Manager à la chinoise, un point de vue chinois

Why Chinese Make Bad Managers

By  Jiang Xueqin

http://thediplomat.com/china-power/why-chinese-are-bad-managers/      

  Cet article de mai 2011 m'avait échappé. Ecrit par un Chinois il dresse un portrait sévère des managers chinois, d'autant plus crédible que l'auteur est chinois ET manager également!     

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In his New York magazine article ‘Paper Tigers,’ the Korean-American writer Wesley Yang argues that the Asian parenting model and cultural values mean that Asians will excel in schools, and only in schools: ‘According to a recent study, Asian-­Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents.’

While many Asian-Americans attribute this ‘bamboo ceiling’ to racism, Yang argues that the same cultural attitudes and values (the unquestioning work ethic, the narrow-minded focus, and the overwhelming conservatism) that permit Asian-Americans to excel in tests also trap them into ‘middle class servility.’ 

Yang’s article is a battle hymn for young Asian males to smash out of the bamboo ceiling by ‘(putting) themselves into the spotlight and (making) some noise.’

But is more Asian alpha males really the answer?

In China, everyone agrees there’s a bamboo ceiling in place in multinationals, and no one’s happy about it. Importing an expatriate management staff to China increases overheads for multinationals while constraining their in-country growth. A bi-cultural work environment where expatriates are at the top also creates internal discord, language problems, and cultural misunderstanding. But despite costly and patient attempts to train and develop local management, multinationals still import expatriate managers. So why do Chinese apparently make such terrible managers?

In the land that invented the bureaucracy, management theory and practices have existed for millennia, codified in classic texts such as The Art of War and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That Chinese would equate management with warfare helps explain why they’re so singularly bad at it. Mao Zedong’s idealism may be long dead and buried, but his politics is alive and flourishing in Chinese offices. 

To ease their own violent paranoia, Chinese managers instil and augment violent paranoia in their staff. To maintain absolute control, they will practice divide-and-conquer by constantly changing favourites, spreading innuendoes and rumours and lies, and acting arbitrarily and violently to induce terror. They won’t compose memos or read financial statements, but they’ll probably have watched ‘The Godfather’ dozens of times, and have memorized The Art of War. China’s management problem isn’t that there aren’t enough alpha males—it’s that there are too many.   

As a Chinese manager of a bilingual and bicultural work environment, my priority is to maintain a cohesive community, and to accomplish this I’ve learned that the two most important skills needed are empathy and self-understanding. 

Being a good manager means ensuring that everyone works towards the same goals. Being a good communicator (articulating values and goals in a concise and clear manner) is important, but being a good listener (taking a personal interest in each employee’s emotional well-being) is even more so.

Just sitting there, and nodding your head as the teacher, the student, or the parent rants and raves isn’t enough—it’s necessary to get inside his head, locate the source of his concerns and discontents, and articulate back to him the logic of his grievances. In other words, to be effective, managers need empathy, something that is refined through a lifetime of interacting with different people in challenging situations, and something that’s lost after a few years of cramming for tests.

Much more difficult than empathy is self-understanding. I’ve discovered that to manage others I need to manage myself, to restrain my ego and emotions, to understand my limitations and control my expectations, and to defer to process and committee: Narcissism, megalomania, and distrust are internal rumblings that can violently shake a workplace, if they’re not tamed by self-control. And self-control is a by-product of self-understanding, which itself is a result of a lifetime of making mistakes, coming to terms with failure, and starting over—practices that are neither valued nor encouraged in the test-taking, risk-averse, and face-obsessed culture that is China.

Jiang Xueqin is a deputy principal at Peking University High School and the director of its International Division. From 2008 to 2010, Mr. Jiang created and managed the Shenzhen Middle School study abroad program. He has previously worked as a journalist, a documentary film-maker, and a United Nations press officer.

Managing the Chinese way

An executive with 20 years of experience in China says that to succeed there, leaders must learn to think differently and devote particular attention to people.

Mc Kinsey Review, July 2013                

Despite decades of experience in China, many organizations still struggle to identify and select executives who will make a tangible impact there. My research and experience suggest that companies can do better by focusing on two crucial skills—an ability to read the external environment and an understanding of what makes employees tick—and on a tough truth: a generational challenge is making the talent equation more complex.

Everything is political. Being effective in China means realizing that everything is political. Executives must have a keen grasp of political and social trends so they can position their business strategies and communications within that landscape. One example is the reframing of proposals for corporate-social-responsibility initiatives, to promote the “harmonious society” when that was proclaimed as a government priority.

Executives must develop a nonmarket business strategy, as well as the usual market strategy, for China. The nonmarket strategy includes plans for building a network that intersects with the government, business partners, suppliers, customers, and other industry and public stakeholders.

Successful executives develop their intuition, are receptive to learning from Chinese patterns, and thus begin to think and behave differently. The sort of linear analysis generally favored in the West divides a problem into its component parts and seeks rational solutions. Intuitive thinkers seek patterns and relationships between a problem and its context, including contradictions. “The Chinese don’t polarize—it’s the last thing a Chinese would do; we get moving instead,” says the Chinese head of a global life-sciences company.

 

Everything is personal. Managers in China need to pay more personal attention to staff and colleagues than managers in many other cultures do. The head of China operations for a major global manufacturing concern says he does his e-mails and reports during the evening because during the day he needs to talk with employees or meet external stakeholders. In China, leadership is a contact sport.
Senior leaders too often succumb to time pressures and put the wrong candidate in charge. One European retailer, for example, chose a manager to head up its China operations who had an excellent track record in his home market but lacked any experience outside Europe and was a poor listener. Within months, relationships with the retailer’s Chinese joint-venture partner were shaky, several well-qualified Europeans had resigned, and staffing was behind schedule. Employees said the executive did not care about their observations and ideas, expected the staff only to follow his instructions, and did not listen to customer feedback. After two years, the executive was replaced, but the damage was done and the operations closed 18 months later.
To keep capable staff from becoming disengaged, demotivated, and disinclined to share important information gleaned from interactions with customers and suppliers, the best companies have a culture, set from the top, of working toward common goals in a spirit of mutual respect.
It’s getting harder. The talent challenge for multinational companies in China has intensified since the generation born in the 1980s began to take on managerial responsibility. As a result of the government’s one-child policy and the uneven pattern of higher education, many businesses are facing a shortage of capable young executives. Moreover, the new generation of leaders demands both purpose and work–life balance, and no longer automatically accepts hierarchy in the workplace. The best way to retain these leaders is to have role models who inspire commitment—which makes it even more important to select leaders who can read and respond sincerely to their stakeholders.

the author Nandani Lynton is director of leadership development at Maersk Group, in Copenhagen, and visiting professor of management at China Europe International Business School, in Shanghai. Based in China for 20 years, she is the author of the report Ain’t Misbehaving: Labours and Loves of China’s Gen Y (CLSA University Blue Books, May 2011).