First Days at Work
Chinese people love inaugurations. When a new shop opens in your street in a Chinese city, you cannot miss the piling floral arrangements and loud rehearsals a week in advance. Welcoming ceremonies for incoming expats are great excuses to celebrate too, often complete with red banners and prepared speeches. Yet, most foreigners I asked were pleasantly surprised that after the somewhat overwhelming welcomes, the local teams and fellow managers who greeted them turned out to be straightforward urbanites, more Wall Street than Great Wall. “At the beginning, the lack of contrast puzzled me,” Richard Eardley described his first impression of Hays Shanghai. “But then it occurred to me that the Chinese people surrounding me were pre-selected and pre-trained.” He was right, and there was an even larger dynamic at play. Local employees at multinational companies are an adventurous minority on their own right. As they often admit at job interviews, they want work in foreign languages, meet foreign people, and eventually to travel or sometimes even relocate abroad. They want to be surrounded by things, ideas, news, and habits that mainstream China cannot offer.
This means that local colleagues serve as welcome committees to expats in many ways. “Without them, even the simplest tasks can cause daily frustration,” Angelo Puglisi of Benteler explained. “You must trust your household to your housekeeper, and your and your kid’s life to the driver, because most foreigners don’t drive here.” Judith fully agreed as she recalled her first weeks as an incoming senior manager. “I cannot imagine how people survived here before WeChat,” she voiced her gratitude to a local social media app that links over a billion people, including foreign damsels in distress like herself. “One evening, there was a knock on my door and there were two uniformed men standing outside. Their English proficiency matched my Chinese: zero. To explain their purpose, they showed me a printed notice—in Chinese characters. Without instantaneous intervention from my colleagues through the messaging app, things could have gone messy before I realised that they came to match the name in my passport with the local police station’s occupant register.”
“Being an expat in China is not, psychologically speaking, an easy posting,” warned a publication in 2014.1 The nation’s ageless cultural traditions influence a whole spectrum of daily habits, from tastes in tea to the way citizens should approach authorities. Camera-wielding new expats cheerfully notice that people breakfast differently, shop differently, ride bikes and buses differently. But as early exploration gives way to daily routine, the same differences can also obstruct and annoy: mistaking decoratively wrapped spicy beef jerky for candy, people crowding and jumping queues, a visa clerk’s resentful expectation of a submissive approach. Local helpers are essential in that early stage of forming new routines: the right amount of intervention helps foreigners see mishaps as pleasurable learning opportunities with little downside. Professional service providers handle their essentials like accommodation, insurance, and police registration. For a few glorious days or weeks, newcomers have little more to do but show up for prearranged appointments (typically with a local aid) and learn to tell dried meat from confectionery.
I trained, coached, or advised hundreds of foreigners who had recently arrived in China convinced that a thorough understanding of the culture would ensure collaboration with local people. But their actual experience was more akin to Richard Eardley’s pleasant surprise over the smooth sailing onto routine work. Understanding a culture, any culture, takes the number of years that most foreigners simply do not have in a given location. Therefore, the larger the cultural GAP between the home and destination countries, the wiser it is to operate through intercultural hubs: conferences, agencies, multinational corporations, and cosmopolitan cities in either or both territories. That makes it easier to work together but also less important to understand one another beyond superficial business transactions. Such cultural islands seldom result in profound changes in the perception and habits of people who work there, compared with more dramatic immersions such as marrying into a local family, or starting a small business far from visitor hubs. For most people who work at cultural islands, intercultural flexibility is a sort of behavioral dress code that they can freely ditch at the end of the working day.
Like Richard, most new China expats were surrounded by preselected colleagues accustomed to dealing with laowai—an endearingly discriminating Mandarin term for foreigners. That is a helpful arrangement: newcomers who plunge into the eye of a cultural hurricane (academics at local universities, agricultural experts, exchange students lodged with local families, and so forth) testify to the near-impossibility of normal routines for the first few weeks or even months. The culturally mixed workforce, procedures, and customs of multinational work environments at foreign firms allow relatively free experimentation without the danger of halting professional tasks with every misstep. “At the beginning, I tried to work with Chinese colleagues like I would with Germans, because they seemed to be open to a direct cultural style,” Henrik König of Thyssen-Krupp recalled. “But their reactions were often the complete opposite of my expectations. At other times, I tried to use what I knew about traditional Chinese values, but the result was equally confusing. It felt as if they had a box where they could pack away their old Chinese ways, only to open it again when they wanted to.”
Henrik instinctively spotted a scientifically proven fact: people respond to intercultural difficulties with a sort of face-changing routine. Acting differently to reduce the stress of working with foreigners is a rewarding experience. But second-guessing normal routines also requires extra attention and burns far more energy than just going about one’s usual business. Eventually, the result is what psychologists call control fatigue: the claustrophobic feeling of constantly defying familiar habits, as if walking in undersized shoes. For many expats I asked, it all started with working without a common language. “Initially, I had no language problem with colleagues around me, who were all proficient in English,” Judith told me. “But China was my first location where I also had team members with no shared language. For a while I communicated with them through local colleagues, but that is not the way I like to operate.” At the time of writing, the English First English Proficiency Index ranked China at 49th place as a country of moderate proficiency, near Chile and Russia.2 Urban hubs fare better than the country in general, but challenges of communicating with the wider local organization eventually limit many expat managers to their close circles of English-speaking collaborators.
The fatigue is often mutual. “Chinese people have two annoying habits when they work in English,” explained Tony Shi of Benteler. “One is to start off in the team’s shared language but constantly switch back to Chinese when the discussion becomes more complex. Another comes from a characteristic of the Chinese language: we understand each other by reading between the lines, even when we say very little. We do not have that efficiency in English, so local colleagues feel that they are wasting a lot of time when communicating with foreigners.” Incoming expats know it would help to learn Mandarin, the official dialect of the PRC. Research published in Laurie Underwood’s coauthored 2020 book China CEO II (a sequel to her previous China CEO) pointed at Mandarin proficiency as a differentiating factor of high-potential executives in China.3 But that is understandably a tall order while working full-time. Angelo tried. “The bottom line is, you cannot do it alone,” he said. “You need regular lessons or a tutor. It did help me after I reached a basic conversational level, but that took me six months of very hard work.” Consequently, proficiency in Chinese did not become a requirement at most multinationals, who also struggle to hire locals with business-level proficiency in foreign languages.4
Cultural challenges run deeper than language anyway, as one of my former consulting projects illustrates. In 2013, a Western European food conglomerate hired me to find out why their human resource practices clashed with Asian culture. One devil in the detail turned out to be—names. In the firm’s traditional European markets, titles such as Doctor for PhDs and Director for certain seniority levels were so important that adding the proper prefixes to surnames was part of performance criteria for managers. Predictably, at Asian branches, the system imploded. China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and other countries in the region have fundamentally different naming traditions from both Europe and one another. People who live Chinese-speaking lives cannot be on first-name basis with each other, because surnames come first, and what follows is seldom used to informally address someone. If you ever meet Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, bear in mind that his surname is Ren, and do not call him Zhengfei to break the ice. You may hear local colleagues call him by his family name with various suffixes, depending on their own seniority. The system makes locals proud, confuses foreign learners, and annoys those who hope for cultural shortcuts.
