attractive? or comments like: you look handsome/pretty in this clothes, I don't like your haircut, prefer the old one, you should loose/gain some weight, those pants make you look stubby and short, etc. Be prepared for this kind of interactions and take them with an open mind, they really mean good, so don't take them the wrong way.

Because of their nature, you will also be put in situations you were not expecting AT ALL!!! I never thought I was going to be asked by my staff what to do if their husband was cheating on them, what to do if, by accident, he found a romantic SMS from another guy in his girlfriend's telephone, how will you react when someone is crying in front of you because she had a miscarriage? What do you tell someone who's telling you she's virgin and really wants a boyfriend? (I've gotta warn some guys about this, even though laws are a bit looser in Asia, what you may be thinking about the virgin girl is still sexual harassment here, so STOP! hehehe) Sometimes when you take a managerial job here in Asia, you also become the resident psychologist, these are all things that happened to me,except the questions about the boob jobs, but someone told me happened to her, and for those of you wondering, she said they were real.
These and more, are all situations you may find yourself in and you will have to manage them to the best of you capabilities. If you're unsure, try to avoid giving advices about delicate matters without information, ask them if you can take some time to think before giving an advice or opinion (run back and google it) and talk with them later. These interactions can be both uncomfortable as well as very fulfilling and they can bring you unexpected benefits that I will mention later on.
Sometimes these conversations can come from totally unexpected situations. I found myself having conversations like this when doing performance reviews, be prepared for people to tell you all sort of things during performance reviews that, according to them, can be affecting their work, including the person in the adjacent cubicle being too chatty, their boyfriends or girlfriends, etc. But I will talk about performance reviews more in detail later on a different post, I just wanted to mention a weird situation where these conversations can be started.

I mentioned before their sense of loyalty and solidarity. That sounds nice, but in some cases in can lead to behaviors we will consider very irrational and sometimes even borderline reckless.
Normally I try to share my experience without really using a real life even, but I think the best way I can explain this is with an actual situation I went through once.
Some years ago I was happy managing 2 departments in my old company, things were good and improving at a steady pace in both departments, life was busy, but good. One day my boss came to me, in one of his visit to Asia, and told me he needed me to take charge of yet another department, the biggest one in the company. My initial reaction was of surprise, and also rejection, I knew the people from that department liked their manager very much, and to be honest I liked the dude too, he is a nice friendly guy and we got along very well, so at first I said no, but my boss on that time knew I like a challenge and he convinced me saying something like "things are too nice and smooth with your work now, I'm sure you need a challenge", reluctantly I accepted that challenge.
I knew it was going to be hard, but not only about managing the biggest department in the company, also about relationships.

When the former department manager was removed and I was announced as their new boss, they all left the room with a face that reminded me of a person with food poisoning and simply packed their bags and left the building, just a few people remained in their area. I understood why they were doing that, it was their way of protesting for what they considered an injustice to their former manager and 'friend', but that behavior was - even for a person as used to their behavior and idiosyncrasies as me - way too much. When that happened I was given authorization from the company to get rid of whoever I thought necessary to establish my authority over the group... I really thought of getting rid of some of them to be honest, but after a lot of thought, I realized an action like that would be a comparable visceral reaction from me, to their earlier reaction towards me and the company.  I also thought that as a mentor, I had to teach with example and keep my head cool to make the best possible decisions.
It was clear after this initial reaction my job was going to be a lot harder than I thought. My first instinct and also some of my seniors was to have 1-on-1 meetings with the managers and team-leads of the department and find out what was in their minds, since we were sure, the manager's exit could not be the only reason for a behavior of such proportions. Some times their behavior during those meetings continued surprising me negatively, I found out they were implying some sort of 'conspiracy' against the whole department from the rest of the company, so it was clear my initial work there was not about improving performance and efficiency, but to improve relationships.
As an engineer I like numbers and I like things I can quantify and qualify, this problem was nothing of such, so to face it I had lots of conversations with seniors and friends, and taking a bit from everyone's conversations, I was able to improve the situation and morale of the team in a pretty reasonable time and from them just win them over with hard work. Very important in that process were KPI's and documented processes, which gave them tools to measure, and structure to improve upon. Looking in retrospective, I'm very glad I didn't act impulsively.

