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Lessons for Leaders from China’s Lao Zi
What ancient Chinese wisdom teaches today’s leaders in times of complex change.
“Lao Zi was a native of Chu, a southern state in the Zhou dynasty. His surname was Li; his given name was Er, and he was also called Dan. … Lao Zi cultivated Dao and virtue. His learning was devoted to self-effacement and not having fame. He lived in Zhou for a long time; then witnessed the decline of Zhou and departed. When he reached the northwest border, he met the guard Yin Xi, who asked him to put his teachings into writing. The result was a book consisting of 5000 Chinese characters … Thereafter, Lao Zi disappeared; no one knew where he had gone.” (Source: Sima Qian, Biography of Lao Zi, 100 BCE)
The other day I read that business leaders are obsessed with Sun Tzu’s Art of War. It made me wonder: how many leaders know Lao Zi’s short book – commonly called the Dao de Jing or simply: the Laozi (老子). It’s 2400 years old, and easily the best book I have read this summer.
Are you looking for fresh insights on how to lead and deal with complex change, or just interested in ancient Chinese thinking?
What words of wisdom could China’s Lao Zi (The name Lao Zi is best taken to mean Old (Lao) Master (Zi)) possibly have for you today?
How about these:
Change is the new normal
Or better put: change is nothing new. The way of the Universe, the Old Master says, is change:
“Difficult and easy complete one another.
Long and short test one another;
High and low determine one another.
Pitch and mode give harmony to one another.” (Laozi 2)
Stay flexible
If you stay flexible you are well equipped to lead and deal with complex change:
“Plants and trees, while they are alive, are flexible and soft,
But when they die they become brittle and dry.
Truly, what is inflexible and hard leads us to death.
Flexibility and softness are friends of life.” (Laozi 76)
Be observant
“To know when one does not know is best.
To think one knows when one does not know is a dire disease.” (Laozi 71)
Be observant. Become a better listener (read a few tips here). Take the time to understand what is behind unfamiliar behavior before making up your mind and voicing your opinion. Particularly in cross-cultural business situations (read more about cross-cultural differences in teams).
Cultivate your inner strength
“To be like water, that’s the highest.
Water benefits all creatures; yet itself does not compete.” (Laozi 8)
Last but not least: watch your health
“Fame or your own body: which matters to you most?
Your possessions or your health: what is worth to you most?” (Laozi 44)
But how to take care of your health when you are swamped with work and pressed for time already? Here’s what Lao Zi shares in that other delightful book of Taoism, the Zhuangzi:
“These are the rules for staying healthy:
Can you embrace the One? And never lose it?
Can you, without consulting oracles, foretell fortune and misfortune?
Do you know where to stop? Do you know where to let go?
How to not put the blame on others but instead look inside yourself?
Can you be unbridled?
Can you be unsophisticated?
Can you be a like a baby? A baby can howl all day, yet its throat never gets hoarse – harmony at its height! A baby can clench its little fists all day, yet its fingers never get cramped – so perfect is its inner strength! A baby can stare all day without once blinking its eyes – so little affected it is by things that do not matter.
To move without knowing where you are going, to stand without knowing why, flexibly trailing about with things, and riding along with them on the same wave – These are the rules for staying healthy.” (Zhuangzi 23:1)
Lao Zi, legend has it, lived to be 160. Should you now decide to print his words and hang them on your mirror: know that I have done the same.
What reflections or thoughts do you have after reading this? Let us know!
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Photo: DonkeyHotey/Flickr (Creative Commons)
This article is part of our Expert Series in which Hanneke Siebelink shares valuable leadership lessons from a list of experts, researchers and role models she selected. The LaoZi is among the most loved and translated works in world literature. Arthur Waley’s translation into English (1934) is excellent. For Dutch readers we highly recommend Kristofer Schipper’s translation into Dutch (2010).
Hanneke Siebelink is Research Partner and Writer at HRS Business Transformation Services, and author of several books. Her current research focuses on how leaders build successful organizations by increasing the quality and effectiveness of collaboration across companies, functions, and cultures. She is particularly interested in China and East-West relations and is learning Mandarin Chinese. Find out more about Hanneke and HRS services. If you would like to invite us to your organization, contact us here.
Leading Complex Change Programs: Stimulate People to Think Impact!
Over the past 25 years I have been involved in various complex change programs for companies in all kinds of markets and circumstances. But in the past years I have seen the world of Business Transformation, Program and Project Management change substantially. Those of us who are leading complex transformations know what I am talking about. Organizations are confronted with new technologies, new products, and new market conditions that force them to re-invent the way they deal with change and roll out change initiatives. How can they keep pace? Traditional change and project management methods no longer seem to be sufficient. In this article I will highlight a vital element that determines the success of change programs in today’s business reality: Stimulate your people to think and communicate in terms of impact.
A few observations:
- Technology is driving change more than ever before; we live in a digital age, and technological evolutions can be very fast and disruptive;
- Senior management tries to define appropriate answers to these digital challenges without knowing all the answers upfront;
- Transformation programs are expected to align the fast moving needs of the business with the fast moving technological evolutions.
In order to be successful, one of the most essential challenges for transformation programs is to establish the right level of co-creation and alignment between 3 worlds: business management (‘what do we need from our technical colleagues in order to be able to achieve our strategy’) – technological experts (‘what do we need from ‘the business’ in order to be able to define feasible technical options, and to set realistic implementation priorities’) – process owners (‘what do we need from management, HR, and technical departments to be able to execute the changing business rules, processes and tools efficiently and effectively’).
