Useful Links
Best Practices
China
DiligenceChina
ChinaIR.cn
We Want You!
Are you Profile-worthy? Know someone who
is? Let us know. ChinaSolved
is always
looking for new views on successful manage-
ment idesa in China.
title_flash
 |
Personal Data Name: Eric Houser |
You have to invest in a regular, intensive team-building effort that includes your senior overseas people. That is the subtle but powerful message that really resonates with Chinese managers and builds true loyalty. They will turn down other job offers to stay with you for years and years. | ||
| |
||||
|
||||
| The Executive Centre is the most cost effective way to test the China market, enter the China market, and develop YOUR market in China. | ||||
There’s a huge challenge finding anyone in China with a liberal arts education. 95% of the candidates coming to you for a job have one of three majors – Business, English or Engineering.
Older Chinese and peer pressure will tell students that the liberal arts
have no practical relation to business and will do little for finding
employment. But those majors are the first on my list of people to bring
on board. They can think on a deeper level. My first boss in China hired
a local candidate whose major was Spanish Literature. I was new to China,
and didn’t follow why my boss felt so strongly that this guy would fit
our company or industry profile. My boss told me, “You find anyone with
a liberal arts background in China – grab them.”
A liberal arts major is more ‘big picture’ oriented, is more inclined
to think creatively, less imbued with the typical Chinese box mentality
that most college students get put into – and might be just a bit rebellious
– which means that they are keen to prove themselves.
Another challenge is to form deep, friendly relations with Chinese people. It’s not that they’re not friendly people or don’t want to have strong relationships – and it’s not that you don’t want to, either. But unless you’ve been here for more than 4 or 5 years and have an understanding of what the Chinese person’s insecurities are and what makes him uncomfortable, you’re just running into a brick wall. Westerners always think that they’re being friendly by inviting Chinese people out to happy hours – but that’s not what a lot of Chinese enjoy or are comfortable doing. After the Chinese person turns the westerner down a few times, the westerner may give up on him and not invest any more effort into developing the friendship.
It’s hard to build more than a superficial friendship across cultural
boundaries.
Westerners tend to come in with the notion that Shanghai is just
as modern as any big western city. They have unreasonable expectations
due to the western media reports about how developed Shanghai is. The
average salesman or property agent here isn’t nearly as sophisticated
as their counterparts back home. They don’t have the experience or perspective
to give consultative advice to business entry clients. Western clients
have to be careful not to expect the give-and-take discussions and value-adding
advice of US property consultants. They won’t say, “you should start with
something more modest, and take smaller steps to enter the market”.
They don’t tend to start off a business relationship with the client’s long term goals in mind, especially if that would entail the client entering China in a somewhat conservative manner. Instead their main focus is usually to drive clients towards solutions that will equal the largest possible immediate commission for them and their firm. Unless the client already knows about virtual or serviced office options and has done their homework about how to take incremental steps into China they will soon find themselves staring at massive upfront investment costs for space that in all reality is simply unnecessary.
I’ve assisted many clients in building strong team relationships that
have enabled them to retain key personnel for many years. Money alone
won’t hold a team together. Any foreign company can pay good salaries,
but another company can and will come along within two years and poach
away local managers with a slightly better offer. It’s a never ending
cycle here for most. What I’ve done is show senior management how to invest
the time and money to create an emotional bond among their team. I get
the team out of the office and run intensive and FUN programs that built
a real sense of family, some for as long as four or five days. And in
one of my most successful example companies who’ve committed to this approach
for three consecutive years they have had a 100% retention rate of 25
key managers in an already tight industry. That is nearly unheard of in
Shanghai.
The hard-headed business guys will laugh off this approach, but a year
or two later their key people WILL get poached (inevitably by other like-minded
employers). Then you have to start from scratch again and very quickly
you’ll find the frustrations of China spiraling out of control. You have
to invest in a regular, intensive team-building effort that includes your
senior overseas people. That is the subtle but genuinely powerful message
that resonates with Chinese managers and builds meaningful loyalty. They
will turn down other job offers to stay with you for years and years.
And it’s when your top lieutenants are voluntarily rejecting the recruiting
efforts of other companies to stay with your organization that you know
you’ve got a truly unbeatable and unstoppable force in the making.
I had the patience to build and maintain long-term friendships with local Chinese. Plenty of regular Chinese aren’t waiting around hoping to spend time with a foreigner. They don’t show up at the sports bars and come looking for you. Many westerners think they’re being really cute by learning one Chinese song that they can sing at the KTV, but it doesn’t really mean anything. It may take a very long time – years – to build a real relationship. You need to take serious steps towards them. Your idea of compromise and cultural give-and-take doesn’t always mean anything. The cultures are so far apart that it can require serious effort to bridge the gap.