When looking at all these interactions it may sound as a lot of extra work without much reward, but it is not that way. The good feeling you get after helping someone with their problems is very rewarding, but rewards are not only intangible, they are quite useful as well. Without doing anything in particular and without trying to take advantage of your relationships, you can improve retention in your team, people who like working with you and who have friendship relationships within a company are much less likely to leave a company (I mention before, retaining your talent in Asia is hard, because there are several options for locals to move around), so using some of your time to create and nurture relationships may prove a win-win situation.

About delegation and prioritization...

Delegation and prioritization were 2 topics I wasn't planning on addressing this early in my writings and I wasn't thinking to include them together in one single post, because, even though they may be related when you need to juggle around tasks which has been assigned to you by your supervisor (or help your people with their scheduling), it is not a MUST. The reason to include them together comes from the fact that when I thought no one reads my blog, someone actually did and that person asked about my views about these topics... so here it goes, hope this helps you!

Let's start with delegation and also from the fact that delegating MUST be in any manager's toolbox. I'm all about delegating, and I hate micromanaging, but in tasks where control is necessary, I try doing that in a non-invasive way (will talk about some techniques I use in detail later on).
Delegating literally means, give something from your workload to someone else (assigning a regular task is not delegating). All managers should delegate, and the main reason is not because we can't do everything ourselves - which in some cases is very true - but because delegating is one of the most efficient ways of mentoring (mentoring also coming as a topic later), and mentoring is up there in importance as one of the things a manager should be doing.
Delegating is also a great way of motivating, almost everyone wants to feel important, and taking on more responsibility surely does the trick. In Asia delegating is also a sign of trust and respect and if you read my previous posts, these two words are very important in your interaction with the locals.
Delegating also frees your time to do non-scheduled tasks, managers should be proactive and doing everything yourself may not leave you enough time to improve stuff, or simply step aside to look at the bigger picture.

So far, all positives for both side (you and your people), but there are also negative points on delegating, and some of them are even more obvious here in Asia...
You need to be very aware on who you delegate something to, taking in consideration 2 main factors. First, the person MUST have the time to do what you're asking them to do, a manager's job is getting the best from each person, stretching them to achieve their full potential and utilization, but overworking someone is just not 'right'. If you still want to assign that task to someone very 'busy', make sure you work together on his/her schedule to free up time for that, and make sure you prioritize correctly, always keep in mind, your task may not be more important than what they already doing, so keep an open mind, and remember, in Asia, people are very reluctant to say no to the 'boss', so be careful what you ask for. Second, the person you assign the task to, should know a bit about the task to be able to do it, and even if they know more than a bit, you should be prepared to spend time with them as a guide.
I'm sure you heard the phrase "If you want things done right, do it yourself", this can't be applied to delegating, or you won't delegate at all, but it tells you something very important, no matter how good the person you delegated to is, the result won't be the same as if you did it yourself, so, if you want to have a similar result, you have no option but to get involved and mentor your staff, before, during and after the task has been done. The more you mentor, the more they will deliver results you're pleased with.
The aforementioned also applies to timing, don't expect the task to take the same time as if you did it yourself, be patient and nurturing, trust me, extra time spent while delegating, will pay its dividends in more than one way.

Now talking about prioritization. Two reasons why prioritizing is so important, first, we obviously need some things done before others, and second, because humans are not good in multi-tasking. Prioritization works better when you're well organized, you can prioritize all you want, but if you don't organize your day and time effectively, that will do nothing. So prioritization goes hand-in-hand with time-management and time-management is almost a topic on itself, in my case I adhere to the idea of time being relative and that you can do as much as you want with your time... as far as you avoid multi-tasking!!! In fact I don't even agree with time-management software, or for that case, time-keeping as a general concept, but I do agree in keeping time within tasks, so you can compare if you're doing things more efficiently when comparing. Anyway, to conclude time-management, just stop multi-tasking, focus more (i.e. always approach a task or problem knowing what you want) and don't interrupt yourself (e-mail, Facebook, MSN, Skype can wait).. so no more time spent on time-management, but if you want to read more I can recommend this article I quite agree with about time-management.
But again, the main reason to prioritize is to get things done in a timely manner, and when you're managing many tasks at the same time without any given order, you normally need to use your common sense to sort them out, if you're not sure, run your list through your supervisor, if that's not an option, ask opinion from your peers (on important things only, duh!).
If new things come in, make sure you re-prioritize your tasks accordingly and when you're getting a new task with high priority, don't be afraid of voice your opinion if you think a task should have a lower priority, managers can have judgement errors, and in the worse case, the supervisor will just explain why that task has precedence.


