One of the most common questions I am asked, especially at workshops where we have leaders and managers who are working in a different country, is this: “Are the thinking and behavioural preferences of people similar across the world?” The concern here is whether their management styles or leadership traits that they have been used to previously would still be applicable in the current country they work in.
Before I understood what Emergenetics was about, I believed that culture really does affect how one thinks and behaves. That seemed logical. There are, after all, many books and websites that discuss how Easterners see the world differently from Westerners.
Our research has long shown that no matter where you are in the world, thinking and behavioural preferences do not differ much, despite the obvious differences in culture and societal norms. How is this possible?
In Asia alone, there are vast differences in cultures and sub-cultures throughout the different countries. When I first travelled to India, I was told that in the Indian business culture, people tend to be more outspoken (compared to the more reserved business culture I was used to in multi-racial Singapore) and, while being more assertive, they also tend to want to please. In Emergenetics terms, I was expecting to meet people who were in the third-third part of the Expressiveness, Assertiveness, and Flexibility spectrums. Armed with this knowledge, I set about various workshops in India, expecting to meet many folks with profiles that matched. However, this was not so.
While culture in India was clearly different, I found that groups of people, by and large, had very much the same sorts of profiles as you would find in Singapore. (And I have been told that this was true in America as well.) Intrigued, I had a chat with someone in India who was first-third Expressive and first-third Assertive, and she told me that while she agreed with her profile, it was necessary for her to speak up in a workshop as the societal norm was such. Did it make her comfortable? Not very often.
Armed with empirical evidence from across Asia (specifically Singapore, India, China, Japan, Thailand and Malaysia), my assessment is that while cultural and societal norms dictate how we function as a group, they do not change how, as individuals, we are unique and have our own preferences in the way we think and behave. In short, we are all motivated uniquely, no matter the society we belong to. Our unique profiles would then decide how comfortable we are living and working in the culture we are in, which makes sense when you think about the reasons people emigrate to countries they think are more “suitable” for them.
As I thought more about this, I decided to see what the experts thought, and I found this interesting post on Harvard Business Review—“Leading Across Borders: Don’t Change a Thing”—and there are many more articles like this.
Whether we are trying to understand leadership traits or attempting to steer organisational behaviour, at the foundation, we need to understand our people well – not just their cultures and societal norms, but how they prefer to think and behave. I, for one, am glad that we don’t have to change a thing when we engage them from across the globe.
—Colin Yeow