Studying Chinese naming traditions is good advice, but again, easier said than done. Conventions express intricate social assumptions and relationships, and mistakes carry alarmingly high reputational cost. To avoid offending others, cultural islands find creative ways to reduce the risk. In China, a characteristically nonconfrontational solution is what I call name swapping. Chinese people with international connections customarily chose foreign first names followed by their Mandarin family name. Scattered on my desk right now are business cards from Lily Le, Kevin Pan, Henry Zheng, Ben Zhong, and Kathy Lu. Creative first-name choices are part of the cultural fun: I recently met Apple, Rainbow, and Hawk, as well as Leonid, Hans, and Yuki. Meeting Lucy Liu or Jackie Chan is only a question of time in China—unless you insist on the real celebrities. “This ‘borrowed identity’ turns out to be very useful when communicating with old and new acquaintances alike,” explained David C. S. Li from the Hong Kong Institute of Education. “It helps to speed up the process of getting acquainted—something that matters to a lot of people working in various professions, from business to public relations, from communications to international education. This is something that traditional Chinese practice does not encourage.”5
In turn, foreigners take Chinese names, usually helped by local colleagues or Mandarin teachers. Like foreign first names for the Chinese, this habit also originates in former concession ports. Merchants there had a harder time than today’s expats, having to multitask in French, English, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Hindi, Malay, and local dialects, including the then less widespread Mandarin but also Cantonese, Hokkien (from today’s Fujian province), Hunanese, Yunnanese, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian. Adopted Chinese names helped interaction outside of foreign enclaves, and typically included, as they still do, a single-character surname and a double-character given name. Foreigners are advised to pick surnames from China’s widely known list of a 100 common choices. Given names usually consist of two characters whose pronunciation imitates the bearer’s given name. Chinese characters must be chosen carefully and with local help, because they reflect the bearer’s own character and fate. Name swapping makes life easier primarily by reducing the chances of twisting someone’s foreign-sounding name beyond recognition, a cultural mistake that few people accept with grace.
Being confused by all this is a sure sign of slowly understanding the cultural environment around foreigners in China. Expats do daily, sometimes hourly commutes between multiple cultures of families, firms, communities, districts, cities, and professional circles. Foreigners who momentarily forget where they are can easily upset those who hold the key to their success in the country. Navigating this cultural maze is hard and getting useful advice is even harder. Widely available materials on intercultural adaptation often echo superficial soundbites about China’s collectivism, social harmony, and timelessly spiritual attitude to life, sending foreigners down the wrong adaptational path. Asking local colleagues or friends can be equally misleading. Most people are unable to describe their native cultures, and even if they do, their explanations reflect their personal circumstances at least as much as the surrounding culture. Expatriates, on the other hand, need to learn fast, and need widely applicable lessons. Above all, they must figure out the unspoken rules that guide their local colleagues, bosses, clients, and associates on whom their future success depends.
Cultures of Collaboration
It was one of those moments when a fleeting remark allowed a profound insight into the soul of millions. Since she uttered it in 2010, the casual admission of a Chinese dating show’s participant that she would “rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle” has been endlessly quoted and examined.6 Some paraded it as evidence for the erosion of China’s societal values, others as a proof of its population’s determination to come out ahead in a global race to economic domination. Some loved it, some hated it. But however people encountered the quote, in Mandarin, English, or other languages, wondering where China was located or after a decade in the country, few doubted that it was a noteworthy expression of something profound. It caught the world’s imagination because in a few words, it revealed unresolved contradictions between traditional self-sacrifice and modern ambition, global aspirations, and national pride. It also sent a message to the world: China would prevail or die trying. Most likely, it would prevail. Characteristically urban, contemporary, and progressive, this mentality is an essential element of the environment that surrounds foreigners in the country.
With each passing year and new experience, foreigners start scratching the polished surface of social interaction in expat hubs and unveil ever deeper layers of local peculiarities. Based on my interviews, the most available source of such discoveries is how Chinese colleagues work among themselves, and the earliest challenge it reveals is a straightforward one: speed. How fast or slowly someone prefers to get things done is a highly intimate choice. An environment that dictates an unfamiliar pace can cause deep frustration, and the China where our expats arrived was extreme in this sense too. The country attracts and retains foreign talent with highly lucrative offers, but the pace is pitiless. Foreign firms that establish local branches must compete in one of Earth’s most diligent societies. Chinese people are shrewd entrepreneurs in a hurry to make up for centuries of their nation’s relative backwardness, and the nascent middle class of its largest cities insist on running Marathons at a sprinter’s pace. Their ambition and enthusiasm are contagious. It takes a few months in Shanghai or Shenzhen to pull all-weekenders and answer work-related calls at night. It takes just a bit longer to sulk at newcomers who refuse to do so.
Chinese project teams work for velocity: faster manufacturing, speedier transportation and delivery, instant customer care. Foreign firms must stay competitive: China CEO names fast recruitment, training, and promotion as keys to retaining and motivating talented Chinese people.7 Companies (local and foreign alike) dictate increasing speed not only to beat technological and fashion trends but also to outpace China’s ubiquitous copycat competitors. Whether the product is cups of coffee or ocean liners, delivery times are fractions of the global average. “The first year was a shock, especially compared to my previous post in India,” Angelo Puglisi admitted. “But then I managed to readjust my work style. I understood that Chinese people prioritise getting things done fast. Maybe not perfectly, but fast.” Some love it, some hate it, some make the best of it. Eventually, Angelo not only adapted to the new pace but even started seeing his native culture in a different light. “Everybody was on board to do something big,” he says. “Business in Europe can be too slow and organised. Managing people in India, my first overseas assignment, felt repetitive and stressful. Then I got transferred to China, and its speed, energy and dynamism swept me off my feet.”
China’s speed, like its climate, is either an irritation or inspiration depending on personal chemistry. Marie enjoyed the rush with her pharmaceutical team from the start. “Working with Chinese people is lots of fun,” she told me. “Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because they are fast learners, and I am good at delegating. Sometimes I felt like I was the one to put my feet on the gas pedal, and I had to remind myself to give people time to think and absorb.” Christian Eh, Senior Vice President at Covestro China, disagreed. I coached Christian in China-specific leadership skills after he had spent years in various Asian countries. “I guess it all depends on individuals. For me personally, China was exhausting. The pace, the volume, the crowds—they burn energy like Christmas shopping in Cologne.” Coping strategies vary wildly according to temperament. Some of the most successful foreign executives I met in China adopted the local work style so thoroughly that superiors at headquarters told me they seemed too Chinese for their taste. Others learned to tactically mimic but not internalize indigenous practices. Still others surrounded themselves with a trusted circle of like-minded colleagues.
Understandably, there are just as many locals fed up with China’s fast-forward work culture as foreigners. As they burn the candle at both ends in the nation’s most competitive industries, they are aware of the physical, mental, and spiritual damage it causes to them and their families. Even the Chinese government, seldom an advocate of moderation, repeatedly restricts abusive corporate practices like the so-called 9-9-6 regime: 12 straight work hours from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, six days a week. But pathological competition forces market participants, from individual employees to entire firms, to creatively evade regulations, for instance by logging overtime as voluntary, or not logging it at all.8 Foreigners with mindful work habits risk losing corporate battles, wars, and their most ambitious people as well. “Local employees assume that multinational firms send their best managers to China, so there are high expectations on us foreigners,” Renata Santos told me. Expats must deliver world-class performance without pushing their teams to exhaustion. Then, those with a successful survival strategy soon face an even subtler challenge: the relationship between individuals and the collective in Chinese society.