Connecting the dots with an example related with previous posts (a report like this could easily become a KPI). Let's say the board or CEO would like to know what's the production capacity on a weekly basis so they can feed that information to the sales team to tell customers when is the earliest slot in which they can schedule their requirements, ergo, try to sell the slot, and he needs it in 2 weeks. Let's complicate it saying that this request came as very urgent and in a period of auditing, so you really need to focus on that as well.

That's what you'd call a catch 22 situation, because you can't delegate the auditing, you can't tell the CEO to wait until after the auditing is finished, because you just can't. Also your whole department could be busy with the auditors and/or normal work, so if you delegate the report 2 things can happen, you're causing a domino effect to the person below you, overworking him/her or because you still have to supervise the report, you didn't free up enough of your time. What to do? Quit and find a new job? Even though failure is always an option, that would be failing too badly to consider it an option.

So here's where your organization skills come to play. There are many more things you need to do as a manager, i.e., for sure you have department meetings, personal meetings (1-on-1), scheduled calls, etc. use them wisely. What do I mean with that? use them to delegate lesser tasks and free a bit of your time, I myself would delegate the report to a person to whom I have 1-on-1 meetings with, and instead of having a meeting once a week, would divide the time for that meeting into 2 shorter meetings, so I can keep a closer look into how the report is coming along, and also check his schedule.

Now to the detail, how to manage the delegation of such an important report without using too much of your time, without disrupting the work of your staff and getting a report which you'd be happy with?

You will have to do some pre-work for sure! you will have to visualize how you want the report to look like, this includes what you want in it and using what format, identify who that person will have to work with to generate a report like that (this may cause extra facilitating work, so it's important to identify it), timeframe, and ideas on how the info can be acquired. Once that's done you can move to the act of delegating.
As I said before I don't like micromanaging, so I use what I call non-invasive control points to check statuses and progress, for example, I avoid having meetings about a particular subject that I need to control unless it's totally necessary, I keep agenda meetings short, but multi-subject for that, 1-on-1 meetings are perfect for controlling without being intrusive, use phrases like "I'd suggest you to...", "what do you think if instead of...", "Do you have any other ideas for this..., can I share my idea?...", be very appreciative of their effort (after all, they're doing your job), and avoid at all cost telling them exactly what to do, leave some room for creativity, encourage them to ask you if they have any doubt (you can even schedule these interruptions, and remember, a 5 mins interruption can avoid days of re-working something), if you don't agree with what they're doing, sell them your idea, get them on board instead of dismissing theirs (as said in Sell, not tell), pointing too much to errors can lead to demotivation, avoid that as well, so be subtle... remember, when you start delegating something to someone you're being almost like a teacher, you're a mentor, a sensei, a guru... Mr. Miyagi or Yoda if you will... so acting all philosophical and mystical may even work :)

Good luck and hope this helps!

Phrase of the day

You don't need a boyfriend or girlfriend to be happy, you don't need to be successful to be happy, you don't need more money to be happy, you just need more serotonin...

About KPI's

As I said in my post 'Sell, not tell', Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are one of the most difficult things to make someone accept and work on, but managed in the proper way you can get very reliable information and have everyone on-board believing KPI's are a great tool, but to do that, you need to keep in mind how, why, where and what KPI's you're putting in place.

Again, Asians have a different sensibility, so it's important to make it clear you're not trying to point out their individual mistakes and make them loose face, KPI's are there to get a general view of the situation, to help them improve themselves and existing processes. It's important to make clear that KPI's are for their own benefit as well, to make their life easier.

To address the why, how, what and where, I will divide this post into all those parts, but starting with a short-ish introduction to give you a general idea.

First of all, KPI's are a required tool in the managerial arsenal, without a metric, you're blind on how your plans and processes are doing. You're blinded to possible improvements and slip-ups, you have no visibility regarding who's doing a good job and who is not, etc.
It's great to have information and the more the better... but no, you don't need to know everything and most importantly, you can't absorb too much information. How you gather information it's important as well, and you don't want to create an overhead that will cause people to stop doing what they're supposed to be doing, you also need focus, you can't identify everything or take action on everything at the same time.
Let's say you're go into a start-up or a company without KPI's, what to do first? Well, you need to start from somewhere, so the best would be creating a general KPI to give you a general view of the situation, and after a while - having enough information - identify areas in which you want to have more information for either, improve or set new processes or take preventive or corrective actions on obvious things.