One of the most essential challenges for transformation programs is to establish the right level of co-creation and alignment between business managers – technological experts – and the users/executors of the new processes and tools.
As McKinsey&Company describes it: when companies take a systematic approach to prioritizing initiatives and involve input from a range of company stakeholders, executives are more likely than average to report successful transformations (read the McKinsey article here).
What does this ‘systematic approach’ actually mean? What kind of mindset do we need to create a successful systematic transformation approach throughout the organization?
Quite often I see organizations translate this into an ‘action planning’-mindset: discussing actions and planning, negotiating deadlines, putting it in extensive documentation, and communication about the actions and planning. Even in organization that claim to apply agile roll-out principles I regularly observe this action planning focus. But does this really help stakeholders to create alignment on their mutual needs and expectations?
Here is my point: to create successful transformation we need to build an ‘impact’-mindset in our teams, rather than an ‘action planning’-mindset.
To create successful transformation we need to build an ‘impact’-mindset, rather than an ‘action planning’-mindset.
A few examples of the importance of an impact-mindset during transformation programs:
- How do we define business requirements? How much of our focus turns to inventory and action planning versus to impact-analysis and impact discussions?
- How do we communicate very complex technical options to business stakeholders? Do we keep the details out of their sight (‘they are not interested in the details anyway’)? How well do we understand and explain the potential business impact to them?
- How well do we understand the impact on people and processes? Do we have the right people around the table? Cross-team, diverse areas of expertise, HR and ICT together?
Stimulate your people to think and communicate in terms of impact. Why? Because it makes our expectations towards the changes and end-results more accurate and more precise! It creates a stronger mutual understanding of what we want, about what is possible, and about the priorities we set. It increases alignment between stakeholders, and therefore the chance of a successful transformation program.
What is your experience with transformation programs? What points would you add? Please share!
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Photo: Andrea/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Aad is a global business advisor, change leader, executive team facilitator, leadership coach, and frequently asked keynote speaker. He is founder and managing partner at HRS Business Transformation Services where he works with senior executives and their organizations globally in three key domains: ‘leading complex change’, ‘cross-cultural leadership’, and ‘post-merger integration’. Find out more about Aad, our services, and his keynotes. If you would like to invite Aad to your organization contact us.
How to Avoid 3 Big Collaboration Traps? Morten Hansen’s Book Helps
Collaboration across functions and company units has become a top priority for firms in the United States, Europe and Asia (read more here). And yet too many collaborative efforts fail. A whopping 75 percent of cross-company teams are currently dysfunctional, according to a recent study. Clearly there are serious and often underestimated traps. Morton Hansen’s book can help you to avoid them.
‘Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration.’ It was this statement by management professor (UC Berkeley) Morten Hansen that made me read his book ‘Collaboration’ when it was launched. Four years and lots of client cases later, Aad and I still turn to it from time to time.
What makes this book powerful?
Not just that it is based on solid research (Hansen spent 15 years analyzing what differentiates good from bad collaboration in large multinationals.) Not just its central thesis that the objective of collaboration is more than tearing down silos and getting people in different business units to work together. It is to generate results. We couldn’t agree more (read our previous article about how to get collaboration right).
What I like best is Hansen’s take on what could possibly go wrong. When stimulating cross-company collaboration, companies and organizations can run into serious, and often underestimated, traps. I am picking 3:
Collaboration Trap 1: You collaborate too much
In today’s fast-paced business environment, it is easy to get carried away with collaboration. Many companies see increasing collaborative efforts as a smart way to deal with insecurity and change. But setting up too many collaborative projects, without sufficient focus can slow your business down (read more here). Or worse: become the enemy of reaching concrete results. Lack of results, in turn, inevitably affects trust. Ask any business team that fails to make real progress. Or ask the men and women leading the EU.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, the key to being successful with collaboration is to know when to say no to it. If you can decide when collaboration does not make sense and turn down projects which don’t have a solid business case in their favor, then you increase the odds the collaborative projects you do undertake will be winners. – Morten Hansen
Collaboration Trap 2: You haven’t analyzed existing barriers
‘Different situations have different barriers. Leaders must first evaluate which barriers exist in their organization. Not doing so is the same as throwing darts in the dark; you have no idea what you are hitting.’
Building smart collaboration across functions and company units starts with understanding the nature of the barriers that may be present in your organization. For instance: People, working hard to meet their own targets and feeling swamped already, may drag their feet when asked for help by people in other business units. People may find it hard to search large enterprises for ideas and information. Or they may simply not have learned how to work effectively as cross-unit, and often virtual, teams. Different collaboration barriers require different types of intervention.
Collaboration Trap 3: You underestimate accountability
To make collaboration generate results, the last thing you need are teams where people hide behind one another’s backs and don’t take ownership. But how to make cross-unit teams embrace accountability?
Collaborative leaders who hold themselves and others accountable engage in a few key practices. They spell out what they are accountable for – which targets, what kind of job. You can’t hold yourself and others accountable if you don’t know what to be accountable for. They then accept responsibility for mistakes and poor performance, no matter the circumstances and whether or not others mess up a collaborative effort. – Morten Hansen
Amen to that.
The focus on cross-company collaboration will increase, as road ahead becomes more complex, the world increasingly global, and technology increasingly connective.
Make your own collaborative efforts count, and avoid these 3 big traps.
Thoughts? Feel free to share your own experience below!