“Chinese people are friendly and welcoming, so don’t be surprised if someone asks you out for lunch or dinner,” the HSBC Expat Explorer Survey wrote. “Equally, don’t be offended if a stranger asks about your age, marital status or parents’ jobs. These topics aren’t considered private and are common points of discussion.”9 Westerners accustomed to intensive but skin-deep professional interactions and a six o’clock separation between work and private life often collide with local habits. “Chinese employees quarrel like families,” Christian Eh told me, echoing a frequent observation. For better or worse, Chinese workplaces are emotional gatherings that can shock foreigners with little privacy, lots of intimacy, and endless compromises. A firm that feels like home sounds wonderful, but Asian families are more demanding than European or North American ones. Chinese people often choose their studies and first jobs according to dynastic aspirations, consult their elders on bonuses, promotions, international postings, and conflicts with superiors. Parents accompany young applicants to job interviews. At one firm I ran as a General Manager, the Chinese owner suggested I fix the performance issues of a local manager by phoning her husband.
Expats seldom manage to observe this dynamic from a safe distance. Locals give them temporary leeway to adjust, but sooner or later, expectations to treat Chinese colleagues, clients, and suppliers with due intimacy catch up with them. “Here, you cannot just say ‘no’ to customers if their request conflicts with company policy: you must work for compromises,” Tony Shi of Benteler explained. “If you cannot find one, you must try harder. Compromises keep the customer happy, keep the team happy, which means the manager himself is happy. More importantly, everyone learns in the process: expats and local managers, even the client.” Of course, compromises have drawbacks too. At many firms I advised, colleagues dutifully clocked in for absent friends, and managers had to infiltrate the loyal ranks to curb the practice. Foreigners with a tough and straightforward temperament resent such near-spiritual level of interdependence. Others begin to see its advantages over their home cultures. “In Germany, people who were left out of a meeting will torpedo the decision later,” said Christian Eh. “In China, those who are in the room speak for everyone, and you can rest assured they will deliver collectively.”
Accommodating to China’s team culture is a steeper and more emotional learning curve than picking up its work speed. Some obviously take the wrong start. “My work style is task orientated,” Renata admitted. “I get straight down to business without social niceties. Local employees disastrously misunderstood my intentions. They thought I was there to fire them. I made some of them cry.” Others were unaware of their incompatibility until a few episodes, however mundane, revealed a gaping cultural canyon. “Chinese hospitality overwhelms me,” architect Kristina Kinder’s expat memoire described a series of business trips in the country. “I wonder if this kind of hospitality is expected by Chinese people when they visit us in the West. If that’s the case, then the office I worked for, including myself, have been incredibly rude to Chinese friends and clients in the past.”10 Experimentation and even eventual success can be utterly confusing. “One day, a local colleague looked a bit sad,” Renata told me. “It turned out that her parents were unwell in hospital. I felt helpless and wanted to comfort her in the Brazilian way, so I asked if she needed a hug. She flatly refused. But in a few days, she reappeared. ‘Do you remember the hug you wanted to give me?’ she said. ‘I need it now.’”
The key to success with China’s collective culture, my interview subjects almost invariably said, was to accept its differences without trying too hard to assimilate. “The Chinese speed is based on the way the Chinese economy works, and the Western speed is based on the pace of Europe or the US—there is a strong disconnect between these two,” explained Rachel, China Director at a world-leading corporate think-tank, over black tea in the café of her Beijing gated community in early 2020. Taking sides and forcing that pace on the company seldom works across cultural divisions. A soberly balanced attitude enables foreigners to contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of local habits and manage their work accordingly. “The pace can be fast and focused,” Briana told me. “Once a decision is made, getting to the end-product happens very quickly. But at the beginning it also baffled me how late in the day they started working and the long lunchbreaks they took. In North America you can walk around in the office at five-thirty in the afternoon and hear a pin drop, because people dash off to pick up kids and run errands. Here, people are still at work at seven in the evening.”
Ultimately, the way to reduce pressure is not cultural imitation but a clever combination of imported and indigenous work styles to match personal temperament with performance goals. Communication between newcomers and experienced Dragon Suits is essential. “My expat manager told me to focus on results instead of hours,” Briana recalled. “He told me I would get messages day and night. That working from home on Fridays would not function here because I had to be physically present. But he also said, ‘Just because you are in China, it doesn’t mean you have to completely adapt.’ He said a lot of those extra hours would be filled with activity, not outcome.” Annoyances aside, most expats I talked to were delighted to play an important part in China’s thrilling saga of economic success story. Research on global corporate culture revealed China as one of the most optimistic societies on Earth.11 Their enthusiasm can be contagious. “The Chinese were far from perfectionists, but they got things done quickly,” Angelo said. “Everyone had a lot of positive energy, at work and afterwards.” Thrill, however, can also be tiring. This leads us to another danger of expat life in China: exhaustion.
Work, Life, Balance
Workdays in China’s metropolises, like their bustling streets and blinking neon signs, can swipe anyone off their feet. Long and strenuous hours breed collaboration, camaraderie, and performance beyond expectations. Personal chauffeurs, secretaries, and housekeepers boost self-confidence and allow foreign families to work, learn, and socialize without worrying about distracting duties. For a few decades, expatriates inhabited a sweet triangle of generous performance-based remuneration, a soaring economy, and local prices that compared well with richer countries. With incomes matching those in the United States and top European destinations, residences, rides, home trips, medical care, and children’s education paid by employers, they could save for rainy days. Singles could hit the night with fellow foreigners from all over the world. Families trusted their kids to nannies and the multiethnic faculties of international schools. Nor did they have to worry about driving to incessant soccer practices and parent–teacher meetings: international schools in China occupied kids with the spartan routines set by affluent local families.
Expats themselves adopted the local work ethic. Many Dragon Suits felt that in China, everything aligned for doing great things, perhaps the first time in their lives. “A year or two here, and many European managers secretly dread the time when they eventually return home,” Christian Eh told me. “There, you must be genuinely rich to have this lifestyle.” But work psychologists classify money as a so-called hygienic motivator, whose lack stimulates more directly than its abundance. Once the family repaid debts, bought a home or two, and saved enough for their children’s education, few managers celebrated monthly paychecks anymore. Their focus shifted to less tangible goals like learning new skills and plotting promotions. China was the perfect place for such ambitions, but after a year or two, the thrill could wear off, and incessant challenges could wear anyone down. “During my first year I did little else than work, and that was very hard,” Judith recalled her transition from a previous job in Manila. “Of course, we worked hard in the Philippines too, but that made me much happier there. Filipinos are straightforward and cheerful. China makes it much harder and lengthier to establish relationships.”
It is easy to see why expatriates get lonely in China’s megacities. “Companies sponsor a highly desirable lifestyle and expect nearly superhuman performance in return,” explained to me Dr. George Hu, Chief of Mental Health at Shanghai’s United Family Pudong Hospital, in early 2019. “As busy managers see it, their employers provide the family’s house, cars, cleaning staff and schooling so that they can focus on work. It is easy to lose sight of healthy boundaries.” The result is what Dr. Hu called a weakened sense of agency—busy expats dutifully toil away without asking too many questions. Once caught up in that robotic mindset heroically called firefighting in business circles, regaining control is problematic. Alerts, reminders, appointments, tasks, and chores cast their victims into vicious downward spirals of stress, fatigue, and ceaseless activity. Eventually, the shock of abandoning familiar places and loved ones, relocation, adjustment to new places, jobs, cultures, colleagues, and homes often accumulate into a cartoon raincloud that casts a shadow on every commute, meeting, and meal, regardless of stellar careers and swelling bank accounts.