So, how to generate the information necessary?
There are basically 2 ways, automatically and manually. Automatically generated stats are in general more reliable than manual, but not always. A machine can tell you how many circuit boards it made, but not how many didn't pass QA, a software can tell you how many hours and person had certain windows opened in their computer, but they can't tell you how long they were thinking in improvements ideas or if they did things correctly. So starting from the basis that automatically and manually generated information require manipulation and checks, and that both generate overhead, the key here is generating information as accurate as possible, generating the smallest amount of overhead possible.
One of the best ways of keeping accurate manual information, is keeping a weekly or daily calendar divided by hours, at the end of each hour, a minute or two are required to fill in the tasks done within that hour and their duration, and since that task is fresh, you avoid 'remembering'.
One important note on this. People work better when they're not multi-tasking and in periods of 45 minutes each. Encourage your people to minimize checking their e-mail or other distracting tasks all the time, but instead to add that into their hourly schedule a 5-10 minute break, to check their e-mail, Facebook, fill in the sheet, etc. I promise you that will increase productivity.

Why generating a KPI?

In my opinion, the most important thing to have in consideration when generating a KPI is the 'why', a KPI just for the sake of having information doesn't make sense, your metrics MUST have a purpose, i.e. improving something. You may think a KPI to report the status your company or department to the board is only informative, but you should think differently, that metric should be part of your own KPI, maybe, in a more detailed way, which allows you make decisions on particular things, but it should be the same KPI, presented differently.
The why can take many forms, depending in many factors, but again, they should be in alignment of certain goals and objectives, preferably sat by the upper management or the board.
In conclusion, the why must be very well defined and the objectives must be clear.

What to measure is probably the most complex part of a KPI, what you think it may be the perfect thing to track, may not represent what you want to improve, correct or prevent, so the first thing is to identify your goals and objectives, secondly, identify the subset of information you want to focus on, then identify your control points (is your data coming out correctly? is it accurate?), and then how you will represent that information (graphs? tables? written reports?). Only then you will know if the 'what' is getting you what you were expecting.

The 'Where' has 2 parts, where will you be measuring, and where will you be presenting the information.

Let's imagine we want to measure individual tasks inside a project, we can ask the developer to measure these tasks, we can ask the project manager to measure these tasks, we can ask the developer's supervisor to generate the stats, but 'where' we ask for this to be measured will affect both, the overhead and the accuracy of the information, so we need to be clear on how accurate we need the information to be versus how much overhead we're willing to cause.
For this example, asking the developer will be the most accurate way of measuring this KPI, but will also cause the biggest overhead, because he will have to stop to measure exactly how long it took to do something every time he did it, and if there are many tasks involved, he will have to stop a lot, just to register stats. Now, if we ask the project manager, he will get a good estimation for particular tasks in his project, accuracy will depend on how often he will get a status update of his project, given that memory is fragile, also if the number of tasks to be measured is considerable, then the overhead can be considerable as well, but one-time-only, unlike the developer's metric, creating less distraction, ergo, less overhead. If we ask the developer's supervisor, probably he will gather this information in a department or team meeting, using a mix of experience and actual memory, and maybe several people's experience, which will make this metric a bit more of an average than a metric for a particular project, in this case, overhead will be minimal, but accuracy may suffer.

Now the second part. Where you will be presenting this KPI will also dictate how you have to prepare it. I said before, most goals and objectives SHOULD be cascaded down from the high-management and/or board, in some cases your KPI will be merged with others to create a more general view of the situation of a department, area or company, so formatting will be very important and the level of detail will vary from the level in which it will be presented, but the objective must remain the same. Let's continue with the example of the project metric above, we have a goal cascaded down from the board of directors, which is, reduce the implementation time of a particular type of project in 10% within 1 year without increasing resources and/or effort.
For this case our KPI will work perfectly:

• We know the target is 10% reduction in time
• We will have a good idea of the overhead of generating the stats (depending on the method we chose), and this time should also be factored into the project itself (and informed to the high management)
•  After some time gathering information, we will know which tasks consume the biggest amounts of time, and we can take actions to try to reduce those times (with automation, improving training, improving processes, etc.)