This article is part of the Expert Series investigating how high-quality collaboration helps leaders to build success when faced with complex change. Business leaders, experts and role models selected by Hanneke Siebelink explain how they did it and share valuable lessons they learned along the way. You can find previous LeadershipWatch Series articles here.
Hanneke Siebelink is Research Partner and Writer at HRS Business Transformation Services, and author of several books. Her current research focuses on how leaders build successful organizations by increasing the quality and effectiveness of collaboration across companies, business units, functions, teams, and cultures. Find out more about Hanneke and HRS services. If you would like to invite us to your organization, contact us here.
How to Lead Global Teams: One Powerful Tip for Westerners
How to lead cross-cultural teams, particularly teams where East meets West? What are concrete things you can do to help your global team in real-life business situations? This was the topic of my recent keynote at SIETAR Europa’s congress in Valencia. Here I want to share my one most powerful tip for Westerners.
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently (May 2015) released its forecast of what will be the Top 10 economies of 2050. Just in case you still had doubts about how the balance in this world is shifting: Eastern economies (including China, India and Indonesia) move up rakings. Western economies (including the US, Germany and the UK) slide down.
Source: Economist Intelligence Unit
Not surprisingly, business leaders increasingly approach us with questions like:
“We have just been bought by an Indian multinational. What can I do to ensure that our global research teams deliver, within the agreed planning? I noticed that the Indians are bad planners already.”
“I think I inadvertedly offended the Japanese person in my global HR team. When I told him in clear terms what I expected him to do, he just stood up and walked out. What went wrong?”
These are just a few examples of how leading cross-cultural teams comes with its own surprises. Even to the most experienced (read here how GE’s Raghy Krishnamoorthy describes his cross-cultural missteps).
How to lead cross-cultural teams, particularly teams where East meets West? What are concrete things you can do to help your global team in real-life business situations? This was the topic of my recent keynote at SIETAR Europa’s congress in Valencia. I want to share my one most powerful tip for Westerners.
Stimulate your team to invest in personal relationships.
I believe that in today’s business world, the importance of building relationships outside the business context is crucially important. To really get to know the person you are working with, not just the colleague or the member of your team.
Now if you are Italian, French or Greek, this probably sounds obvious. But for a Dutchman like myself, it is not.
For the Dutch, and for most Americans and northern Europeans I know, work is work, and private is private. I am extremely open about my business and about what I want to achieve, but if you ask me about my family I’ll be a little bit reluctant because: how well do I know you? It is not that I don’t want to share, but for me family is private.
I recall a nice discussion with a global business team I coached. A Danish team member shared how he had received a wedding invitation from a colleague in India. ‘Flying all the way to India?’, he had thought. ‘How can I decline this invitation without insulting my colleague?’ At that point the Indian team members started to laugh: ‘Do you really think that, when we invite you to a wedding, we are expecting you to come? You shouldn’t feel obliged to go, though you would certainly be welcome. But in our culture it would be very rude to not send you the invitation.’
Experience has thought me how important it is to invest in personal relationships, even when the next deadline looms on the horizon. And I am still learning every day.
So if you are leading business teams where East meets West, build those personal relationships. And stimulate your team members to do so too.
Like this article? Find more useful insights on how to lead cross-cultural teams here:
– How different cultures look at time and planning
– How to avoid making people lose face
– How to help your cross-cultural team deal with different perceptions of authority and hierarchy
– How to build trust in cross-cultural teams
Join us and register at the top of this page to stay up to date with LeadershipWatch articles and news. Your personal information will be kept strictly confidential.
Photo: moodboard/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Aad is a global business advisor, change leader, executive team facilitator, leadership coach, and frequently asked keynote speaker. He is founder and managing partner at HRS Business Transformation Services where he works with senior executives and their organizations globally in three key domains: ‘leading complex change’, ‘cross-cultural leadership’, and ‘post-merger integration’. Find out more about Aad, our services, and his keynotes. If you would like to invite Aad to your organization contact us.
Strategy Execution: Get Collaboration Right!
To execute your business strategy successfully and keep programs on schedule, supporting people to get collaboration right is just as important as good planning. Have you really thought this through?
In today’s turbulent business environment, where companies and organizations are learning how to deal with an increased rate of complexity and change, strategy execution is high on the agenda of business leaders. How to turn good ideas into concrete results? How to beat the competition? How to increase responsiveness, flexibility and speed?
Strategy execution has changed!
There is a need for companies to take a close look at their business models and strategy execution habits
If the past 25 years of working with companies and business teams to achieve strategic objectives have taught me one thing, it is this.
For strategy execution to succeed, focusing on deliverables, planning, analyzing data, and controlling finances is important, but not enough. Getting collaboration right, across teams, functions and company units, is at least as important. And probably even more.
I recall a study conducted by IMD’s Professor of Innovation Management Bill Fischer and his team. Fischer, a firm believer in the power of good teamwork, investigated how the giant Chinese home appliance maker Haier accelerated and improved strategy execution by changing the way its employees collaborate.
Here is what he found.
Like many companies, Haier used to be organized with strong hierarchies, with separate departments (R@D, manufacturing, sales, HR, …) run by layers of managers. Convinced that these silos within Haier slowed the company down in this fast-speed internet age, CEO Zhang Ruimin took a bold step. He practically reversed Haier’s internal structure and broke the large firm (70,000 employees) down into a network of ‘mini-companies’, or self-managed teams of cross-functional employees, each responsible for its own profit and loss.