Earning the privilege of an enviable lifestyle is the defining mindset among many expat communities, and China is no exception. While a family could earn, spend, and show off like never before, they often neglect rest, intimacy, and spirituality. Managers, spouses, kids, and even household pets frantically follow precision routines, and their surroundings reinforce unhealthy habits. China made astonishing leaps in economic welfare, but life quality, mental and physical health stumble behind of feeble feet. Urban citizens of the PRC long suffered from varieties of conditions related to the scarcity of nature and nurture, from cardiovascular to reproductive and mental ills.12 Secret weapons of economic triumph like the 9-9-6 regime tragically fired in both directions, damaging individuals, families, and communities. In 2021, in the midst of debates about China’s waning population, academic Zeng Diyang rang a widely heeded alarm bell when he wrote that “being forced to work outside regular hours and not getting compensated is a powerful restraint against people from engaging in activities related to reproduction”—simply put, they were too busy for sex.13
“It’s kind of a workaholic culture,” Rachel explained. “It starts with school and then it goes up to professional life.” But expats must know where duty ends and dysfunctions begin, and chronic workaholism in Chinese cities has long fallen in the latter category. In a 2010 Gallup Global Wellbeing study, China unflatteringly ranked between Afghanistan and Nepal.14 The forced transition from poverty to economic miracle took its human toll, and expats received their share of damages as well as benefits. To make things worse, habitual means of stress relief are absent from the futuristic, skyscraper-pierced landscape. Simple remedies like a walk in the crisp morning air, an idle day in nature or the closeness of a trusted friend are rare and dear for expats enclosed by physical and digital walls. Emotional isolation follows almost inevitably. Depressed people feel lonely even in the thickest crowd. Helpline operators bear daily witness to the grotesque evolutionary instinct to fig-leaf our wounds with false confidence when we are most vulnerable, and expats are a proud lot. Unwilling to offload their insecurities on their bosses, colleagues, and clients for one reason, their family and friends for another, outwardly successful professionals often wither emotionally.
Modern urbanism was a brainchild of the industrial revolution. One of its side-effects was the stress relief we call sports today. Engines became faster and stronger but also louder, dirtier, and uglier than traditional transportation. Nostalgic middle-class urbanites turned boating, horse-riding, running, and cycling into ways to release steam after long working weeks. Engines widened the outreach of empires, and Western colonizers enthusiastically carried their pastimes around the globe, coaching reluctant locals in the useless skills of golfing, tennis, cricket, and going nowhere in outdated vehicles. Initial resistance gradually subsided, and wherever modernization went, the folly followed: today, perspiring Tokyo bankers run around the Imperial Palace on weekends. Chinese cities were not designed with such pastimes in mind. Traditional medicine shunned rigorous exercise and recommended a restful lifestyle instead. Legend has it that when 19th-century British officials invited Qing counterparts for tennis, the Mandarins sent their servants to run such bothersome errands. Up to the present day, sports were periodically labeled by nationalist movements as tools of Western domination alien from local traditions.15
In the early 2000s when I arrived in China, most people I saw exercising in cities were senior citizens following the ancient Taoist practices of forearm-slapping and reverse-walking. Those who ran were usually armed forces, athletes, or in a hurry. A renewed interest in modernity brought football pitches, jogging lanes, and badminton parlors but often at the expense of remaining green patches. In most public parks, flowers are neatly rank-and-filed, lawns are off-limits, and climbing trees is prohibited. Industry dominated suburbs and beaches until developers recently started converting them into exclusive resorts. Superhighways, skyscrapers, rapid trains, and glitzy malls thoroughly impress foreigners at the beginning, but can gradually get bothersome. “In the long run, the lack of nature was difficult to bear,” Henrik König explained. As a substitute to long-distance running or cycling, he took early walks along the Huangpu River promenade near Shanghai’s Mercedes-Benz Arena, and watched the crowds grow. “Soon it felt like a railway station: thousands of people cramming together with cheap music blasting from mounted speakers and mobile phones. Eventually, it was so annoying that I stopped going there.”
Most expats live and work in commercial and residential centers enclosed by 30 stories of concrete, in turn surrounded by more concrete. When families are fed up with confinement, where do they go? Dinners, parties, barbecues, and spa resorts. Those places can easily overdo the job of making people forget the pressures of daily life. The problem, Dr. Hu explained, was that busy expats often reach for the hair of the dog that bit them, seeking relief in intense activity rather than rest. Asked to name the most harmful example, he joined the chorus of other health experts I interviewed: alcohol! On average, Chinese people are moderate drinkers.16 Although boozy dinners are quintessential status symbols among rich businesspeople and party cadres, Chinese tradition stigmatizes public drunkenness and discourages women from drinking at all. Expats, on the other hand, freely go with the flow. Networking events serve free-flowing wine from the afternoon onward and urban restaurants take pride in their imported and local liquor selections. “When I first arrived, I was at bars four or five nights a week,” Henrik König recalled. “It was not about the drinking: it was just fun to hang out with Germans from all the big companies, expats from all over the world, Filipino cover bands and random people of all kinds and nationalities.”
Eventually, expat families must finish their drinks, return to normalcy, and face another risk of self-healing. Expat jobs in China attract ambitious people, and selection criteria are strict. But the temperament that spurs applicants to high performance at work can backfire when it is time to rest. “As the years went by,” Henrik König continued, “bar-hopping gave way to badminton with friends over the weekend, or trips to Dalian and Qingdao. I joined a gym nearby, the largest I have ever seen.” But some expats fail to notice how persistently they focus on performance targets even in their pastimes: strenuous fitness routines, Marathons, dramatic yoga positions, or competing for attention at charities, dinners, networking events, and on social media. Gigantic gyms, indoor badminton courts, and networking lack the natural cleansing power of beaches, mountains, and peaceful parks. Self-improvement and socializing may be enviable, but they add further items to the already-busy schedule of expat families, and China’s metropolises offer little alternative. “When I advised managers to get away from their phones and relax,” Dr. Hu said, “many downloaded fitness and meditation apps. I had to remind them to fight the temptation and put the gadget away in a drawer.”
Employers of China-based expats should pay close attention to such seemingly mundane issues. Regaining control in unfamiliar surroundings is an uphill struggle. Those who fail often leave: turnover rates at Chinese branches of global firms are consistently a quarter higher than the global average, reaching 40 percent in some industries.17 Premature departures are seldom due to dissatisfaction with performance. One paramount problem, one 2020 study found, is inability to adjust to the new location. Another, the same paper showed, is the family’s unhappiness with the host country.18 “Family considerations are often the main reason to accept assignments in China,” Kurt Yu, Regional President at Voith Group, a German industrial conglomerate told me in 2020. I trained one after another of Kurt’s leadership teams over two years and witnessed how he mentored incoming expats through adjustment to his native China’s challenges. “Parents hope that their children can learn foreign languages and receive good international education, while the company pays for all that. But then, the husband typically goes to work and travels frequently, while taking care of the kids is left to the wife. Spouses and kids do not have their own networks in China, so they can feel lost.”