So as you can see, the same KPI will do for all levels of the organization with small alterations.

The developer will know his/her time frames, the PM will know how much to reduce in each phase of the project and will be able to keep track better of deviations, the supervisor will have a clear view of the projects on time and delayed and the board will receive a report with the average time projects are now taking.

So far, this all sound pretty easy to achieve, but in most cases is not, and the main reason is because KPI's are very likely to be linked with your and your staff's performance bonus, which makes it a bigger challenge to gather accurate stats, and this is when you have to start thinking in cross referencing KPI's. A good example for this would be people staying later than normal, just to make it appear like a 10% reduction in effort was achieved, when in reality no improvement was made, just extra effort from the people involved. So here you could cross check with something like the IN/OUT report of the door. If something there doesn't add up, you know you have to look at it more closely. You also need to be vigilant of tampering, and this is why 'Sell, not tell' is so important here, if people believe in what they're doing, they much less likely to alter results and numbers...

One advantage regarding KPI's while managing in Asia is the highly developed concept of honor and the ability of Asians to follow well stablished processes better. In my experience, if you're able to find ways to reduce time or improve things that you can add into a well defined process (or process improvement), people here will be able to follow it and reduce time pretty much all the time. 

So from this you can deduct that KPI's and processes are closely related. One of Newton's laws, actions and reaction, red or yellow numbers will almost certainly require an action from the manager and those actions most probably will require some sort of process in place.

Some people would say "if it's not broken, don't try fixing it", and this can be truth most of the time. Trying to add improvements into existing processes, can cause problems and overhead, but being able to interpret small fluctuations in numbers in a KPI correctly, can also indicate preventive actions are needed... just apply your common sense and prioritize what's important.

Reach out and be rewarded

Last night for no apparent reason I had a dream about the time when I used to go to summer camps, it was a nice dream, I dreamt about the times we were swimming in the pool, talking until late in our bunk-beds and just in general having fun. But I also dreamt about this kid, he was shy and awkward, always quiet and as he was sitting outside the cabin, that was the time I woke up.

I remember we were 13, I remember that kid well, because he taught me a great lesson in life.

I don't remember his name, but I remember how he looked like, I remember his low tone of voice and the way he brought his hand over his mouth every time he smiled or laughed, he was a bit chubby and short legged, but even like that he could run like hell!

He was always the last one to be picked playing sports, and it seemed like he would have preferred not being picked at all, on free time, while everyone was trying to impress the girls or playing pranks to each other, he would just sit in the park alone or in a tree outside the cabin. We were going to be there 20 days and in 4 or 5 days I haven't seen him doing anything else, even at swimming pool he would be under the shade of the big tree alone. Sometimes monitors would go and talk with him, but after a few minutes, he'd be alone again.

Next day, when it was time to go swimming, I saw him sitting alone outside the cabin with his towel in one hand and a big tube of Hawaiian Tropic S.P.F. 50 sunblock on the other. I never talked with him before, but I felt the need to go and talk to him. I've never been the sociable type, so these things are usually hard for me.

I said hi and asked if he cared for some company, he nodded. I asked what he was doing there, to which he replied, he was looking at some ants working and how amazing they were. We sat there for 5 minutes barely exchanging a word and then I asked him if he wanted to walk with me to the pool, he smiled at me and nodded again.

We walked to the pool talking a lot (it was a good 500 meters away), about lots of stuff, he was a very smart and fun kid, he liked video games same as me, and same as me his favorite was 'Pole Position', a really bad game we both played in our Atari 800XL.

At the pool I introduced him to my friends and we continued talking, he told me he liked one of the girls, the same we all liked (as always the most developed one for our age) and that they went to the same school but never talked to each other, I told him I knew the girl and we could speak to her together, he said no need, so we didn't, and of course all the girls were at the other side of the pool, so I was kinda relieved he didn't call my semi-bluff.

We spent that summer camp sporadically spending time together, he kicked my ass at chess more times than I would have liked and he sat with me and my friends for lunch.

2 days before the end of the camp they had prizes, some chosen by the monitors, some by vote from the other kids. There was this prize called something like 'best friend prize', that it would be something like a 'Mr. Congeniality' award in a beauty contest, so we all cast our votes into the urn. When they were counting them, I got 1 vote, first time for me!!! everyone voted for the funny kid, the one who's friends with everyone, the one who would hurt himself doing belly flops at the pool, just to be noted, I think I may have voted for him myself, he was a cool kid and his dirty jokes were hilarious! So after I was the only one in our dorm who got a vote, my friends started teasing me that I voted for myself - hahahaha, at that time I was a bit pissed, but now that I think about it, it was quite funny... hahaha.