“If we don’t challenge ourselves, someone else will.” – Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin
It works broadly like this. Any Haier employee can generate his/her own idea and submit a prospective business plan (including sales goals, plan of attack and a budget for the resources needed), based on careful studying of customer comments and market information. If approved by senior management, that person can create and lead his/her own team to implement the project, which involves persuading staff such as engineers, designers and sales experts to join. Team members share in the resulting profits, and have the right to elect a new leader if the team underperforms. In Zhang’s words: “In the past, employees waited to hear from the boss. Now, they have become entrepreneurs, collaborate across functions and listen to the customer.”
While the Haier Group takes business transformation to the extreme, the example brings home at least one important point. Improving business performance by getting cross-functional collaboration right does not just happen by itself. It requires new ways of thinking, new approaches that fit today’s reality and challenges. And an active and continuing involvement of senior leadership is essential.
In the way we work with our clients, getting collaboration right is about finding the most effective combination of:
- Fostering a mindset that encourages collaborative behavior (team development, learning to think across borders (functions, cultures, departments));
- Making decisions and setting priorities that create clear and transparent responsibilities (dare to make choices, even if the consequences are sometimes hard to predict);
- Putting processes in place that stimulate continuous feedback loops between people, teams, and leaders (team structures, meeting & communication rhythm, networks)
- Assembling a portfolio of integrated technologies that facilitate collaboration
- Measuring and finding the right balance between ‘learning by analyzing’ (study), ‘learning by doing’ (experimenting), and ‘learning by evaluating’ (anchoring what works well).
What things would you add? Share it with us!
Co-written by Hanneke Siebelink
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Photo: GotCredit/Flickr (Creative Commons)
How to get collaboration right: some useful reading material
Good books:
– Reinventing Giants: How Chinese global competitor Haier has changed the way big companies transform. By Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago and Fang Liu, 2013
– Collaboration: How leaders avoid the traps, create unity and reap big result. By Morten Hansen, 2009.
Good articles:
– The Collaborative Organization: How to make employee networks really work
– How to Create Collaboration that Generates Results: Five articles with interesting tips
Aad is a global business advisor, change leader and program manager, executive team facilitator, leadership coach, and frequently asked keynote speaker. He is founder and managing partner at HRS Business Transformation Services where he works with senior executives and leadership teams globally in three key domains: ‘leading complex change’, ‘cross-cultural leadership’, and ‘post-merger integration’. Find out more about Aad and our services. If you would like to invite Aad to your organization contact us.
What Western Business Leaders Learn in China
The Chinese learn from us more quickly than we learn from them. Let’s reverse the situation, and use working with Chinese people to our advantage.
Jack Ma founder and chairman of the successful Alibaba Group, discovered the power of e-commerce when he was touring the United States. Xiaomi co-founder and president Lin Bin must have learned more than a few useful skills when he studied (Drexel university) and worked (Microsoft, Google) in the U.S. And where were most of China’s Top 30 Young Entrepreneurs educated? You guessed it. In the United States, and Europe (Click here for the inspiring Forbes list of young Chinese entrepreneurs).
I recall a conversation with a Chinese business student in Shanghai. Though he had never been outside of China (‘Maybe I need to save a little more’), he spoke remarkably good English. He knew what countries made up the European Union, described Paris, London, Rome. He quizzed me about our history, our habits, how we worked, what we liked. He had just finished reading Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to make friends and influence people’ – a book he clearly loved. I told him I was touched by how much he knew about us, his hunger to learn more. He replied with words I will not easily forget: ‘Thanks! And what do you know about us?’
“The fact that so many Asian people come to the West to study, and so few Westerners do so in Asia, is not a sign of the superiority of the Western mind and model. On the contrary, it impoverishes our mindset, if not our culture.” – Dominique Moisi
The Chinese learn from us more quickly than we learn from them. They graduate from the best Western universities, apply for jobs in western firms, or learn to understand the western mind by actively seeking interaction, like my Chinese friend did in Shanghai. Judging from the rapid rise of companies like Xiaomi and Alibaba, this approach clearly serves them well.
Let’s reverse the situation. Let’s stimulate our curiosity and learn to understand what is behind some unfamiliar Chinese/Asian patterns of interaction.
Let’s use working with Chinese people to our advantage.
Like these Western business leaders did. Here is what they say they learned in China, or by working with Chinese people here:
Seeing the big picture, including context and relationships
Joerg Wuttke , Chief Representative of BASF China: “Some time ago I was on a project with a Chinese team, who drew maps of influence, maps of personal and family and business relationships, then stood back and thought about things that could happen. And they saw the impact move from one map to another. They are masters; they showed me how to see the big picture. Although I now know the maps were not even that sophisticated, I can feel the many more hidden layers that come into play, of people, of interests, of long-laid plans. I can feel them like a seismologist and I have learned to play the existing forces.”
Improving negotiating skills
Jacques Rogge, former President of the International Olympic Committee: “In every negotiation, you want to look for a win-win: that is true for companies in West and East. But in Asia, I find, there is more emphasis on reaching a win-win situation. This has to do with the great respect that Asians have for each other. They always want people to save face (read more about saving face), so reaching a win-win situation is a specific goal for them. It is a matter of respect. Showing respect is a quality that we all have, but a quality in which Asian and Chinese people excel to such a degree that it becomes important for us to be aware of it” (read more about Jacques Rogge’s China experience here).
