Many companies remain stuck in a bureaucratic mind-set. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some leaders of knowledge companies, especially those in the global arena, decided that to create collaboration, they needed to understand the diverse mix of people in their organizations. It started with executive teams, especially in global companies.
At the end of the 1980s, I was hired by Göran Lindahl, then the hardcharging head of Transmission and Distribution for ABB, the global energy giant, which had just been formed by a merger between Asea, a Swedish company, and Brown Boveri, a Swiss company. There were also large departments in Germany and the United States. Lindahl was concerned because managers from these four countries were complaining about each other, and collaboration was breaking down. What was causing the anger and distrust? Lindahl asked me to find out; as I’ll describe later in this chapter, it was due to national variations in the social character, which when understood and discussed by the top managers from these countries, improved trust and collaboration.
In the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the corporate leaders who hired me wanted help in understanding themselves, team members, and candidates for top jobs. At first, I used the Myers-Briggs test, an easy nonthreatening way to show differences in the way people think (extrovert versus introvert, sensing versus intuitive, feeling versus thinking, perceiving versus judging).1 When members of executive teams wanted to understand each other even more, I developed a questionnaire that shows the different personality types based on psychoanalytic theory discussed later in this chapter. Team members shared their profiles and discussed how understanding each other could improve communication and collaboration.2
What had changed to increase interest in understanding people? Why did emotional intelligence suddenly become so popular? The answer, I believe, is that in the advanced knowledge workplace, knowledge workers are being forced to collaborate, and it goes a lot better if they understand each other.
The term collaboration has a shady past. In World War II, it meant helping the enemy; a collaborator was a traitor. But now the term has reverted to its Latin root co-labore, working together, and, according to a recent IBM global survey of five hundred CEOs collaboration has become the major challenge of the knowledge workplace.3 Consider the different kinds of collaboration that knowledge leaders need to create: across departments for concurrent engineering and to produce technical solutions for business customers; projects within departments where designers have to interact to develop complex software; partnering between and among companies and governments; and all kinds of collaboration across cultures.4
To facilitate collaboration, some companies are trying to shake up bureaucracies with a strong dose of interactive medicine. To move the IBM culture, which was so rooted in clear lines of command and individualism, CEO Sam Palmisano has organized “jams,” online town meetings to get IBMers interacting. The jam on values in 2003 triggered so much criticism of management that some feared a corporate revolution. But by staying the course, Palmisano gained trust that, at least, IBMers wouldn’t be punished for candor. 5 In the 2006 jam on innovation, seventy thousand employees of IBM and seventy invited partners offered ideas on four topics: transportation, health, the environment, and finance. These ideas will be organized into projects. IBMers tell me the culture is changing. When they need help, they can call on experts in other areas who respond. Collaboration is reinforced with “thanks awards,” symbolic recognition with shirts, umbrellas, backpacks, and the like embossed with the company logo. Any employee can give six of these “thanks” a year.
Interactive jams, even global virtual teams, don’t require that people know each other. In fact, there’s some evidence that people in virtual global product development teams brainstorm better when they don’t see or know each other.6 The reason may be that when participants are unseen and anonymous, the flow of ideas isn’t blocked by quizzical or disapproving looks from the boss. But you can’t escape into anonymity or an assumed identity when you’re working closely with others face-to-face, especially in a leadership team.
No amount of jam or any other online interactive activity teaches you to understand the people you need to work with. That requires a different kind of learning. Emotional intelligence is part of it, but not enough to understand and predict how others will behave in key roles.
What does it mean to know another person? Ideally, it means describing the person behind the persona, the mask of self-presentation, much in the way a good novelist or playwright does. Few people have that valuable skill. For most of us, even recognizing the persona is a step ahead of assuming others are just like us.
You will better understand people in the knowledge workplace if you learn to focus on four conceptual variables that will strengthen your Personality Intelligence. They are:
Identities
Social character and its cultural variations
Personality types
Intellectual skills
These different concepts are windows on the self—the person—including values, emotional attitudes, characteristic ways of working and relating to others, the identities we give to ourselves, and our ways of acquiring, retaining, and transforming information. Of course, we can’t see these aspects of our brains and personality directly, but we can observe patterns of behavior and interpret them in terms of personality type and social character. These concepts are useful only when they equip us to predict and understand attitudes and behavior. We may talk about our sense of identity and, to some extent, our values. But like transferential attitudes, part of personality may not be conscious to us, even though a trained observer can see it in action. Yet we can develop our Personality Intelligence to become more alert to patterns of behavior, and that starts with making use of these concepts.