So, in the middle of all the jokes about me loving myself a bit too much and being my own best friend, this kid came to all of us and in his normal low pitch voice said "I voted for you", everyone was quiet, so I asked him why and he replied "because in all the years I came to this camp I never had fun, I was always alone and even though I sometimes spent more times with other kids than you, you were the one who reached out to me and introduced me to his friend" then he smiled without covering his mouth and raising his voice said "and shit I've had fun in this camp" we hug and I got a pat in the back from everyone in the small dorm.

Little I knew that such a small thing as a 'hi' and a small talk about ants would make his summer a much better summer, and even less I knew that what he said to me would made me feel so good and proud of myself.

Don't underestimate the value of helping, no matter how small you think it may be, you can make someone's day or even summer. In fact I'm glad I had that dream, it made my day!

Sell, not tell

This is, so far, the hardest topic to write about for me, I keep on deviating to other topics, it is very hard to keep it simple without going on forever, and even when I was writing the draft pointers, I started straying away, so I will do my best to keep it within topic. Bear with me if I stray a bit and sorry if I write too long :P

"Sell, not tell". For some people it may be self explanatory, but to explain more about the concept it's important to understand that people react much better to things they share and agree with than to thing which have been imposed to them. Paraphrasing the series 'The Big Bang Theory', Leonard tells Sheldon "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar", to which Sheldon replies, "you can catch more flies with manure, what's your point?". Well, I guess here I will answer to Sheldon a bit. Yes, you can catch more flies with manure, but, who wants to handle manure? Isn't it better get someone on board willingly than having to scream and micro-manage someone to get things done?

"Sell, not tell" can appear, in theory, to be a very easy thing to do but is not, most managers I've met in my life do not use this technique, I used it before I knew it was a technique, but I used it much more often after I met my ex boss and friend John Wagner who preached about its effectiveness in any occasion he could.

Most managers tell you what to do without any explanation on why this needs to be done, which leaves you with a sense of "this is just another task", but when someone 'sells' you the idea or task, you will instead have a sense of ownership and you will share with your boss or supervisor that task and agree with it's reasons. So far this is all nice and sounds pretty straightforward, but is not.

What if the task or order you will be asking your staff to do is something that is not wanted or unpopular? how will you handle that? Well, these questions and more could be answered dividing the problem in 2 'sell' the idea, problem task, etc. And then get them 'on-board'.

My former boss and also friend Damon Mannion used to say all the time, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", I couldn't agree with him more, and that brings us to the topic of KPI's (I will be touching the subject of KPI's later in a post of its own).

KPI is short for Key Performance Indicator, and these are one of the manager's most useful tools, they help us make informed decisions and take preventive or corrective actions based on numbers (I'm an engineer, I love numbers) as well as measure trends. These KPI's are also used to show the board and high executives how things are going, and that on itself can scare people, A LOT!

After this intro, you can imagine KPI's being one of the hardest things to sell to a person under your supervision or even managers at the same level - sometime KPI's are cross-departamental, so you will need another manager's help to generate your stats, and this can also be an inflammatory subject, but I will talk about that in detail later - so in some cases, you almost have no option but to 'sell' instead of 'command' what's needed.
Another thing which is a horrible thing to handle for a manager is bonuses, imagine yourself having to explain someone that he/she will have to generate metrics to measure his/her productivity and that this KPI will reflect the bonus they can get in the future... woohoo!!! How do you manage people's expectations on a budget? Most people think they're doing more than what they're receiving, and in several cases that's quite close to reality, you can't give people everything they want, even if you wish you could, because, after all you're hired to reduce cost and increase profit and blah, blah, blah, so it's your job to do so.

You may ask, where am I heading with all this? simple, to the pointers that I hope will help you in difficult decisions as this one.

First of all, always focus on the positive side, one thing that is almost a no-brainer, but I often saw lacking in my former bosses was, always start complex news and conversations with positive comments. Also remember, there is no template for challenges as this one, what someone else used, maybe not apply to your particular case, so analyze the variables as best as you can, never make promises you can't keep and don't lie (sometimes things that can't be spinned into a positive view are shared and embraced by your staff when honesty is shared with them).

