Leadership

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First Assignment

After many years working with the Chinese government, our company has had a few job references. As the competition exacerbates domestically and payment term from the powerful government continuous to sore our finance situation, the company has shifted their focus to the overseas business, concentrating in the area of industrial lighting, mainly Europe. But first, we would have to make certification on our product to open up the gateway to enter the market. Without doubt, I have no experience in how to execute the task. The first thing I did was to gathering the department heads and come up with a game plan and asking questions. It did shock me that no one knew the process in obtaining a certificate. I would assume that CE(certification used in Europe) was very much similar to obtaining CCC or CQC (certification used in China). With my ability to speak in Mandarin, and my minimal knowledge in understanding the technical terms, I kindly requested a meeting minute sent to me in a template. Every meeting after that I would be using it as a guideline to follow up what needs to be done. At the same time, I would do my very best to speak in Mandarin and digest the material after work. Meetings were limited to be one hour max.

Although, there was slight improvement in the working style, progression was slow. The project was scheduled to be completed in two months, but first sample was one month delayed. I asked the team what was the problem and what was the solution. All departments were blaming each other, and again, this was their culture. In this project, the hardest part was to get all the departments to cooperate. Mainly because there were no trust, and that they have this idea rooted that money is the problem solver. They were not used to interacting with each other and reaching consensus. They were used to being told what to do and finding quick fix to a solution. What’s next? After reading the financial report, I have learnt that in the past, we were spending a portion of our revenue in building “guanxi” with the government and legal entity. To me this was more like bribery, but I was told by the CEO that building “guanxi” is needed in the China business world, which I only partly agreed, but I did not speak out my mind that I think this is bureaucratic. But I knew something needed to be changed.

Paradigm shift

The next week, I decided to do things differently. Coping into the Chinese culture, I went dinner with my team in a local restaurant. I put down my pride as a TCK, and shared my story where I grew up and how I was brought up. Interestingly, most of the members in my team were closed to my age. And that all our parents were also from the Baby Boomer Generation, who lived in the rural side of China and migrated somewhere during teenage time to seek for a better life. The only difference was that my parents were lucky and was given the opportunity to move to Hong Kong. In the 1960’s, my great great grandfather was working in Philippine. By law he was allowed to file an application to apply his son to coming to Hong Kong, but my great grandfather was already married that time with family and uneducated. Through bribery, they had changed the status of my father as the son of my great great grandfather and got him to come to Hong Kong. Shortly after, I was born. The moment I realized, the fallacy of being better than the local because I have studied abroad was deceptive. In China, regional disparity is serious and still persists. I had a better life chance, which made me different but no difference. That night, we connected drinking “baijiu,” much like vodka. I was glad to accept and being accepted by them.

Participant Observation

To not taking anything for granted, I become even more curious. Rather than stepping in intrusively and telling them how things should been done, I have decided to step down to become the “player” in action and working in each individual department to get an insider viewpoint rather than asking questions. I was learning through active collaboration. The difficulties were magnified and it was so much easier for me to influence their behavior while I worked more closely to them. From time to time, conflicts still arise, but the attitude coming out was rather mature. It has become the tradition that we would do weekly casual meeting to eat, drink and bond. Even though, in our first assignment, the CE certificate was two months delayed, the CEO was impressed the improvement in the overall working culture and style. The second year, I was sent back to Hong Kong to complete my Master in Business Administration, to help me further develop. My experience in China has changed me, and made me understand that hard work and talent do not guarantee success. Granting that there is a lot of cultural diversity within the East and West, solely having a Western mindset is merely a manifestation of cultural segregation. I still have not installed QQ, but I have started to use wechat to stay in touch with them. In fact, most of my customers now from Europe are using wechat from communication with me.

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