That does not mean that dependents are exempt from the competitive lifestyle of China-based expats. The pressure on students in international schools can be especially high. Their teachers are excellent, their curricula demanding, if for no other reason than to attract the brightest domestic students from affluent families. That, however, also raises the performance bar from a very early age. “Expats must understand that schools here work differently,” Attila Hilbert of Danone explained. “Their children must study seven days a week. Otherwise, they might be excluded by classmates as underachievers or deviants. Children should be aware of the one-child policy and the fact that in a thousand years, the only way for Chinese people to elevate the family was education.” Based on his clinical practice, Dr. Hu agreed. “China’s expat circles do not meet the needs of many otherwise healthy young foreigners, even if they live in villas with private swimming pools. Busy managers who juggle projects and business trips can do little for their kids. Just the opposite: it often happens that the working expat and spouse come to my clinic for help during the day, their kids after school hours.”
A final challenge for foreign families is that even a lighter daily routine would not necessarily make them happier. China offers lots of fulfillment from work, study, and activities related to status (shopping, social gatherings, and so forth), but in the long run, little else. In fact, Dr. Hu advised against staying idle. “Spouses without jobs are much more exposed than their working partners,” he explained. “They feel the lack of friends and support groups much more severely, and consequently put pressure on the spousal relationship itself.” China’s laws add to the pressure on foreign families, a 2019 report by European think-tank MERICS suggested. “The immigration regime,” the paper explained, “draws clear discrete lines between visa categories: if you came to work, then work on a working visa; if you came on a family visa, then sit at home and look after children; if you came to study, study and don’t work.” The same laws make it very complicated for expat kids to remain in the country after they reach legal age, making their time in China a high-risk, high-yield but short-term investment for most foreign families.
Of course, a feeling of impermanence can also help expat families weather through the difficulties. With the right amount of flexibility and a constructive mindset, even the most worrying features of life in China prove soluble. “However dramatic the pollution situation is in Chinese cities, it is possible to plan around the missed outdoor time and stay physically and mentally healthy,” Dr. George Hu suggested. Following an understandable adjustment period in reaction to the culture shock, he continued, new arrivals could find the balance between typical extremes: ignoring problems on one hand, paranoid worries and self-imposed isolation on the other. Attila Hilbert’s frantic home-sealing project was an eloquent example of reasonable coping. Briana shared a similarly agile attitude toward Internet connectivity problems. “It’s part of the fun to learn living like a local,” she said. “Instead of fussing that I cannot access Amazon, I learned how to shop on Taobao. On the other hand, I still enjoy walking into an Apple store and buying something that is exactly like in America. Instead of Mandarin apps, I order food on ones for foreigners, and I probably overpay.”
Culture-Mapping Matches and Mismatches
Cultural adaptation is a complex and frequently underrated process, especially in the early stages of expat assignments. In the honeymoon phase of the first months, it appears deceptively easy to follow a simplistic strategy that everyone remembers from their first days at school: observe, understand, and try to blend in. If you cannot understand them, imitate their rituals. When in Rome, do as Romans do. When in Shanghai—the rest is common sense. The numerous intellectual descendants of the when in Rome school, like the business culture guidebook Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands by a team of American business advisors, are loose collections of curious facts about how people meet, greet, dress, negotiate, agree, or disagree, instruct, implement, and entertain in various national cultures.19 They imply that understanding the underlying rules of an exotic culture guarantees successful collaboration with people there, often leading to adorably pointless advice. “Familiarize yourself with all aspects of China before you arrive,” the authors of Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands suggest. Those who fail to learn China the week before they arrive should supposedly blame themselves and indemnify the authors.
Trying to observe and tactically imitate another culture’s behaviors is ineffective even if the expectations sound clear. “Be patient, expect delays, show little emotion, and do not talk about your deadlines,” the book’s authors recommend, based on their evaluation of Chinese cultural norms. Such mimicry might be one way to achieve skin-deep acclimatization, especially while every little curiosity of the surrounding culture is new and exciting. But business travelers want more than merely avoid culturally awkward situations, and they soon realize that imitation leads to fatigue and futility. The list of an unfamiliar culture’s peculiar practices is endless and lacks cohesion. Knowing how Chinese people dress for meetings, enter a conference room, greet junior and senior colleagues, exchange business cards, and decide seating arrangements will not guarantee a clear understanding of who speaks first, whether the meeting should start with pleasantries or presentations and what happens afterward. Even if it did, what if different Chinese people represent different values? What if they follow the same cultural adaptation strategy, imitate you, and thus become less predictably Chinese? Generations of businesspeople learned of such hurdles the hard way, and systematic cultural comparisons emerged only recently.
East and West have been in an increasingly direct contact for millennia. Wandering merchants tried hard to get their bearings not only at sea but also among the countless cultural reefs that could shipwreck potentially lucrative ventures. Around 500 B.C., traveling philosopher Herodotus recorded the curious peoples, beliefs, and habits of the world he knew, meticulously but fully assured of Greek superiority. A few centuries later, Chinese Court official Jia Yi provided a frighteningly pragmatic example of faking cultural adaptation for self-interest, called three standards and five baits. “The ‘standards’ were to deal with barbarians in good faith,” author Michael Schuman wrote in his book Superpower Interrupted, “pretend to enjoy their strange appearance, and take interest in their stranger habits; the ‘baits’ were to clothe the barbarians in silks and feed them delicious food; entertain them with music, dancing, and women; give them mansions with slaves; and shower them with attention. In sum, spoil them rotten to win their compliance.”20 The means of indulgence have changed, but tolerance still too often means pretending to accept others in order to squeeze out of them what we want.
Ancient explorers drifted between continents without clear points of reference, in both the navigational and cultural sense. Without maps and clear orientation, they followed the coastline and hoped that friendly currents would take them to their destination. When their life and livelihood depended on people of incomprehensible languages and habits, they worked hard to decipher and pilot cultural currents as best they could. It took over a millennium to discover the application of latitudes and longitudes in navigation, a revolution in intercontinental travel and exploration. Scientific cartography enabled not only easier journeys to places that people knew but also anticipating the location of yet unvisited ones. Meanwhile, navigating across cultural distances blindly followed coastlines and currents for centuries longer, until similarly reliable intercultural mapping could emerge. Even in the age of jet engines and fiber-optic communication, basic fallacies persist and undermine international negotiations, teamwork, and leadership.
Most known early cultures, from Hammurabi’s courtiers to Native American chiefdoms, imagined themselves at the navel of the universe. World maps printed in the Americas, Europe, and Asia still illustrate this bias, placing their respective continents in the center. As in topography, so in anthropology. Early Chinese descriptions of people outside the Heavenly Kingdom, the sort that Jia Yi wrote, were treatises on how and why foreigners lacked civilization—contemporary Indian, Persian, or European writings were equally biased. Prejudice followed us into modernity. All nations claim to be the greatest, down to Ecuador, wrote British philosopher Bertrand Russell in The Problem of China in 1922.21 Twentieth-century intercultural experts like Edward T. Hall, an advisor to U.S. governments, armed forces, and firms, essentially instructed leaders on ways to do business with the Native Americans, Japanese, Arabs, South Americans, and other curious natives. The established assumption that the West was ahead of the East on a linear developmental curve yielded wildly inaccurate and often disastrous predictions on the forthcoming conduct of the people of the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
The inherently judgmental comparison of cultures explains why national, regional, and local traditions make such awkward conversations. “Speaking about a person’s culture often provokes the same type of reaction as speaking about his mother,” writes INSEAD Professor Erin Meyer. “Most of us have a deep protective instinct for the culture we consider our own, and, though we may criticize it bitterly ourselves, we may become easily incensed if someone from outside the culture dares to do so.”22 In a modern world where mundane objects and even our meals increasingly depend on collaboration between distant places, this inability to transcend cultural comfort zones became a tangible liability. Rich and successful nations rely on countries whose values they cannot accept: think of the love–hate relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Supply followed demand, and academics like Dutch social scientist Gert Hofstede developed cultural classification systems that borrowed behavioral criteria from psychology. Like individuals, they claimed, families, communities, and entire nations can be classified into courageous or cautious, stubborn or flexible, social or solitary, caring or selfish, pedantic or spontaneous ones.
