Being The Boss In Brussels, Boston And Bejing By Erin Meyer Cultural Differences In Leadership Styles Often Create Unexpected Misunderstandings. Americans, For Example, Are Used To Thinking Of The Japanese As Hierarchical While Considering Themselves Egalitarian (Believing In Or Based On The Principle That All People Are Equal And Deserve Equal Rights And
culture was so contradictory and puzzling.” Problems like this manager are widespread. In many years of researching, consulting, and teaching executives and managers in hundreds of global companies, I’ve found that it is common for people from different countries to grapple with mutual incomprehension Often that is because managers fail to distinguish between two important dimensions of leadership culture. The first of these is the one we’re most familiar with authority. How much attention do we pay to the rank or status of a person, and how much respect and deference do we pay to that status? On this dimension, the Japanese are more hierarchical than Americans. The positions are reversed, however, when we look at the second
dimension decision making. Who calls the shots, and how? Does the boss decide, or does the team decide collectively? On this dimension, which is often overlooked the Japanese are more consensual than Americans Attitudes toward Authority Over the past century, the biggest leadership trend in the US and parts of Western Europe has been the abandoning of hierarchical management processes for a more facilitative, egalitarian approach. Command-and-control has been replaced with empowerment Managers have been trained to stop felling their employees what to do and instead move to management by objective, “open-door policies, and 360-
was that we were perceived not just as incompetent but as arrogant because we didn’t take the time to explain to our staff carefully and in detail what we wanted them to do and how it was a valuable learning moment for this firm, which began to pull back on some of the egalitarian practices that it had so long taken for granted as the best approach Of course, those who already have some international experience might not be surprised that Chinese managers defer to their bosses and that American attitudes toward status don’t travel well. But understanding differences in attitudes toward hierarchy and status, as we’ve noted, isn’t