IDENTITIES—HOW WE ARE DEFINED AND DEFINE OURSELVES
We’d like to be able to define ourselves, to decide how we’ll be seen. But from an early age, others define us by how we look and where we’re from. For example, despite growing up with a white mother and grandparents, Barack Obama learned that the world defined him as black. Our identity starts at an early age with our physical characteristics: sex, age, size. Later, talents and achievements are added. As we grow older, we internalize the identity given us and start to define ourselves. Our cultures influence how we shape our identity. In the preindustrial era, people identified with family above all, then with place and religion. We’ve seen that in Iraq, with the breakdown of the state, people have reverted to family and religious identities as their only refuge in the midst of civil war.
In the United States today, we take our national identity as a given. We’re Americans, and we feel a sense of identity with other Americans when we meet them abroad. This feeling can get even stronger if they are from the same area or went to the same schools. But historically, our national identity is not so old. After the revolutionary war, many in the former colonies only reluctantly accepted the new American identity, and the Civil War of 1860 showed that Southerners were ready to discard it. But just as national identity was threatened by Civil War, so was it strengthened by World Wars I and II, when all Americans shared a powerful purpose.
Despite creating the EU, people in those European nations resist a common identity. In some European countries—for example, Italy with its North-South differences and Spain with its Basques and Catalans—regional identities still compete strongly with national identity.
It was in the bureaucratic-industrial age that people started to identify with organizations, especially the companies, unions, and professional associations that gave them a sense of security and status. Asked to describe themselves, managers of major companies would invariably mention the company (e.g., “I’m an IBMer”). Of course, family, place, and religion remained part of their identities, and identifications were sometimes expanded further to memberships in fraternities, service organizations, schools, and colleges, especially those that added to the person’s sense of impor
tance.
Compared with the interactive social character whose sense of identity can be protean, the bureaucratic social character is strongly attached to its identities. It doesn’t bother Interactives to shift identities like roles in video games. Rather than identifying with a company, they identify with a project or mission, a sport, or consumer group. They practice shaping identities that will get them a job or a date on the Internet.
The identities of the bureaucratic social character are essentially individualistic and vertical, like military ranks, buttressed by identifications with parents and authorities. Interactive identities are more fluid and horizontal, moving among and between identifications with siblings and peers, often combining meaning with self-interest, cultural identification with political agenda.
However, in this new age of diverse identities at work, we risk confusing cultural-social character differences with identity interest groups. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, points out that identity groups can include people from very different cultures and a variety of individual values. He argues “that the diversity that preoccupies us is really a matter not so much of cultures as of identities.”7 But identities differ according to how deeply they are rooted in our personalities, and a characteristic of Interactives is their ability to shift identities in different settings. Sometimes, people choose to belong to an identity group at work, mainly because the group promises to gain privileges for them. Unions are prime examples of identity groups that members choose to join, as are professional societies. People may choose to identify themselves with ethnic groups like Hispanics, a name that corresponds to no particular country and that covers people who don’t even come from the same culture or even necessarily speak Spanish. In terms of social character, a Mexican villager may be more like a Serbian or Indian villager than like a professional from Mexico City or Havana. But people with a family background from a Latin American country can choose whether or not to take on an Hispanic identity, especially if that gives them some advantage at work.
By satisfying the demands of identity groups, leaders don’t necessarily gain willing followers. But if these identities are not respected, leaders will be less willingly followed, possibly resisted. In a democratic society, we enjoy the right to have multiple loyalties, based on multiple identifications, while in an autocratic society, and in some companies that are autocratically led, those in power are threatened by loyalties to any group other than the regime.
Keep in mind that identities can be extremely powerful when attached to deep human needs for respect and support from people we can trust to care about us. Identities can be powerful motivators because they provide meaning for our lives. This is especially true when we feel that an identity determines our friends and enemies. When an identity gives us a feeling of security and pride, any attack on identity is a blow to self-esteem, even a threat to survival. Clearly, clashes between religious, racial, and clan identities continue to ignite bloody conflicts, especially in those societies that have not developed institutions that provide security and strengthen trust. Understanding people must include their identities. Otherwise, as in Iraq, we can blunder into identity wars.
SOCIAL CHARACTER DIFFERENCES—HOW THOSE OF USE FROM THE SAME CULTURE ARE ALIKE
Once you are aware of the descriptions, it’s relatively easy to tell the difference between peasant, bureaucratic, and interactive social characters. However, as in the case of ABB, cultural variations of social character are not so obvious, and they can cause misunderstandings in a global company.