The first system of cultural comparisons that entered the management mainstream was Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions: power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, time orientation and indulgence. The resulting charts were insightful and scientific, showing how selected countries compared against each of the six criteria. But charts showing all six comparisons for even two countries were hard to remember, and including three or four countries looked as convoluted as wiring panels in contemporary television sets. Politicians, diplomats, and managers were routinely pressed for prompt decisions based on limited data. They needed dashboards, not circuit boards. The solution was the emergence of so-called culture maps after academic Erin Meyer arranged intercultural research data into a matrix resembling the personality chart known as DISC.23 Emotionally expressive cultures were on top, reserved ones at the bottom. Confrontational ones on the left and nonconfrontational ones on the right. The resulting two-by-two layout of culture maps replaced Hofstede’s spaghetti bowl of interlocking curves with four visually memorable cultural quadrants.
The Culture Map’s four-fold visualization of behavioral styles is nearly idiot-proof, mainly because humanity has intuitively used them for millennia. The four DISC styles called direction (top-left, expressive, and confrontational), inspiration (top-right, expressive but nonconfrontational), service (bottom-left, reserved, and nonconfrontational), and competence (bottom-right, reserved but confrontational) borrowed from the work of psychologists Carl Gustav Jung, Gordon Allport, and others. In turn, those pioneers of behavioral research had drawn inspiration from ancient classifications of human qualities like the four essences of fire, air, water, and earth, and their applications to early forms of medicine, engineering, and governance. Thanks to their efforts, today’s map-like charts translate temperamental differences into clear and memorable visual representations: once someone places their own or another country, corporate culture, or personal work style in a specific quadrant of a culture map, it is practically impossible to forget where it was.
Culture maps also allow easier comparisons between traditions, the same way as maps replaced the myth of infinite oceans with coordinates to enable orientation. The farther away two societies (in Meyer’s map, countries) are from each other, the bigger the differences, suggesting a fiercer culture shock when someone commutes or collaborates between them. The placement of societies instantly reveals the remarkable fact that cultural differences have little to do with geographical distance. In Meyer’s map, the United Kingdom and Sweden share the emotionally reserved and nonconfrontational service-style quadrant with Korea and Japan, while Germany and France are in respectively different corners. At my training courses, I encourage participants to imagine culture shock as rubber bands stretched out between countries in the map. The tighter the band, the greater the pressure of understanding and adopting local lifestyles. Like rubber bands, people may simply snap when they are expected to bridge excessive distances between cultures.
Poor matches between personal temperament and the local culture can ruin projects and careers, not to mention the mood of families, colleagues, and clients. Experienced overseas workers can spot such mismatches in a few weeks, if not days, of working together. As Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland cautioned, not everyone is cut out to be an expat, and although nobody is unfit for a country, they can be poorly adjustable to the culture of a specific city or firm. But spotting expats just before they succumb to acute culture shock is too late: reversing overseas assignments is costly and harmful. At headquarters, someone mistakenly promoted to the executive floor can be demoted again at the cost of some extra cardboard boxes, awkward negotiation, and some compensation. Failed expat assignments, on the other hand, squander thousands of air miles, relocation, rental and agency fees, unnecessarily disrupt teams, and uproot families. They also undermine relations with clients, suppliers, and government agencies, and cause reputational damage to the company.
One serious hurdle is that someone’s birthplace is a poor predictor of adaptability to China or any other place in the world—individual differences within countries are simply too big. One advantage of culture maps is that since their terminology originally described individual character, they allow straightforward scientific comparisons between individuals and societies. Research reveals that the determining factors of people’s behavior are evenly split between nature and culture, in other words, that character is half inherited and half imprinted by society. That also implies that babies have a roughly even chance of being born in a culture that aligns or conflicts with their natural temperament. There are as many genetically fun-loving, curious, and whimsical (emotionally expressive and nonconfrontational) children born in Rio as in Tokyo, but they experience dramatically different treatment as they grow up. As humans instinctively try to reduce conflict, life is about finding like-minded companions and communities—friends, teachers, peers, professions, spouses, clubs, and so forth. Those who are born into a natural mismatch with their immediate surroundings feel a stronger urge to explore. Leaving one’s native land is one of the most symbolic ways to wipe the cultural slate clean.
Strategies and Tactics of Cultural Adaptation
Culture mapping could prevent mistaken expat placements, but daily business practice is not that simple. Profiling one candidate with cutting-edge tools costs less than a wheely bag. The reason why many firms still deploy people without cultural scrutiny is that the reputation of inter-cultural behavior assessment has ridden a roller-coaster between hype and hatred in recent decades. A century ago, progressive intellectuals celebrated Carl Gustav Jung and his like minds as geniuses. Sadly, they also conflated psychology with Taoism, reincarnation, and other forms of magic and mystery, which repelled technocrats at corporations and government offices. (This was the time when authoritative figures also dismissed Keynesian economics as humbug.) When recession and war in the 1930s and 1940s demanded new solutions, intercultural studies crowded their way into war rooms and boardrooms along with other new sciences. Edward T. Hall had studied culturally diverse approaches to time, space, body language, agreements, disagreements, and hierarchies from the 1930s, but only became prominent when U.S. armed forces harnessed his research to win hearts and minds among both allied and hostile nations during the Second World War.
Meanwhile, statistical minds like Robert McNamara, former Price-Waterhouse accountant and future Ford Motors President, U.S. Secretary of Defense, and World Bank President, taught armed forces to efficiently poll their people and turn massive amounts of data into speedy solutions. Bomber pilots panicked under fire and used minor mechanical issues as excuses to prematurely return to base, McNamara explained to an interviewer in 2003: commanders had to understand individual temperaments and deploy people accordingly.24 American armed forces and their European allies retrospectively analyzed data collected since the First World War, systematically conducted entry and exit polls for a wide range of deployments, and appointed military psychologists who occasionally followed troops into combat. One such combat psychologist unknowingly made a lasting impression on the U.S. Army Air Corps Gunnery Officer Arnold Daniels, and through him millions of future job seekers, workers, and managers. After the war, Daniels turned McNamara’s methodology into Predictive Index, a widely used workforce analytics instrument based on the same behavioral principles as DISC.25
War widened the scope of American interest from the exotic eccentricities of Brits, Belgians, and Italians to farther shores. Most of the fascination went to Japan, whose spectacular economic rise and resilience as a wartime enemy inspired as much bewilderment as the cultural distinctiveness of Japanese immigrants in the United States. Of course, curiosity and scientific rigor aside, wartime intercultural researchers served the same ultimate purpose as chemists and meteorologists: military victory. If culture specialists helped win wars, governments did not return the favor. The United States emerged from the conflict as the only genuine winner militarily as well as economically and politically, and the triumph lessened collective curiosity about the cultural roots of the conflicts it tried to police in Korea, Vietnam, then the Middle East and elsewhere. Projecting American blueprints onto local terrains seemed a surer secret to success not only in Washington but gradually among power elites in allied and conquered nations as well. Once again, intercultural research appeared to become an academic oddity with little practical relevance.