Increasing flexibility by mastering different problem solving methods
Ton Buchner, CEO AkzoNobel: “I am generalizing here of course, but Americans and Dutch people typically see a problem, attack the problem straight on by dividing it into a series of smaller problems, then solve these one by one, then put it back together. Chinese people, on the other hand, first walk away from the problem, analyze the situation from a distance, then look at each other and jointly figure out a solution. The first method is not better than the second, but I have learned that, depending on the problem, one of both methods will be more effective. It helps me to lead this company.”
The conclusion seems clear. Working with Chinese people pays. Chances are that the experience will broaden your mind, make you a better business leader, and equip you with more tools to face the challenges ahead.
And it’s backed up by solid research too: China improves executives’ minds (here is a particularly nice study about it: ‘How China Transforms an Executive Mind’).
So what are you waiting for?
Share your own experience below! What have you learned from working in China, or with Chinese people here? What habit or practice did you find particularly useful, and did you incorporate in your work a business leader? Would you recommend actively seeking opportunities to work with Chinese people? Let’s share experiences here, and learn from the Chinese as quickly as they learn from us.
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Hanneke Siebelink is Research Partner and Writer at HRS Business Transformation Services, and author of several books. Her current research focuses on how leaders build successful organizations by increasing the quality and effectiveness of collaboration across companies, business units, teams, and cultures. She is learning Mandarin Chinese. Find out more about Hanneke and HRS services. If you would like to invite us to your organization, contact us here.
East and West Perceive Authority Differently. And It Affects Your Cross-Cultural Team
When working with cross-cultural teams, especially teams where East meets West, team members can have very different perceptions of authority. Are you aware that these different perceptions affect the functioning of your team, and your role as a business leader?
In the year 1405, a Chinese eunuch named Zheng He decided to discover the great unknown: the West. In a series of six epic voyages the formidable admiral, commanding 300 giant vessels and a combined crew of 28,000, sailed via Thailand, Sumatra, Java, and Ceylon all the way to Africa’s eastern shores – an achievement comparable with, in Niall Ferguson’s words, ‘landing an American astronaut on the moon in 1969.’ ( The west and the rest, 2011, p. 32). 87 years later, Christopher Columbus left the Spanish town Cadiz and steered his comparably tiny ships (3) and crew (90) across the Atlantic. Aided by the stars and a Chinese-invented compass, he hoped to reach the continent he was just dying to discover: Asia. Columbus never faced up to the fact he found America instead.
While today the physical location of continents and countries carries few surprises, and Google maps ensures you don’t get lost even in places where you never were before, finding your way in the midst of unfamiliar habits and preferences can be a lot more challenging. Particularly when the successful functioning of your business team depends on it. In a globalized world where you increasingly collaborate with people across business units, different teams and cultures, cultural misunderstandings can lead to unforeseen setbacks (read one true story recounted by a business leader here). And because Asian (China, India, Japan, ..) cultural values often contradict our own (America, Europe), people can feel particularly lost in teams where East meets West.
People in the East and in the West Perceive Authority Differently ….
Consider these ‘West meets East’ pictograms developed by Yang Liu, a Chinese designer living in Germany. At the risk of oversimplifying (every European knows that the northern European countries are quite different from the south, just like every Chinese knows that northern and southern China are hardly the same): do these pictograms ring true to you? If you lead cross-cultural teams: are you aware that such culturally-determined differences, how Asians and Westerners manage time for instance, and how they view you as a boss, profoundly affect the functioning of your team, and your role in it?
The ‘boss’ pictogram made me think of Carlos Ghosn, the French-Brazilian CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Asked about his experiences managing Japanese team, he quipped:
‘Being a CEO in a Japanese company is absolutely remarkable. I mean, I feel so good because you have the impression you can do anything you want. People are so different towards authority; they respect what the CEO says. CEOs in Japan are not very talkative, they are very cautious about what they say, but when they say something it is done. Which is surprising for me because I am coming from a Latin environment where usually, when you give an order, people tell you ‘yes’ but they do something different. You spend a lot of time trying to bring them back to your decision. In Japan, no: you say something and it is going to be done. Whether it is wrong or right, it is going to be done. Now if it’s wrong, people will say ‘Yes, but the boss said this’ and then they assume the consequences. I find it very refreshing. When you notice you are being taken very seriously, when every single thing you say is going to be done, you are going to be much more cautious about the orientations you decide to give.’
… and this affects the functioning of your team
How people accord status: it is an important cultural difference you may encounter in the teams you lead. Egalitarian western cultures, like the American and the Dutch, tend to accord status on the basis of concrete achievements. Eastern and more hierarchical cultures (China, India, …) tend to ascribe status based on age, experience, education, and so on. Be aware that these perceptions exist, and have an impact on the way your team members will respond to you (read more about cultural differences in Indian-Dutch business teams here).
Here’s a Useful Checklist You Can Use:
Effective leaders establish teams where people collaborate successfully despite differences in the way they deal with authority. Where people ‘own’ decisions reached as if they were their own. Below you find a useful checklist that will help you to deal with authority in mixed East-West teams.
What is the pre-dominant orientation of my team: achievement or ascribed orientation?
Achievement (for instance):
- Focus is more on knowledge and expertise
- Titles are less important
- People will more easily challenge decisions
- People like to receive space for personal input
Ascribed (for instance):
- Focus is more on seniority
- Titles are important
- People will not openly challenge decisions
- People will stick to your instructions
Is my team aware of this dominant orientation? Do all members feel equally ok with it? Is my leadership style fitting the team orientation?
