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Résolution des conflits

Conflict Resolution

Thinking Styles

National Cultural Differences

The Client: A Financial Services company with HQ in Germany and international operations in approximately 20 countries worldwide.  The work took place in a European country outside Germany .  

The Conflict (and Change) Problem:   The local staff did not understand the importance of reporting, preparing for meetings, attending meetings on time or giving feedback to their manager.  They also felt that the expatriate manager was asking them to perform tasks they did not know how to perform.  Every time he asked them to perform a new task they said “Yes”, but they never told him about the difficulties they were experiencing or even if the project could be done.  There was a tendency to pile up in a heap all the requests from the expatriate manager while the local staff battled with the managerial tasks they should have been able to do but which they had never been trained to do.  This created a situation where the expatriate manager could not give information to HQ and where turnover was being badly affected.  He grew increasingly frustrated by what he saw as a resistant national culture.  A couple of minor incidents then caused an all-out crisis in which the local staff complained over the head of the expatriate manager.  The expatriate manager had been “protecting” the local staff by not telling his own management the problems he had encountered over the past two years.  Thus the whole situation came as a “bolt from the blue” to senior management back in Germany .

What we proposed and were then asked to do:

(1)               Hold confidential meetings with all people involved.  We tried to bring trust to an atmosphere of high distrust.  We got their opinions about what had gone wrong.  They were also asked to fill out the Kirton Adaptor Innovator (KAI) questionnaire.  This allowed us to analyse their individual decision-making and creative style, to analyse the spread of cognitive diversity within the team, and to give them written individual feedback later.

(2)               Analyse the results of the interviews and hold a feedback session with the expatriate manager and design with him a workshop that would allow him and his colleagues to talk sensibly about what had happened and to find a way forward.

(3)               Hold the first mini-workshop with the manager and his colleagues. 

a.       Written feedback from the verbatim interviews was given to all present and then destroyed.  In this way everybody could see what had been said but no written traces were left that could inadvertently be used out of context.

b.       Presentation of our analysis to all present:

                              i.      The problems that resulted from individual differences (This came out in the feedback from the KAI questionnaire,i.e. some individuals in the team were relative or extreme adaptors and others were relative or extreme innovators and this led them to go at problem solving in different ways)

                               ii.      The problems that resulted from national cultural differences: The Global-Local problem, in which Headquarters tries to put in place fixed, worldwide processes which local staff see as not taking into account their local knowledge and thus destroying creativity. 

                              iii.  The two countries had different ideas about what constituted a successful  meeting. 

                              iv.  Both countries also had different styles of knowledge sharing (one country shared knowledge in as explicit a manner as possible in regular, structured meetings, the other country shared tacit knowledge informally all day long and did not understand why meetings should be held regularly or even be prepared)

                               v.      The problems that resulted from the poorly planned change and lack of management of the transition: (Transition Management)

1.       The expatriate manager had been given one day of intercultural training and only a few days with his predecessor.  The predecessor had not brought him up to speed on his local management team’s competencies and he treated them like equals instead of people who needed extensive coaching.  This put enormous stress on the local staff.

2.       The local staff, who had worked with a manager who liked to do everything himself had never had the opportunity to exercise responsibility and the previous manager had thought it part of his job to “protect” them from the HQ culture so they had not had the possibility to work with people of the new expatriate manager’s national culture before

3.       The local staff had never been trained in the skills needed to do their jobs, they did not understand the importance of meetings or why they needed to send detailed reports back to HQ and instead of telling the expatriate manager they could not do what he had asked they preferred not to “lose face”.  Thus they took on work they knew they could not do.

(4)               Hold the second mini-workshop.

a.       The first workshop had already given rise to considerable discussion, as the participants began to see that they could analyse the situation rationally, with the concepts they were being given.  Previous analysis had been on the level of emotions. 

b.       In the second mini-workshop, all participants were asked to use the “Transitions” framework to explain:

                              i.      What had ended for them.  For example, in the case of the expatriate manager he had left behind a big team which had clear lines of delegation in place in a culture he knew to take over a team that did not have the necessary skills to accept delegation.  In the case of the local staff, they had lost an authoritarian manager who had perhaps not allowed them to grow professionally but who knew their culture and values and who had shielded them from many difficult decisions.

                              ii.      The Neutral Zone for them.  For example, the expatriate manager accepted that the national culture of the local staff was a big challenge for him.  The local staff accepted that they needed to get to know better the national culture of the large company they worked for.  On issues such as meetings, the expatriate manager and the local staff had to come to a compromise: formal meetings and informal meetings so that the reporting could be done.  This whole process was part of helping people through the neutral zone, and other training management training programmes were put in place to help the local managers get the required skills.

                              iii.     The New Beginning for them.  The fact that they could now analyse the situation rationally and that the local staff now said they knew how to take on board the next expatriate manager and to avoid the pain they had all been through for the previous two years.  

c.       The workshop ended with a session where the company’s values were pinned up on a set of flipcharts.  In an “idea walking” exercise all participants showed which values had been the most respected, which had not been respected and what actions could be taken by everybody present to make sure that all the values could be respected.

Result: As a result of the “Transitions” work we did with this company it managed to retain all of its local managers, many of whom had threatened to leave.  The expatriate manager was able to analyse on three levels what he needed to improve: the national cultural level, personal style level and the staff coaching level.   The local staff understood how their management behaviours had contributed to the problem and committed themselves to take action to become more in line with the more affirmative behaviours of the parent company.  We recently talked to the whole team and they say they work very happily together today and we have been engaged to do more management coaching work with the company.

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