To understand these differences and the reasons why they caused conflict, I asked managers from Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States to tell me about how they worked together, their relationships with customers, how they made decisions, and how they compared themselves to managers in the other countries. It turned out that while they all had the same formal organizations, each national company had different informal organizations and decision-making practices reflecting cultural variations of the bureaucratic social character. These differences caused misunderstandings and also negative stereotyping. For example, the Germans saw the Swedes as lacking integrity and concern for quality, and the Swedes viewed the Germans as contentious and autocratic.
In fact, the Swedes believed in consensus, and to make sure everyone was singing from the same hymn book, they held frequent off-site meetings. Managers got to know each other well, even called each other “brother,” so they were less likely to disagree with each other. Sometimes spouses and children joined these gatherings, tightening the bonds. But the Germans saw all this sociability as a dangerous form of seduction that undermined objectivity and integrity. If you socialized outside of work, you’d be less likely to shoot down faulty arguments; you’d want to please each other. German managers valued objectivity above sociability, and they maintained very formal relations, using the formal sie form of address with each other after years of working together; the Swedes, of course, used the intimate du as soon as they met. While the Swedes avoided conflict and kept quiet even if not fully convinced the boss was right, the Germans valued tough, sometimes contentious debate, as long as it was based on facts, not position in the hierarchy. However, once the German meister—always a respected technical expert—made a decision, everyone marched in step. For them, this was not autocratic, but both reasonable and effective.
Swedish avoidance of conflict sometimes led to decisions made bureaucratically, based on hierarchical position rather than an open clash of factbased views. Although they appeared more autocratic, the Germans were arguably the more democratic decision makers, since the meister’s decision was transparent, based on a clear business logic and all available information.
Swedish and German approaches to product development were also different, owing to their economic histories. Since much of their business went to Middle Eastern, Latin American, and Southeast Asian countries, where the products had to withstand the heat and be easy to repair by local people, the Swedes were used to producing robust, easy-to-service electricalenergy products that could withstand rough climates. Furthermore, since the Swedish engineers knew a lot more about the products than did their customers, they decided what the customer needed. They joked that if the customer is king in the industrialized world, the king is the customer in some of the Middle Eastern countries they served.
The Germans produced more complex products for domestic use, and their customers were typically electrical engineers with advanced degrees who knew as much as they did about the products. They were producing for a highly developed industrial infrastructure rather than a developing country, and the keys to success were zero outages and continual quality improvement, which is a strong German value.
No wonder Swedes and Germans misunderstood each other. And both distrusted the Swiss, complaining that the Swiss would make agreements and then renege on them. Furthermore, Swiss costs were out of control. It turned out that the reason Swiss managers sometimes asked to change an agreement stemmed from the fact that they were all in the army reserve, and a subordinate at work might be a superior at the military summer camp. It was best to get agreement from everyone to avoid making powerful enemies, and sometimes after an agreement had been made by one manager, another found out and disagreed, and they reconsidered the issue. As for costs, the Swiss were used to customizing expensive energy solutions for different cantons, and as with Swiss banks and hotels, Swiss quality is expensive.
The Americans were different from the others. They had factories that mass produced products for very competitive markets. Their margins were thin, and they focused on cost control. Organized in traditional industrial bureaucratic hierarchies with much less job security than the Europeans, the Americans were politically acute about who they needed to follow. And in this Swedish-controlled company, they did not make waves. They were nobody’s problem.
By describing and discussing these differences, ABB management cleared up a lot of distrust and miscommunicati
on. They clarified how decisions should be made, and they encouraged more of the German style of open debate, which moved them toward an interactive style of collaboration.
European managers, especially those at the top who still have the bureaucratic social character, continue to struggle with cultural differences. A Financial Times survey of two hundred CEOs in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom reported that German managers, just like the ones at ABB, supported constructive conflict. French CEOs boasted of making decisions without having to listen to subordinate views.8 This is in the tradition of French graduates of grandes écoles, especially École Nationale d’Administration, who move between the public and private sectors with an attitude of superiority and entitlement. Another group of French CEOs ran family firms, in which they didn’t even have to answer to outside directors. However, even if French CEOs wanted to be more collaborative, they’d have a hard time getting subordinates to play along. One of my students at the executive program run by the Säid Business School at Oxford moved from IBM, where he led a collaborative team, to become CEO of a French company. Even though he asked his direct reports to call him by his first name, they insisted on “Monsieur le président.”
The U.K. CEOs cited in the survey claimed they liked to be challenged. In my experience in the United Kingdom, however, this depends on how secure they feel. Certainly, unlike the French, they don’t want to look like autocrats; and like the Dutch, the Brits enjoy making fun of puffed-up leaders.
The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow Page 10