Now to the point (using the example given above regarding KPI's and bonuses), sell the idea:

• Spin negativity: If you detect negativity in your staff never say something like "this will be used to calculate your bonus", say instead "this will help us see how good you're working and compensate you in a more appropriate way" or something like that, which is true! Also spin their comments into a positive outlook
• Point the obvious: You can say things like "this will help you improve yourself, see what your weak points are and I'll do my best to get - whatever you can promise - to help you improve that before your next evaluation"
• Minimize the negative: Don't talk about the money they may not get if their evaluation is non-satisfactory, speak instead of the improvements that can be reached using these tools
• Maximize the positive: Saying things like "this will show the rest of the company how hard and good we're working", "this will finally give us visibility to showcase our work and results to the upper management", etc. Be creative, but truthful, don't bullshit!
• Set checkpoints: When something like this is present in a company, you have to work with your people to allow and even help them reach their goals and objectives. Set checkpoints down the road to see progress and help them take corrective or preventive actions to stay on track 
• Create a sense of teamwork: Even though I don't believe that a strong sense of belonging is a very good thing (because it can easily cause friction between areas and departments), I do agree with people-helping-people, we all want to make more money, we all want to feel proud of ourselves, let's achieve that making our department/area the best we can, and now with these metrics we can prove we are...
• The necessary evil: Explain in a positive way that this is necessary and there's no way out, we gotta do it and we gotta do it well, same as a programmer doesn't probably like testing his code, a manager doesn't like to be told if his decisions were good or bad based on numbers, certain things are necessary and we just have to learn to live with them. Focus these as challenges with questions as "can you do this?", "are you up to the challenge?"

A similar approach with the necessary changes would apply if you have to convince a peer to help you do this, but more focused on cooperation and showing off together how good you're doing. Always give credit where credit is due...

So, "Sell, not tell" will require quite a bit of prep work from you; analyze the issue, identify pros and cons, positives and negatives, put yourself in your staff's or peer's shoes imagining different scenarios, outline a communication strategy and most important of all, let them participate in the decision making.

Yes, you got that right, my last pointer and the one that will, almost for sure, get people 'on board' with you, will be making them part of the decision making. This is a hard thing to do if your task has many constrains and limitations, as it could happen with a KPI where goals and objectives are normally pre-determined by the upper management. All this assuming the goals and objectives set by the organization are difficult, but achievable (some people call these objectives S.M.A.R.T., but I won't go into any book terminology here, you can google it if you feel like, it's kinda interesting).

Even with all that, you can still make people participate in the decision making, for this example I'd say, from the top of my head:

• Set the time for checkpoints
• Help designing the metrics and how they're generated
• Identify things that can seems as unfair by staff and maybe generate a pararel KPI with those 'ifs' included into the filters and deliver it to the upper management for consideration or comparison
• Set parameters (i.e. seniors and juniors will be judge differently)
• Etc.

Again, be creative and as flexible as you can without compromising the quality of the output or objectives.

All of the above is partly why I say I would deviate a bit, because I will be repeating many things here said in my future KPI and bonus posts, but I thought the combination of bonus+KPI was a very representative example of something hard to sell and get people on board with you.

Now, my blog is about managing in Asia, so, what this all have to do with managing in Asia? I'd agree with you totally that this is something applicable to any culture or company, but I've got to point out that it works better here for 2 reasons. First, people here are much more receptive and they take pride in their job, in the Western world some people are just there to get something done and they don't care why or what, they just care about the when they have to deliver it, and second, and probably the most important one, the work market in Asia is huge and people can change jobs as they change underwear, unlike in our side of the planet, where you almost have to kill someone to get a good job. My experience is that using the 'sell, not tell' technique, you're more likely to keep your people happy, and keeping people happy is keeping people from browsing jobs. After all, one of your own KPI's will most probably be retention, and you don't want to see your bonus cut, don't you? :)

I have the feeling that KPI's should be my next topic, but I haven't decided it yet. See you next with some undecided topic...

Phrase of the day

And to start the week...

Follow your dreams, except the ones in which you're naked in public...

Next shocker, body language

What is there to say about body language and social interactions?

Again, this is a very obvious thing, but it's important to point it out because, at the very least, as visitors in a new country, we need to 'behave' and we also need to understand what our new friends are trying to tell us, besides, it can be very useful to be able to interprete what extra things we can get from the non-verbal communication.