- In the way I make clear to the team what I want to achieve and why?
- In the way I make clear what I expect from them?
- In the way I check whether decisions are really embraced by them?
- In the way I invite people to share their opinion openly?
- In the way I follow up on actions and results?
Asking yourself these questions may help you to spot potential areas of misalignment, and improve the quality of collaboration in your cross-cultural team.
Do you like to learn more about how to lead cross-cultural teams? Join me at the Sietar Europa Annual Conference where I will be sharing more insights in my keynote session.
You can also register (at the top) to stay up to date with upcoming LeadershipWatch articles. Your personal information will be kept strictly confidential.
Co-written by Hanneke Siebelink
Aad is a global business advisor, change leader, executive team facilitator, leadership coach, and frequently asked keynote speaker. He is founder and managing partner at HRS Business Transformation Services where he works with senior executives and leadership teams globally in three key domains: ‘leading complex change’, ‘cross-cultural leadership’, and ‘post-merger integration’. Find out more about Aad and our services. If you would like to invite Aad to your organization contact us.
5 Unusual Statements that Reveal how Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Thinks
This post is part of the Expert Series investigating how high-quality collaboration helps leaders to build success when faced with complex change. Business leaders, experts and role models selected by Hanneke Siebelink explain how they did it and share valuable lessons they learned along the way. You can find previous LeadershipWatch Series articles here.
What is your first thought when you hear the name Jack Ma? The king of e- and mobile commerce? The richest man in China? Here’s what my Chinese teacher told me when I asked her: ‘Ma Yun (his Chinese name) has shown us that it’s possible to make a fortune based on new technologies and smart thinking, rather than on real estate and bribes. He is very symbolic in China. A source of inspiration. Did you know he used to be a language teacher?’
How did the founder and chairman of the Alibaba Group (Alibaba’s recent IPO was the largest in world history) build his success, and that of the countless people using Alibaba’s trading platforms? What lessons does he want to share?
Let’s take a look at 5 unusual statements Jack Ma made at Davos 2015, when he was interviewed by Charlie Rose. 5 Unusual statements that reveal how Jack Ma thinks:
1) I think crazy is good
’When I first appeared in Time Magazine, they called me Crazy Jack. I think crazy is good. We are crazy but we are not stupid! We know what we are doing.’
Jack Ma founded his business 15 years ago, when he discovered internet during a trip to the US, typed his very first search word (‘beer’) and was surprised to see that not a single Chinese beer turned up in the results. He came up with the name Alibaba while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. (‘I asked the waitress: ‘Do you know about Alibaba?’ She said: ‘Open Sesame!’ I said: ‘Good!’) Crazy? Probably. Open-minded and eager to learn? You bet.
2) I think we should get used to being rejected
Jack Ma knows a thing or two about not succeeding, and still staying the course. He received countless rejections – from the universities where he wanted to study, from the companies where he wanted to work – before being hired as a teacher (the job he held before he founded Alibaba).
In his own words: ‘I was rejected 30 times when I applied for jobs.’ I tried to be a policeman. They said: No, you are not good. When KFC came to Hangzhou, my city, 24 people went for the job. 23 were accepted. I was the only one who wasn’t. And I applied for Harvard 10 times. 10 times I was rejected. And then I told myself: One day I shall go there and teach (…) I think we should get used to failing and being rejected. We are not that good.’
Jack Ma understands that the fear of failure can have a crippling effect on business. His personal recipe when confronted with rejection? ‘Improve yourself, don’t complain and never give up.’ (Read more here on what you can do to improve resilience in your company.)
3) How to make our customers succeed, that is our philosophy
‘When we developed Alipay (the online payment service of the Alibaba Group), everybody told me: ‘This is the most stupid idea you ever had.‘ But I don’t care if an idea is stupid or not. As long as people use it. Now we have 800 million people using Alipay (…) How to make our customers succeed, that is our philosophy. ‘
To Jack Ma, the important question is not: ‘How can we get our customers to buy what we make?’ But rather: ‘What are the unmet needs of our customer that we can satisfy?’ Delight the customer, his motto is, and the company will flourish. This total customer focus has served Alibaba well. Alipay, for its part, is shaking up China’s entire financial sector. Find intriguing details here.
4) One secret of our success is that we have a lot of women
Jack Ma, out of the blue and with fire in his eyes: ‘One of the secrets of Alibaba’s success is that we have a lot of women. 47 percent of our employees are women. 33 percent of management are women, and 24 percent of senior management are women. We have a woman CEO, CFO, Chief People Officer… If you want to win in the 21st century, you have to make sure that you empower people . Then you will be successful. I find that women think about the others more than they think about themselves.’
Per the New York Times, women still make up only 16 percent of directors at Fortune 500 companies, 4 percent of chief executives at Standard & Poor’s 500 companies and 10 percent of chief financial officers at S&P 500 companies.
5) The most important thing is trust
Jack Ma: ‘In e-commerce, the most important thing is trust. These past 15 years, when we built Alibaba, everything we did was trying to build trust. Today in China, and in the world, people do not trust one another, everybody thinks: ‘This guy is cheating.’ But how can you do anything online when there is no trust?’
