Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Creating trust with teams in Asia

In an earlier blog I wrote about the importance of creating trust in order for people to express their opinion on a work related subject when asked for it. But then, how do you create trust ? There are a lot of references out there about the importance of creating trust at work and how to go about it. But what is specific or different in Asia ? Two main differences stand out in my experience.

1.       The working relationship extends into the private sphere, and so does the trust

In Western countries, trust (at work) is limited to issues … at work. Honesty and transparency are critical for a trusting relationship. Straight talk when needed, and listening skills are other key ingredients. These traits need to be demonstrated by the leader at work.

In Asia, the personal and social relationships are important in addition to the work relationship. For Asians, contexts at work and outside of the workplace intermingle, and it is important to interact with your team members beyond the pure work related activities. This means participating in social events, even if they seem not really necessary or a worthy investment of your time. But also attending personal events of your closest team members, like weddings (when invited !) or unfortunately also funerals of relatives (even when not invited). Affective trust is a precondition on which trust at work can be built.
 
2.       Praise in public and correct in private

One of the key requirements listed for creating trust is the importance of telling things as they are, straight and honestly. In Asia, managers need to take into account the importance of face (or more importantly the loss of face) in a team. Try to address issues in private rather than putting someone in his place in front of the entire team. This is not the same as "hiding the issues": everybody in the organization will know when the boss has put someone in his place, even if the meeting was behind closed doors. Public loss of face equals loss of trust in the relationship.

So my advice for (in particular expat) managers is to take the time to build up a ‘social’ relationship with your team members, and to keep the tough but necessary discussions out of the public sphere. It is tempting to focus just on work because there is so much to do and the quicker things get done the better. In the long run however, a good bond with your team members will create a better working performance.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Cynefin and the floods

In my previous blog I introduced in a simple way the Cynefin framework. I discovered this last year, right in the middle of the floods that caused so much destruction in Thailand. The framework helped me at that time to do - with the teams - a reasonably good job of steering our organization through this period. Our manufacturing facilities were not impacted at the time, but our employees and our business activity was.

The flood situation, at least as far as my organization at that time was concerned, can be described as a "complex" problem. Characteristics of complex problems are that they are in flux and unpredictable. There are no right answers, and there are many differing ideas of what should be done. The situation was not simple or complicated, obviously, but also not chaotic. In fact, the events dragged out over several weeks. There was no chaos or sudden dramatic event. Day after day, we obtained (often contradicting) updates from the different news sources on the situation, tried to imagine what could happen, and get ready for those eventualities.

So how did viewing this situation as a "complex" problem help me at all ? As explained in my last blog, the Cynefin framework helps leaders to determine how to react to a problem at hand. For a complex problem, the appropriate approach is Probe - Sense - Respond. The following steps are recommended in the Harvard Business Review article of November 2007.

Open discussions and dissenting views In this kind of situation, a command-and-control approach does not work. The leader does not have the answer any more than the next person. Even the experts had differing opinions about what would happen and about what should be done. Within the organization, we created differeent groups to develop ideas of how we could get ready for all possible scenario. Extreme opinions (from "nothing will happen" to "we're all doomed !") were allowed for discussion.

Set barriers We decided not to review or react to every single piece of "news" or information out there. Internet, blogosphere or Youtube all carried hundreds of snippets of information each day. Considering or evaluating this information overload would have taken half a day. Instead, we created our own measures of the rising water level in our surroundings and objectively and frequently reported this to the people in the organization.

Monitor for emergence Many team members were given the freedom to implement their ideas, even though we did not know the appropriateness at the time. This was not a situation where one could turn to the boss for the correct answers. Allowing all ideas to rise and have people implement most of them created a dynamic and motivation that kept the team going for different weeks.

The crisis turned out OK for the organization although several employees were affected personally. As the leader of the organization, viewing the situation as a complex problem and addressing it with the appropriate approach helped me to maintain the team's motivation and commitment. Having said that, I sincerely hope that nobody needs to encounter this kind of dramatic flood, with our without the Cynefin framework !