Global Dexterity. Andy Molinsky

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СКАЧАТЬ also had very important ideas to contribute to the discussion. Also, by involving them in the process, she could help mentor employees in the process of how to make a decision, which she believed was a valuable skill to teach anyone. Thus, whenever his Indian employees came to Eric with a problem, Eric patterned his approach after his mentor’s. He would not pretend that he had all the answers; instead, he would invite them into the decision-making process.

      Eric was eager to put these powerful management techniques into action. He was passionate about engaging with his Indian workers, getting them thinking for themselves, and, most importantly, letting them know that they were part of the team.

      The only problem was that his vision didn’t work. In fact, it failed miserably. Unlike his former employees in the United States, who relished the chance to make their own decisions and who saw Eric as more of a colleague than a boss, Eric’s Indian workers interpreted this freedom as a lack of competence and confidence on Eric’s part as a manager. After all, why would a leader sit with his employees and keep asking their opinions about important leadership matters? He must lack the ability to do it himself. Rather than being energized and engaged by Eric’s empowerment initiatives, his workers were becoming increasingly demotivated. When Eric approached them for ideas, their interpretation was that it was because he did not know what he was doing. Rather than gaining his employees’ respect, Eric was starting to lose it.

      He overheard conversations in the mailroom and cafeteria about how the previous boss “knew what he was doing” much more than Eric did. Eric’s colleagues in other departments told him that the rumor was that he lacked confidence and decisiveness. He even heard through the grapevine that two of his star employees had already started to look around for other jobs.

      After discussing the matter with some of his closest colleagues and friends both in India and the United States, Eric came to the conclusion that to be successful in India, he would have to adapt his behavior to the more hierarchical Indian leadership style. He would have to take that corner office, begin to make more unilateral decisions, and also start communicating with his employees in a more authoritative tone.

      But he really didn’t want to do that. He firmly believed that what he was doing was correct in terms of managing and leading people. And so he resented the fact that he would have to change to a less effective management style—from his perspective—in order to please his workers. It just didn’t make any sense to him. Additionally, Eric dreaded the idea of having to act so far outside his personal comfort zone to manage in this new context. He had always hated working for authoritarian leaders in the United States, and the last thing that he wanted to do was to become one of these types of leaders himself. It felt disingenuous and unnatural. Finally, even if he were able to somehow convince himself to do it, Eric also had to admit that he was at a loss for how to actually be effective with this new kind of cultural style. Shedding this style felt like dropping his identity, and he didn’t want to do that.

      The combination of thoughts and feelings was overwhelming. All he wanted to do was to be effective, yet everything he was doing seemed to be backfiring. Eric had never failed on a management assignment, but he feared this might be the first time. That too made him anxious. As he sipped his cup of tea, Eric wondered if he had made a terrible career decision in moving to India.

      A New Way of Understanding Cultural Adaptation

      If you have ever lived or worked in a foreign culture, you have likely confronted situations very similar to Eric’s in which the natural, comfortable “default” behavior from your native culture turns out to be ineffective for a situation you find yourself in within a new cultural environment.

      In each of these situations, you don’t just struggle with understanding cultural differences. Rather, you struggle with the far more challenging task of actually changing your culturally ingrained behavior. I call this ability global dexterity—the capacity to adapt your behavior, when necessary, in a foreign cultural environment to accommodate new and different expectations that vary from those of your native cultural setting. For Eric Rivers, it’s acting with a leadership style that fits his Indian setting and that differs from his own in the United States. Or for you, it’s learning to adapt your behavior to function effectively in a particular situation in a foreign culture with expectations for behavior that are very different for how people would typically act in that same situation in your native culture.

      Global dexterity is a critical skill for anyone from any culture attempting to function successfully in today’s global environment. Business scholars and other writers have recently focused considerable attention on the importance of cultural knowledge, but being effective in a myriad of foreign cultural situations that you find yourself in when working or living abroad requires more than mere knowledge. It requires the capacity to act on what you know: the ability to mold and shape your behavior in foreign cultural settings so that you can be simultaneously effective and appropriate in that setting without losing who you are in the process.

      Lack of Global Dexterity Can Limit Effectiveness

      Global dexterity can be a challenging skill to acquire. You can feel anxious and embarrassed about your inability to master the new cultural rules; you can feel inauthentic when performing these new behaviors, especially if the new rules conflict with aspects of your ingrained values and beliefs. You can also feel frustrated and angry about having to adapt in the first place, wondering why the other side can’t simply adapt to you. These feelings can interfere with your ability to successfully adapt your behavior—and, as a result, your professional reputation and effectiveness can suffer.

      Here’s an example. A few years ago I was speaking with an American manager at a company that had been recently purchased by a larger German firm. That manager was quite annoyed with his new German boss, whom he perceived as cold and uncaring. When I pressed him about why he had this impression, this manager said that the biggest problem was small talk. When they had first met, his German boss showed absolutely no interest in him as a person. He did not ask him any questions about his family—which was hard to do, given all the personal photos the manager had arranged on his desk and walls—and he also didn’t comment on his interest in sports, which also was obvious from the many posters and photos on the wall. The boss simply came into his office, introduced himself, shook his hand quickly and coldly, and that was it. And this pattern continued into the future—no small talk, no effort to get to know him as a person.

      I was curious about this story, so I followed up by interviewing several of the manager’s German-born colleagues and asked for their perspective. It turned out that they knew about the importance of small talk in the United States, but felt uncomfortable doing it. In Germany, small talk is far less common than in the United States, and from a German perspective, it can feel superficial, irrelevant, and inefficient to engage in such random banter with a person you barely know. The problem, of course, was that in avoiding small talk, the executive inadvertently made a bad impression on his new employee and compromised his reputation within the firm.

      The lack of global dexterity can also hurt your effectiveness at work. Take the case of Feng Li, a Chinese-born management consultant for a major American-based professional services firm in Chicago. I initially learned about Feng’s case from Robert, one of the managing directors of the consultancy. Several years ago, Robert had hand-selected Feng to work for him in the managing director’s office. Feng had impeccable oral and written English, outstanding technical skills, and was also very creative. He was on the fast track to senior consultant and then director, and eventually partner, except for one major issue: Feng could not get himself to participate actively in meetings. The problem had nothing to do with a lack of ideas. Feng was one of the brightest consultants at the firm, and he had excellent ideas and insights. According to Robert, in terms of pure mental “firepower,” Feng was at the top of the firm. The problem was that Feng was simply unwilling to contribute his ideas in a public forum.

      Instead СКАЧАТЬ