‘Let me tell you how we created Alipay. It was a big decision. The first 3 to 4 years, Alibaba was just a market place for information. No bank wanted to help, convinced that online trade would never work in China. So I didn’t know what to do. Launching a financial payment system would be against financial laws (because you need a license). But if I didn’t do it e-commerce would go nowhere. Then I went to Davos, and listened to a leadership discussion. ‘Leadership is about responsibility and trust’, I heard. That’s when I called my friends and colleagues in my apartment. I said: ‘Do it. Now. Immediately. If something goes wrong, if somebody is sent to prison, Jack Ma will go to prison. Because it is important for China and the world to build a trust system.’
Building trust is crucial, and often underestimated. Recent events prove that it requires continuous attention, even by leaders like Jack Ma.
What do you think about Jack Ma and Alibaba? Share your views below!
Jack Ma was born right before the cultural revolution – a period he vividly remembers. He built the Alibaba Group, in his words, ‘without a rich father, a powerful uncle, 1 dollar from the banks’ and changed a lot of people’s lives in the process. Alibaba went public in September 2014. The company’s $150-billion IPO was the largest offering for a US-listed company in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. You can read Jack Ma’s inspiring life story here. And watch the full Davos 2015 interview with Jack Ma here.
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Photo: e27singapore/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Hanneke Siebelink is Research Partner and Writer at HRS Business Transformation Services, and author of several books. Her current research focuses on how leaders build successful organizations by increasing the quality and effectiveness of collaboration across companies, business units, functions, teams, and cultures. Find out more about Hanneke and HRS services. If you would like to invite us to your organization, contact us here.
Collaboration that Generates Results: 5 Articles with Interesting Tips
Not so long ago, I was asked by a client to help with the rollout of a large corporate transformation program. One thing quickly became clear: producing tangible results will in large part depend on the quality of collaboration between teams and people across company divisions. Even for highly technical programs, where detailed process management, planning and technical expertise are crucial.
In these times of relentless change, forcing even the best of companies to transform and future-proof themselves, the real challenge is: getting people to work together across company divisions and cultures in a way that generates results. Like increasing our agility and adaptability, attracting new customers with better services and products, taking better decisions, and solving problems customers genuinely care about.
Is there an ideal recipe, you might wonder? Is there a one-fits-all solution? Companies, challenges and people are way to diverse for one-fits-all solutions, and thank god for that – for wouldn’t life be boring if our actions and solutions were the same!
But there ARE some smart things you can do to improve the quality of cross-company collaboration and generate measurable results. Of all the interventions tested in the course of many years (and in various business settings), here is my personal top 4:
Work with the best. Invest in diversity
Work with the best people you can find. Like Andrew Carnegie did, who attributed his phenomenal success in business “not to what I have known or done myself, but to the faculty of knowing and choosing others who did know better than myself.” (source: Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie).
Read more here about the value of working with the best:
1) Building Your Executive Team: 3 Valuable Lessons from Andrew Carnegie
In addition, countless studies have shown that investing in diversity (personalities, skills, business experience, …) pays. A company like Philips, for instance, would not have become the multinational it is today without the complementarity of backgrounds and characters at the top. Read more here about the value of diversity in business teams:
2) A Powerful Story about Team Diversity by the Philips Founding Fathers
Build rhythm and focus
Start building rhythm and a collective focus right away, even when the details of the desired end result are not yet totally defined. Read here how a well-developed and regularly updated strategy road map can help your teams to find a steady work rhythm (like a drumbeat) and shared focus, reach results that increase trust, and take corrective action when required:
3) Strategy Execution, Why It Often Fails
Create Transparency and Openness
Pay enough attention to creating transparency and openness, particularly when your teams consist of people from different company divisions. When people born and raised in different cultures work together, pay even more attention: Dutch/American-style directness suddenly feels entirely out of place in an Asian environment, for instance. Read here what you can do to stimulate transparency and openness in your team. Careful listening, as a general rule, is always a good idea:
4) Leading Cross-Cultural Teams: How to Create Openness?
Make your team embrace accountability
Is it possible to build teams where people do not hide behind one another? Where people feel ownership for the team’s objectives, and feel personally responsible for their contribution to the team’s success, and to reaching the desired results? Is it possible to make your team embrace accountability? I know it is, and you can maybe take away some interesting insights from what I have seen working well:
5) Four Tips to Make Your Team Embrace Accountability
Let me know:
What do you do to improve the quality of collaboration between people and teams, and generate results? Share your own experiences and tips below!
Co-written by Hanneke Siebelink
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Photo: Eron Sandler/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Aad is a global business advisor, change leader, executive team facilitator, leadership coach, and frequently asked keynote speaker. He is founder and managing partner at HRS Business Transformation Services where he works with senior executives and leadership teams globally in three key domains: ‘leading complex change’, ‘cross-cultural leadership’, and ‘post-merger integration’. Find out more about Aad and our services. If you would like to invite Aad to your organization contact us.
Leading Indian-Dutch Business Teams: 3 Insights that Help Create Results
A couple of weeks ago, I advised and facilitated newly formed Indian-Dutch business teams – this in the context of a recent acquisition of a Dutch and very innovative SME by an Indian multinational in the pharmaceutical sector. I (myself born and raised in the Netherlands) coached the Indian-Dutch teams in tandem with a partner born and raised in India – an approach that I would recommend to anyone.
In this article I like to share 3 key insights that came out of the team sessions. 3 insights that helped the teams to tackle the challenges they faced, and helped them to collaborate more effectively, despite the cultural differences.
