Surviving Cultures: You're Being Transferred to China. Now What?

CIO Asia — "Are you from Texas?" I heard a familiar voice ask my youngest son. I turned to find myself face-to-face with a former client from a firm in the United States. I was with my family at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport awaiting my flight to Hong Kong and apparently so was he.

"What are you doing here, Michael?" he now asked of me.

"We are moving to Shanghai," I replied.

"Me too," he said.

I am amazed at the number of 'me toos' in China today. Anyone who has arrived China in the last 18 months will, like me, be surprised at the number of expatriates flooding into the world's most populous nation.

Having already lived abroad, I have closely observed the challenges faced by expatriates plunged into new social and corporate cultures. The transition is rarely smooth. When driving change in Asia, for example, what many new expatriate managers first perceive as consensus-driven decisions will be puzzled to find those decisions questioned by employees months later.

While the model of the autocratic foreign boss has now been trumped by the culturally sensitive manager focused on people, this empathy-based approach can often be just as fatal to success.

Empathy and Situational Awareness

But it is seldom so cut and dried. Empathy and situational awareness are still essential for success.

Patrick Litre is Chief Executive Officer of Conner Partners, a consulting firm that helps organizations with transformational change. Now based in Atlanta, Litre is a Frenchman who spent 13 years as an expatriate in six Asian countries.

"For expatriates," Litre says, "the ability to empathize and have a lot of situational awareness is critical. Some people are very good at gauging the environmen

t and adjusting in real time. "This is the skill set that helps you to be effective faster in an environment where many things are different. You have to be sensitive to the signals people are sending regardless of language: this allows you to ramp up your learning curve much faster, and anticipate likely outcomes of your decisions."

The most successful leaders abroad demonstrate this listening capacity Litre alludes to and make the best decisions possible with the information at hand.

As an expatriate leader, building a platform that consists of the right components is essential to overcoming the challenges of being an outsider. The right platform will yield the trust required to be sufficiently assertive with the team, some of whom may view the expatriate manager as an interloper who stepped into the position they coveted. Trust and confidence need a platform consisting of the right environment, processes, measurements and the right team of people.

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