But the aftermath of each war also became a heyday of multinational business as corporations eagerly picked up the pieces that generals and politicians left behind. Private firms suddenly found themselves in charge to rebuild a global network of transportation lanes and warehouses, and simultaneously employ the anxious men who had shed their uniforms. Soldiers returned from overseas and went into business with heads full of ideas and hearts full of hope, but hurdles were as numerous as opportunities. Understanding and properly approaching faraway populations was essential for investment, sales, marketing, and management. Identical assembly lines and rulebooks yielded dramatically different results in diverse locations like the United States, France, Germany, China, and Japan. The work styles that characterized different nations and ethnic groups seemed haphazard. What accounted for the differences, and was there a way to overcome them? It was not too long before some nosy war veterans, now in corner offices, remembered the silent tons of archived survey sheets that recorded the meticulously penciled-in hopes, fears, habits, achievements, and mischiefs of soldiers, officers, support staff, and dependents all over the world.
In a few decades, a virtual trade secret of the armed forces became industry standard in advanced economies. Researchers of statistical analysis, anthropology, economics, and social psychology found new careers as consultants: Edward T. Hall’s 1987 book Hidden Differences came out with the subtitle “Doing Business with the Japanese.” By then, the practice of assessing job applicants and leadership candidates with surveying tools surprised nobody at global corporations. Increasingly, aptitude tests became a standard requirement for the placement of sales representatives, machine operators, airline pilots, managers, and executives. True to the circular nature of human learning, police, firefighting, and armed forces adopted private-sector assessment tools once developed by army psychologists. Experts hopped between sectors and cross-pollenated business with medical and behavioral science. Anthropologist Helen Fisher worked as an academic researcher, Chief Technology Officer at a top online matchmaking provider and leadership consultant within the span of two decades. The assessment tool she developed, NeuroColor, was part of a proliferation of tools that found their way to countless firms in dozens of languages.
Apostles of this upheaval of applied sciences never tire of presenting the benefits of mapping and harnessing human diversity at organizations. Meredith Belbin’s revolutionary work on Alpha teams demonstrated the importance of combining individual styles: a room full of natural leaders gets nowhere without followers.26 Anyone can spot the same four fundamental behavioral styles in management inspired systems like Situational Leadership, an elaborate methodology for managing people according to each person’s background, competence, and interest. Erin Meyer built on previous research about the nature of culture clashes and developed her Culture Map into a series of tools for human resources management, leadership, and more.27 London-based Hungarian entrepreneur Csaba Toth creatively fused the DISC personal profiling system and research data on national cultures to create Global DISC, an intercultural assessment and coaching toolkit. Year after year, multinational firms with winning intercultural strategies, and their entourages of business students, academics and think-tanks published convincing best-practice cases along with their documented financial, operational, and reputational benefits. The evidence appeared irrefutable.
Lost and Found in Cultural Roadmaps
Consultants like myself spent countless hours of conversation with decision makers over an ocean of variously toxic beverages to calmy reflect on past placements and strategize about the best use of advanced assessment tools. But when the rubber hit the road and companies had to choose among candidates, usually fast and based on limited information, old habits returned with a false promise of efficiency. Assessment tools are simple but still take some training and adaptation. Successful managers enjoy learning but hate the inevitable loss of self-confidence associated with new methods. They also tend to be busy and lack the foresight to experiment during calmer times between recruiting seasons. When they need to hire or promote someone, it is urgent. Under time pressure, most of them reach for the proverbial hammer of the human resource management toolbox, and make decisions based on a track record of past performance. But the only thing proven about such appointments is how often they fail. No wonder: when specialists and managers are transferred between countries and continents, they may retain their previous field of expertise, but everything else changes dramatically.
While often labeled soft skills as opposed to hard skills like finance, sales, engineering, and project management, cultural difficulties persistently bounce back, smack managers in the face, and bite them behind, especially those with a dismissive attitude. Early into expat assignments, people with insufficient cultural awareness sense that their personal effectiveness and trust with their teams are on shaky ground, but they justify that as a fair price for getting things done. Like an athlete with a neglected injury, they push through the pain and watch their performance ebb away in a vicious circle of discomfort, irritation, and conflict. The wider the GAP between the natural work styles of individuals and the cultural styles of their surroundings, the faster they race to the bottom of this destructive downward spiral. Like sports teams who run their players through medical check before the next game, cultural mapping methodologies help firms save time, money, effort, individual and collective dignity. Mapping behavioral matches and mismatches between candidates and target locations not only reveals how quickly the new arrival can roll up their sleeves and get to work, but also the kind of support they require in the longer run.
The thorough cultural orientation and VPN crash-course provided to Renata and Nicola is the exception rather than the rule. “I don’t think we prepare our people for China very well,” Attila Hilbert of Danone told me. “When we came here, we only took a short and unimpressive cultural introduction course. I refer my new expats to YouTube videos instead: they can learn more from those.” Some decision makers complete intercultural assessment but then forget about it, or feel too much in a hurry to decipher it. Others have more understandable concerns, starting with the fear that another layer of selection would shrink their talent pool. The long-term benefit of better placements should compensate for that worry, but there are other, less obvious advantages. Behavioral mapping can actually widen talent pools, because people with the right talent can learn the necessary skills but missing talent cannot be acquired. Assessment enables cross-functional hiring and promotion: firms that regularly profile their candidates can more easily move candidates for expat vacancies between fields like production, sales, customer service, or project management.
Another widespread source of skepticism toward behavioral mapping is the belief that ultimately, technical experience tramps culture fit. It only takes a few months of experience in an exotic country like China to realize how mistaken that belief is. Cultural tension devastates the morale, clarity, and motivation of managers with a poor fit to local work styles. At the end of the initial adjustment period, it even wears down ones who have the potential to succeed in the long run. The resulting surge of negative energy makes affected expats see everything in darker colors for a while. A perfect illustration is a straightforward admission from Fernanda, perhaps the most upbeat among all my interviewees. “After two years, I felt stressed and isolated. It seemed that people were unreliable and unwilling to help. That they constantly made promises that they didn’t keep. I had to ask myself ‘What am I doing here?’” At such times, expats must return to the proverbial drawing board and contemplate fundamental questions about their presence and prospects in their chosen location.
“The question is what you want to be as an expat,” Rachel told me. “Do you want to be a change agent, or do you want to fit in?” The choice may feel harsh to outsiders and newcomers, who often seek ways to synthesize the best of both options. But seasoned expats know how important it is to soberly assess matches and mismatches between their own expectations and the surrounding layers of work cultures: team, firm, city, and country. The data provided by intercultural assessment serves as an essential resource for such soul-searching, which successful expat managers tend to repeat every couple of years. They must start with the culture in the center: their own personality, values, and habits. Naturally sociable managers pick up the pace much faster than relative recluses. “I must have had about fifty introductory one-on-ones during my first weeks,” Briana recalled. “I had never done that in previous jobs, but I’d learned that relationships were critically important to get anything done in China, so I saw that time as investment. I was surprised that the otherwise ‘go-go-go’ sort of Chinese managers had an hour to chat and how transparent they were. People don’t do that in North America.”