I was struck by what the Indians themselves refer to as ‘the new India’: the young and tech-savvy generation, often educated in the West, who look at India with different eyes than their parents and grandparents do. A clear sign that the cross-cultural differences we all love to box and map are evolving, an are growing towards one another as the world we live and work in turns more global.
People change and therefore cultures change. Knowing and recognizing key differences between cultures certainly helps (books that do a particularly good job here are Riding the Waves of Culture and The Culture Map).
But in the end the key to working effectively across cultures is not learning about cultural differences. It is being able to adjust your behavior to take those differences into account.
Back to our Indian-Dutch business teams. Working with the teams, what were the main cross-cultural differences at play, differences that – if not addressed effectively – were sure to create friction and would slow down or even derail strategy execution? What proved to be the best tips to overcome existing differences and create concrete results?
Here we go: 3 insights and tips that will help any of you working with Indian-Dutch business teams to create results.
1. Time and planning
What clearly proved to be an issue between Indian and Dutch team members was their different approach to time and planning. The Dutch, similar to Americans and Northern Europeans, have the tendency to see time rather as something linear, and spend much time drawing up sequential (first A than B) plans, plans that people need to follow. In their view, this structured way of working is highly efficient. It also guarantees that all stakeholders are involved.
Indians, on the other hand, have a more synchronic time orientation. In their view, time is not something that can or should be controlled. Time is something that allows you to explore how to increase effectiveness, reach deadlines, and build closer relationships. The relationship is always more important than the plan (find here useful details about how different cultures value time). Imagine the frustration when the Indians and Dutch started to collaborate.
The Dutch viewed the Indians as ‘inefficient’ and ‘chaotic’ because they continuously overruled the agreed planning. The Indians, on the other hand, thought their Dutch colleagues were ‘rigid’, ‘inflexible’ and ‘afraid of change’. In the words of one Indian team member: ‘Sometimes new information comes in quick succession and things change. In India people are more used to multi tasking and adapting. Sticking to your plan can be very inefficient.’ In the words of one Dutch team member: ‘If you keep on changing the agreed plan you create chaos and rework, all very inefficient.’
Tip: Tackle the time and planning issue head-on, and have a thorough joint discussion about your team’s expected results. Clarify which results you exactly want to achieve. Maybe your Indian colleagues have a more holistic view? Maybe your Dutch colleagues see it more focused in smaller steps? You may just find that both approaches have their merits, and find a way to combine Indian-style effectiveness with Dutch-style efficiency. That’s what our Indian-Dutch business teams did.
2. Who’s the boss?
In Dutch companies, every person from the secretary to the managing director is a member of the team, and Dutch bosses generally know better than to issue anything that might be taken to resemble an order. In Indian companies, well, the boss is still the boss (find more on how hierarchy is perceived across cultures). More than once I observed some friction related to this different take on hierarchy. Indian team members, in particular, could not understand why the Dutch kept volunteering their opinions, without showing respect for existing hierarchy (you insult me because you did not take account of my function). Leaving the Dutch person puzzled, because she/he thought that speaking up showed true commitment to the team!
Tip for the Dutch (and other people from egalitarian cultures): Show you are aware that hierarchy is treated differently in Indian/Asian cultures. Instead of volunteering what you think, start by asking the right questions. By asking questions that encourage openness you can show respect for hierarchy, without losing your own preference for open and participative discussions. You can find examples of good questions in this article on how to create openness in cross-cultural teams.
Tip for Indians (and other people from hierarchical cultures): In flat, egalitarian cultures like the Dutch the risk of offending somebody is minimal. There is no need to worry about saying the wrong things! Dutch people are also open to feedback. ‘Very refreshing’, one Indian team member thought, and ‘something India could really learn from.’
3. How far to get involved?
Last but not least. In some cultures, like the Dutch culture, there is a clear dividing line between work and private time. Work is work, weekend is weekend, and colleagues who work well together are not automatically close friends outside the office. In India there is no such dividing line. Indian people (just like the Chinese and the Japanese for instance) are also very relationship-oriented. Getting to know the person is crucial if you want to build the one thing no successful business team can do without: mutual trust.
As a Dutch team member shared with me: ‘Two weeks ago I received an invitation from an Indian colleague for his wedding party in India. I don’t know what I now do best. Is he expecting me to fly over for his wedding? Quite a cost, and I do not know him that well… Can I decline? Will he be offended?’ In the Dutch culture you send an invitation like this to those who are close to you. And the invitation is not something you easily decline. But as the Indian colleague explained later: ‘Of course I send an invitation to all my colleagues in Holland. Not inviting them would show disrespect to our relationship. I understand they will probably not be able to come, that is ok. But in this way I include them into my life’.
Probably the most important tip for people from cultures that are more task than relationship oriented: Invest time and energy into getting to know your Indian colleagues outside of the office. Visit your colleague at home when you are in India, meet the family, and certainly go to the wedding if you are around. It may turn out the best ‘business’ decision you have ever made.
Co-writer: Hanneke Siebelink
Like this post? Share it with others! Join us and register at the top of this page to stay up to date with LeadershipWatch articles and news. Your personal information will be kept strictly confidential.Photo: Yogesh Mharte/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Aad is a global business advisor, change leader, executive team facilitator, leadership coach, and frequently asked keynote speaker. He is founder and managing partner at HRS Business Transformation Services where he works with senior executives and leadership teams globally in three key domains: ‘leading complex change’, ‘cross-cultural leadership’, and ‘post-merger integration’. Find out more about Aad and our services. If you would like to invite Aad to your organization contact us.
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