The inherent wrongness of your mental screwdrivers
A few years ago, while still living in the UK, I bought an apartment in Vancouver and was told it needed some new shelves. I was going over anyway, so I decided to fit them myself. Because I come from a moderately universalist society, I took my screwdrivers. A screwdriver is a screwdriver, right?
Wrong. In Europe, the heads of screws and bolts either have horizontal grooves, a cross-shaped slot, or occasionally a hexagonal hole. Readers on the Western side of the Atlantic will know where this is going - when I arrived in Vancouver, I could not find a single screw with ‘normal’ heads and I had to buy a new set of screwdrivers to fit their weird square-holed screw heads.
Just as screwdrivers are culturally specific, so are management styles and theories about management. It will become painfully clear that if you manage a team overseas, you must use management mechanisms that will be recognised and respected by the team, rather than the ones that you feel are inherently “right”.
Matrix management works in Milwaukee but not in Monaco. Sempai-Kohei relationships work in Tokyo but not in Trondheim. Nepotism is frowned on in Indiana but works reasonably well in India.
And people from universalist societies who work abroad are in for a nasty shock when they run multinational teams, because they will find their mental screwdrivers are the wrong shape.
>>more to come