Expats with a temperamental preference for clear boundaries, consistency, and privacy adapt slower and with numerous reservations. But then again, in a culturally challenging business environment, fitting in is not always desirable. “The objective of the acquired understanding isn’t to become like the people in that cultural group or to be able to play their games,” authors David Livermore and Soon Ang wrote in Leading with Cultural Intelligence. “The goal is to understand and appreciate the rules behind their lives and society so that you can effectively lead.”28 In China’s dynamic but capricious market, keen-eyed organizers and evaluators deliver just as much value as courageous explorers, especially if the two styles collaborate well. “Multinational business matured in China, and the local workforce matured with them,” coach Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland explained. “Large international firms represent middle-class values, and the majority of expats are sent in to enforce compliance.” Naturally calm and cautious leaders can also help foreigners under their guidance to avoid the reactive firefighting mentality mentioned earlier.
Initial self-reflection can naturally proceed to wider comparisons, for instance between an expat’s native culture and local habits. “Frankly, coming from Italy helped me to pick up the pace in China,” Angelo Puglisi of Benteler told me. “Italians are fast and flexible, just like Chinese people. They summon each other for last-minute meetings, and people actually show up. That style definitely doesn’t work at our headquarters in Germany.” Even if the temperament of individual foreign managers does not reflect the work style of their homelands, having been raised, educated, and employed there guarantees certain cultural survival tactics—otherwise they would have never been promoted to management. Mapping matches and mismatches between a manager’s personal work style and surrounding cultures can make crucial decisions much easier, be they about career or private life. Whether an expat’s preference is blending in or inspiring change, obscure towns, or glamorous metropolises, culture mapping can replace some of the costly and painful experimentation with a simple analytical exercise.
High-stake promotions to senior positions often raise the question whether a candidate’s personal characteristics, like the balance between confrontational and conciliatory tendencies, are genetically determined or caused by family and ethnic background, life experience, or even factors such as gender and age. That sounds like a relevant question, because social influences change over a lifetime of personal and professional experiences, while innate ones stubbornly remain. Did Attila Hilbert, native to the confrontational culture of Hungary, develop his empathy during a childhood spent between cultures, or was he born that way? Should Angelo Puglisi thank his genes, the chatty confidence of his native Italy or his managerial experience in India for his agility? Being from candid North America, are Briana’s patient listening skills a personality trait or the fruit of trial-and-error learning? But as opposed to therapy, in a corporate environment, the distinction makes little difference. Expats are mature adults whose profiles stay relevant whether their drive, curiosity, empathy, or diligence come from their inherited genetic code or upbringing. As long as they show the potential to manage cultural ambiguity and deliver results, the underlying reason is of secondary importance.
Intercultural assessment can also clarify sensitive and deeply misunderstood topics like diversity. Managers are often aware that uniformity undermines performance, and try to add demonstrable but superficial varieties of minority ethnic, religious, gender, and generational backgrounds. But, as neuroleadership expert Hans W. Hagemann pointed out, “a team that looks like the UN may not be diverse. Teams succeed not because of the variety of their appearances or backgrounds, but because of the diversity of skills and personality types they possess.”29 Scientific assessment helps managers consider more sources of diversity than meets the eye, including personal temperament and influences from early childhood to recent professional postings. Remember how Angelo Puglisi’s experience in India helped him in China. Or Attila Hilbert’s preference for expats with experience in other developing nations, which has its root in his own childhood. “I remember how outraged I was at the condescension and arrogance of Europeans in Tunisia,” he recalled his youthful experience as the son of a Hungarian expat. “When I saw the sons of Italian factory managers act like princes, I felt closer to the Arabs. I still cannot stand that attitude.” Assessment profiles clearly reveal such mixtures of commitment and empathy.
The value of second-generation expats and so-called third-culture kids from ethnically mixed families, for instance, had been an open secret in diplomatic services and international commercial missions long before corporations realized it. Kids surrounded by multiple cultures playfully master lessons that adults must drill in through ossified biases and prejudices. Candidates from such backgrounds welcome the opportunity to work in culturally diverse and flexible environments. In the hands of smart managers, culture mapping reveals shortcuts across this otherwise problematic leadership area, and can benefit entire firms. “L’Oréal Paris builds product development teams around these managers, who, by virtue of their upbringing and experiences, have gained familiarity with the norms and behaviours of multiple cultures and can switch easily among them,” one expert wrote in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article. “They are uniquely qualified to play several crucial roles: spotting new-product opportunities, facilitating communication across cultural boundaries, assimilating newcomers, and serving as a cultural buffer between executives and their direct reports and between subsidiaries and headquarters.”30
A couple of hours with expats over dinner or drinks proves that scientific methods only confirm the wisdom of generations: exposure to diverse lifestyles is a good preparation for handling daily culture clashes. But even seasoned wanderers have a lot to learn in each new culture they encounter. Open-minded people, no matter how they acquired their mental agility, suffer less and make faster progress under cultural pressure. Their abilities are often so subtle that even they do not understand the secret of their successes. Were his achievements in China due to active effort or gradual socialization, I asked Henrik König. “Is there a difference, Gabor?” he countered. “It’s hard for me to tell the difference.” The enormous value of Dragon Suits for global firms lies exactly in the fact that the daily grind of busy jobs polishes their potential into the kind of minimalistic wisdom that is tried, true, and digestible. “The bottom line here is that they will respect you for respecting their culture,” wrote a long-time foreign resident in 2017. “They won’t respect you for ditching your own.”31 Such soundbites may be the best proof that someone is ready to ascend to the next level of responsibilities in China, and lead others along the same learning journey.
1 C. Devonshire-Ellis. November 2014. “Hong Kong Murders and Expatriate Psychological Issues in China,” China Briefing. www.china-briefing.com/news/2014/11/04/can-recent-hong-kong-murders-teach-us-hr-issues-china.html.
2 Education First. n.d. “EF English Proficiency Index: The world’s Largest Ranking of Countries and Regions by English Skills.” www.ef.com/wwen/epi/ (accessed July 12, 2022).
3 J.A. Fernandez and L. Underwood. 2020. China CEO II: Voices of Experience From 25 Top Executives Leading MNCs in China (Oxford: Wiley), p. 75.
4 J. Huang. January 2013. “Developing Local Talent for Future Leadership,” China Business Review. www.chinabusinessreview.com/developing-local-talent-for-future-leadership/.
5 C. Chan. January 2016. “Why Some Chinese Speakers Also Use Western Names,” Deutsche Welle. www.dw.com/en/why-some-chinese-speakers-also-use-western-names/a-18966907.
6 R. Zavoretti. 2016. “Is It Better to Cry in a BMW or to Laugh on a Bicycle? Marriage, ‘Financial Performance Anxiety’, and the Production of Class in Nanjing (People’s Republic of China),” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 4, pp. 1190–1219.
7 J.A. Fernandez and L. Underwood. 2011. China CEO: Voices of Experience From 20 International Business Leaders (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons), p. 55.
8 M. Cyrill. April 2016. “The 996 Work Culture That’s Causing a Burnout in China’s Tech World,” China Briefing. www.china-briefing.com/news/996-work-culture-china-tech-sector-burnout/.
9 HSBC. n.d. “Living in Mainland China: Your Guide to Expat Life in Mainland China.” www.expat.hsbc.com/expat-explorer/expat-guides/mainland-china/living-in-mainland-china/.
10 K. Kinder. 2015. Wonderlanded: Life as an Expat in China (Amazon LLC), p. 35.
11 OC Tanner Institute. n.d. “2018 Global Culture Report,” p. 24. www.octanner.com/content/dam/oc-tanner/documents/white-papers/2018/2018_Global_Culture_Report.pdf.
12 G. Filippelli and P. Gong. May 2018. “Aspiring Toward Healthy Cities in China,” Eos. https://eos.org/editors-vox/aspiring-toward-healthy-cities-in-china.
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