The first thing that comes to my kind when talking about this subject is the nod. We all understand in the the West that a nod means 'understood', 'agreed' or 'yes', here in Asia it may not mean that, sometimes it literally means, 'I don't understand a rat's ass what you're saying and I'm being polite with you', here the same pointer I gave in my previous post applies, make sure your counterpart understands what you're saying confirming his/her understanding. This applies even more when you're just starting a new job in your new home. Keep this in mind!

One very important thing you need to understand about body language is the fact that in most Asian countries, seniority is very important and it's highly respected, so a person who's under your supervision  or seniority level will not feel at all comfortable saying 'no' to you in a verbal way (at least at the beginning), so it will be your job to understand when they're accepting something while not being totally OK with it, in my experience, these expressions could be as subtle as a slightly awkward smile while you talk to them or a twitch in their noses or as obvious as the expression someone would make if you ask them to kill their parents, but they will still not say the word 'no' to you. Be very aware of it and as always try 'sell not tell' - one important pointer here, don't take the 'never saying no' too much to your advantage, what you're thinking now it's still sexual harassment here :)

Body language changes from country to country, not just from continent to continent, but of course the differences are more marked here. It is our job as visitors to understand what our hosts are trying to communicate and for us to follow the social conventions of their culture. Now the best way to do this, again goes back to the pointer before mentioned, if 2 or more people use corporal expressions which clearly oppose to those of your own culture, you can pretty much assume that's a common thing in your new home town.

Now, social interactions can be almost as important as body language, there are many things in the behavioral aspects that can shock you and things you do that shock them, I will give some examples of both side here so you can understand better, these can be in some cases quite amusing:

• Burping. For some Asian cultures burping is fine anywhere and anytime, you can be in the middle of a meeting, in the train going home, or even on the phone with them and they will find it perfectly fine to let go of a burp, this could be a big shocker for some, I'd assume even more to females, but we just need to get used to it, I'm not saying you should start burping wherever you go, but beware, so the shocker is reduced
• Peeing conversations. Yes, you read that right. This one is of course about males, I don't have experience of what women do when they're in the bathroom as I never go to their bathroom, hey, wait, there was this time... ermmm, no, I think that story doesn't belong here, or even in my blog :P. Anyway, in the West, our interactions in the bathroom are 'hey', at the most a 'wassup' and never a 'how's it hanging', but for some cultures in Asia it seems to be a perfectly acceptable thing, to have a long conversation while grasping your penis having someone doing the same in the urinal next to you, or having an argument with his girlfriend on the phone, while peeing...
• For us, we need to be aware of what we do with our feet. It can be very offending if you put your feet over a chair or a table, in most places in Asia feet are considered dirty and should not be used in almost any interaction with people. This can be as extreme as kicking a tennis ball while playing with someone. One time I reached a ball on the second bounce after running a lot, and out of frustration I kicked it, I was immediately corrected by my friend, saying that was very rude and he was gentle enough to explain why I shouldn't do that
• In meals. To understand this one, you should know I love soy sauce, so when I eat sushi or sashimi I dip it all inside the sauce. Once in Tokyo, I was in a business dinner with some customers and eating in the same way I always do, and I was told by my host to dip just a bit, because the way I was eating was impolite and I was loosing face as well as making him loose face, as my host

The body language you should understand and the behavior you should follow are 2 of the most important things you need when you come to this beautiful continent. Remember in Asia, interactions in social activities such as lunch and dinner are extremely important for your business activities and it could as easily make or break a deal, in the same way it could do it while talking business in the office. In Asia the social part of business can be as important as the business itself. This could mean you will be forced to go for drinks after work or even take your Asian customers to places you would not usually go (i.e. a ladyboy bar), so warn your better half about this, because this is an aspect of doing business in Asia that could easily bring you problems in your private life, so beware! Maybe it'd be a good idea if you suggest your husband/wife/person-who-you-sleep-with to read this, it could give you an impartial ally in a highly probable argument (not that I'm trying to boost my 2 readers) 

In my previous posts I've been mentioning a lot the 'sell, not tell' technique in management, I guess the time has come to talk about it and how to use it in your work-life in Asia and in particularly in hard-to-ask things, so obviously, my next post will be about that. Please feel free to comment with questions, suggestions or critics, anything welcome!