Synchronous Style

By Frank Mulligan - Recruit China

One of the things about working in a culture other than your own is dealing with the different approaches to things like management, time, authority, process, and so on.

The expanding market that is China is a meeting point for many cultural fault lines and the results vary from hilarious to tragic. This is an area that I would like explore and I am choosing to start with time. It doesnít deal directly with how to hire, or how not to hire, but there are some insights here that will help us with the hiring process in China.

Individual Profiles
There are two kinds of people in the world. No, really, there are: Sequential and synchronous.

Ok, so there are as many different kinds of people are there are people, but the point is still valid. Two kinds of people, and two different approaches.

This fault line, synchronous versus sequential, is a good place to start with because the split is basically East-West. But first some definitions.

Sequential time is clock time. Time is money time. Time is in short supply time. Not surprisingly it is a favourite of the Swiss, and the Germans.

Synchronous time is cyclical time where things happen in ëgood timeí or ëin due courseí. If it doesnít happen then maybe it wasnít its time or it just wasnít ready. Again, not surprisingly this is the preferred approach in China. Or at least was.

The good news is that neither approach can be seen as right or wrong. They just are. Itís at the fault lines, where two cultures meet, that it gets interesting.

My own experience of this kind of fault line comes from watching German managers trying to move a joint venture negotiation along in a linear track with their Chinese counterparts. The German negotiators took each issue one by one and made sure to deal with it completely before moving on to the next issue.

The Chinese negotiators didnít see it this way and felt no embarassment about going back to previous issues on the basis that later decisions changed the previous issues.

You could only smile and accept the inevitable chaos. In situations where both sides had the intent to do a deal, a deal was always done. In China, there is always a way.

Addressing The Problem
However, difficulties arose in situations where one of the sides was completely unaware of the fact of their cultural differences. In these cases a war ensued as each side tried to pursue its own interests using its own approach.

At the time I did not have the language of cross cultural conflict and all I could do was to try to bridge the gap by clarifying everything, both at the negotiation table itself and privately during the breaks.

In most cases it worked, eventually, but if the team had known about sychronous and sequential behaviour back then we could have saved ourselves a lot of bother.

And signed more deals.

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog - english.talent-software.com