Total Lubricants China Essay - After New Md’s Landing

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Bai Jiu is considered as precious stuff traditionally in China, because large volume of broomcorn can only brew a limited volume of Bai Jiu. So, for Chinese, Roger and his team, toasting with Bai Jiu is important to show the respect and welcome to guests, and it is also important to maintain the hot atmosphere during the dinner party. It would not be polite to the guest if no one talking or no toasting activities during the dinner. When Roger and his team saw the Alcohol Prohibition notice, their interpretation was that Roger made a mistake in organizing such a dinner party and Pascal didn’t like Bai Jiu or Roger. No one even thought about the same reason as Pascal had, the safety of staffs.

If further dig into the deep reasons, there can be 2 culture dimensions with big deviation between Pascal and Roger.

- Control Systems: Pascal prefers to tight control and limit staffs’ activity to minimize the safety risk to staffs and company. Roger uses to loss control and believe each staff is able to be responsible for himself.

- Vertical Relationships: Pascal follows typical hierarchy relationship and issues rule when he wants to implement some activities. Roger is much less hierarchy, instead he prefers to build up family like environment within his team and enjoy drinking with team members.

The result can be much better if Roger can pre-alert Pascal about the possible situation of the welcome dinner party and explain the tradition behind, and if Pascal can try other ways to limit the Bai Jiu drinking in company events, instead of just issuing an internal rule right after the dinner party.

Organization Change

Connections among collectivisms

Chinese usually prefer to have network collectivism in the organization, and different collectivisms may not have too much connection with each other. Supply Chain of TLC is a typical established collectivism. Because of many years’ cooperation, Roger has formed a family-like environment successfully within Supply Chain Team. The entire team, including Purchasing, works harmonically and smoothly.

Because the organization was changed suddenly, Purchasing Team was isolated out from Supply Chain. As a newly set up independent collectivism, Purchasing can hardly maintain the previous connection with Supply Chain and its sub-teams. In the meantime, it also took time for Purchasing to build up connections with other collectivism, such as Finance, Sales, Marketing and so on. This breakup on the connections between Purchasing and other collectivisms in TLC made the daily job of Purchasing extremely tough, and the real function of Purchasing to look over all the purchasing activities was finally achieved almost 3 years’ later.

Different Interpretations

Although Pascal emphasized that this organization change has nothing to do with Roger’s performance, people had different interpretations on this sudden organization change. Following by the previous interpretation of Alcohol Prohibition, people easily enhanced the feeling that Roger faced big trouble with this new MD. This interpretation made Roger much more difficult to manage his Supply Chain team as before, as people felt less security. Although Roger still got the support from his team, but the previous “Family-like” environment was being changed. And the interpretation also made Supply Chain more difficult to interact with other departments due to less influence.

In the meantime, because Roger had similar negative interpretation on this change, it created air of tense between him and Pascal, and further caused difficulties in their following cooperation.

Better alternative way to change organization

The building up connection among collectivisms takes time. It will be easier to isolate Purchasing out, when Purchasing has enough time to well build up connections with other collectivisms, and it will also shorten the time needed for Purchasing to achieve the actual function after isolation. In the meantime, to prolong the time between two “shocks” to the team can well reduce the chance of wrong interpretation, and can ensure smooth running of organization without big interruption.

Fairness Lens

Both Alcohol Prohibition and Organization Change happened during the first few months after new MD’s landing in TLC. Besides the culture differences mentioned above, lacking of fair process for these decisions made by new MD is also part of reasons that the decisions didn’t deliver the right interpretations among staffs and didn’t achieve the expected results.

Although the original purpose to issue the Alcohol Prohibition is to look after the health and safety of staffs, it was issued by Pascal right after the HOT dinner party and without any discussion with Roger or any staff involved to understand their thoughts on this issue. People were shocked and this rule with good-will was not appraised. Even worse, due to missing proper interpretation, the implementation of this rule actually blocked an important way for staffs to bond each other and impacted the organization efficiency. Instead, the result can be different, if Pascal had involved Roger and staffs in creating this new rule and secured their support on implementing this rule after well communication.

Because of his experience working in HQ and good knowledge on group organization structure principle, Pascal knew Purchasing had to be isolated out. It would be the only way to align with group principle and minimize the organizational risk on Code of Conduct. So, Pascal made decision and informed Roger, me and the teams. While, although the decision was obviously rational and necessary for Pascal, Roger and myself were shocked. The original Organization had been existed for almost 10 years in TLC, and company developed well without any issue. So, even for me, the biggest beneficiary, it was so hard to accept.

Since Organization Change is a big event for company, Pascal shouldn’t take the decision as granted. If he could take some time first to build up trust with the teams, share his experience with us and help us to understand the constraints and potential risks of original organization setting, this decision on organization change could also be rational for us and for the teams. Then, the execution could be much smoother, the new Purchasing team would have more support from Supply Chain and other teams, and it would be much easier for Purchasing to achieve the targeted function and minimize the attrition among collectivisms.

Institution