AAPI Heritage Month & Beyond: Working with Asian Teams
Working with contractors based in India and other Asian countries is a high-value strategy, but it comes with cultural challenges. If not addressed, these challenges tip over into frustration and misunderstandings that lead to poor quality interactions, scope creep, missed deadlines, and missed business opportunities.
Technical professionals in America struggle against a stereotype that they can’t be good people managers. With a few strategies around self-advocacy and communication, their leadership skills become clear.
Eastern Work Culture vs Western Work Culture
It’s natural to assume professional interaction looks the same across the world, or believe the American way is the standard everyone else should aim for.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
In reality, American and Asian relationships with power and self are wildly different. Research into individualism and power dynamics around the world by Geert Hofstede shows South Asian and East Asian countries have a greater power differential to the USA. Power differential is the extent to which the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally,” which can be loosely translated as being more likely to “do what you’re told.”
American leaders assume that team members will provide feedback. Technologists raised in Asia or by Asians are reluctant to bring ideas and problems to their manager for fear of appearing critical; it simply isn’t done.
When American and Asian teams work together, this cultural difference leads to the misconception that Asian technologists aren’t capable of leadership behaviors or positions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technologists are highly creative problem solvers; a skill can be applied equally to coding or drafting and designing technical drawings as it can be to the day-to-day management of a team.
Book My Bootcamp: ‘Working Effectively with Asian Teams’
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
I believe everyone should be able to thrive in their workplace, and that’s why I offer something completely unique; a virtual leadership bootcamp that brings together employees at the interface of your North American and Asian workforces to learn cross-cultural communication, leadership skills, and cultural awareness.
How Does it Work?
The bootcamp is a tailored series of virtual workshops that tackles the problems you are facing head on, enabling your teams to work in harmony.
What’s Included?
· Cross cultural communication challenges: non-verbal communication and language nuances
· Different ways to communicate with your manager
· Leadership development for individual contributors moving to manager
· Building trust across global teams
· Managing up
· Proactive problem solving
· Client rapport skills
What’s the Impact?
After the bootcamp, North American leaders and Asian technologists report smoother relationships, skills to speak up about issues and opportunities, increased productivity, and smoother client relationships, all of which translates to higher productivity, reduced staff turnover, and new business opportunities. Participants develop informal relationships and use each other as sounding boards when intercultural communication challenges arise.
If you’d like to organize a cross cultural leadership bootcamp for your organization, email me at neelu@neelukaur.com.
