Misaligned Minds

True Story 7.10

 

Western trainer in Asia

encounters unfamiliar trainee behavior

 
 
The setting for this story
Reginald, an Australian, was part of a Western team that delivered a four-day training program in Singapore for twenty-two corporate leaders including thirteen Chinese. As an experienced corporate trainer, he brought with him quite a few expectations about how best to deal with trainee groups. But this was Reginald’s first time training Asians. As he explains, four of his expectations proved wrong.

 
A story of misaligned minds¹⁴
I was well into my career as a corporate trainer, with all my work beyond Australia being in the U.S. or for all-Western corporate teams in Asia. This Singapore gig was something new, and I looked forward to it. But the Asian trainees didn’t respond like Western ones. For instance, I went to Singapore believing that certain methods used by us trainers would work well with all corporate trainees. Those methods didn’t yield their usual successes. These four stand out:

1. Trainers should behave in a friendly, easy-going manner, which helps trainees loosen up.
2. Trainers should ask leading questions as a way of guiding the trainees’ thinking.
3. Trainers should always include role-playing exercises to give “Velcro” to their concepts.
4. Trainers should strive to tailor course material to the needs of individual trainees.

 
Reginald’s question
What’s different about Asian trainees that led to my usual training methods being less effective?
 
Critique of story 7.10
Reginald was able to figure out on his own why his usual training methods were ineffective with Asian trainees. He did this by consulting books and articles written by both trainers with extensive Asia experience and by interculturalists. Then Reginald answered his own questions, as follows:

1. Trainers should behave in a friendly, easy-going manner. What many Western trainers consider a strength was judged by the Asians to signal a lack of credibility. They came in expecting a masterful, even authoritarian, style. Our “just folks” act caused them to lose confidence in us.
2. Trainers should ask leading questions. When a trainer throws out a question, even a rhetorical one, Asian trainees silently wonder, “Why is he, the master, asking me, a student? He knows every answer. So is he doing this just to publicly contrast his knowledge with my ignorance?”
3. Trainers should use role-playing exercises to give “Velcro” to their concepts. We tried to “sell” the role-play concept to the trainees as an opportunity to try, in a “safe setting,” the new behavior about which we had just trained them. But these Asians regarded a role-play as an opportunity to “ham it up.” Why? Two possible explanations – and both could be true – are, first, that they’re skeptical of our notion of intentional individual change because they aren’t aligned with our preoccupation with the autonomous individual. Second, they could be wary of revealing their shortcomings to their tight-knit group of fellow employees because doing so might reveal that they don’t fit in comfortably.¹⁵
4. Trainers should strive to tailor course material to individual trainees’ needs. We trainers erred by focusing on individual assessments and individual barriers to learning. So American! Asians don’t think in terms of “my needs” but rather the needs of their team at work, their family at home, or their neighbors in the community. Whenever an Asian thinks of her daily life and work, the context of that thought is immersion within a group that collectively acts, not as an autonomous actor with privately felt needs.

Here’s another way of understanding this: In the United States, “I” means me, and can mean nothing else but me, singular and unique. The Chinese word translated into English as “I” is wŏ. But wŏ doesn’t mean me. To grasp what it does mean, think of the world of theater, in which actors play roles. An actor speaks of “my character,” meaning the role that he or she is playing. That comes much closer to the meaning of wŏ. It means “me in my social role within this group.”

 
For thought
At the end of the Singapore training event, the trainees rated it as being good – averaging four on a scale of 1–5. Reginald accepted this news with a sense of partial relief, salve for the self-doubts he was harboring after four days of feeling only marginally effective. But should Reginald have accepted these above-the-middle trainee ratings at face value?

Hard to say. Consider these factors. First, it’s known that educated people in different societies have characteristic patterns of responding to such scales. For example, some never select the top or bottom evaluation,¹⁶ while others skew toward the top evaluation unless the program was abysmal. And for many, the quality of their relationship with the trainers gets taken into account as much as, or even more so, than the quality of the program’s design and delivery.

 
Related stories
Stories 1.10, 1.12, and 7.02 also discuss cultural misalignments in corporate training events. Story 10.18 describes training for an individual corporate manager that also became mired in an East–West cultural misalignment.

Go to Chapter 1 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 4 Quick-Links | Return to Chapter 7 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 10 Quick-Links

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Endnotes:
¹⁴ Smart, 6–13.
¹⁵ A third explanation could also contribute to the Asians’ skepticism of role-plays. Asians tend to be “high-context” (see Appendix B), meaning that their behavior is finely attuned to and guided by the myriad contextual factors affecting the situation they’re in. When a trainer announces a role play exercise, the players temporarily adopt thinly described, fictitious roles that lack the multiple, rich nuances of a real-life situation. High-context people sense that role-plays provide them with virtually no contextual clues on which to securely calibrate their behavior. (By the way, I should add here that some Western trainers have managed to run role-plays successfully in Asia.)
¹⁶ When I lived in Portugal decades ago, a teacher told me that the grading scheme was from 1 to 20. But he explained that, in practice, the grades 19 and 20 are never awarded; the top grade any student can earn is an 18. The explanation? “Only God can earn a 20; only the teacher can earn a 19.”.

Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.