Written by Say, you’re a store manager at a retail company, and you’ve been sent abroad to work out the kinks at your sister store in Tokyo. You’re a fish out of water, a monkey out of his home tree, and your managerial style isn’t gelling too well with that of Japanese culture.
The big question: Do you expect your employees to adapt to you and your culture? Or do you expect to adapt to them?
The Cultural Baobab
If you work at an international company, the company culture is usually fairly uniform the world over…but not entirely.
When you’re sent to manage abroad, you’re still working and living in a foreign culture. Just because these employees work for your company doesn’t mean they’ve fully accepted, adapted, and adopted your culture’s practices or behaviors.
We’ve talked a lot about the cultural baobab and how, by identifying and understand its roots (values) and limbs (social norms), you’ll better understand the culture, as a whole.
The point is that living and working successfully in a foreign culture always starts with one thing:
Accept
Accept your host culture as it is.
Don’t fight it.
Don’t condemn it.
Don’t judge it.
This will make managing in the culture a whole lot easier.
Think about it: as the monkey in their baobab, instead of complaining about the branches as you swing from limb to limb, instead of criticizing the roots that grew this tree and spitting out the seeds from its fruits, you should be curious about it, you should admire it, and you should find a home in it.
Accept that your culture’s tree isn’t the only tree in the world. It’s not the superior baobab. It’s not the center of the universe. Accept that there is more than one type of beauty.
There’s a myriad of ways to live life, to organize a society, and to run a business.
Once you recognize this, you’ll see the beauty in this foreign baobab, from the roots to the canopy.
Integrate
In order to successfully manage in a foreign culture, you must integrate into that culture. If you don’t appreciate the beauty of your host nation’s baobab, your employees and colleagues will know it and integration will be null and void.
Accepting doesn’t mean you have to adapt or adopt everything in your host culture, nor must you idolize it.
Accepting does mean that you must make an effort to seek the good in everything with which you are unfamiliar, instead of immediately condemning it as “bad,” because it is foreign to your own values and way of life.
Now, that’s not to say everything about a foreign culture is easy to accept. We’ll talk about how to deal with adverse reactions to your host culture next week.
Success Across Cultures 