Читать книгу Against the yellow background. Zero tolerance - Ilya Marushchak - Страница 4

This chapter continues dealing with the hierarchy of Asian society and how to use it to your advantage. The most important thing you always have to understand is what your own place in the hierarchy is according to your companion.

You may find some contradiction here. Like, the author has just said that a foreigner doesn’t belong to the local system, but in the next chapter he is already trying to put him in some place in the hierarchy. It’s not a mistake. The point is that the tradition of “placing” a person is hardwired to the Asian mindset, so you will be “placed” somewhere automatically, even though you are a foreigner. Therefore, relationships are also structured “by default” – from up to down or vice versa. If this contact is important for you try to understand two things. The first question is what your “default” position is, according to your companion. In order to understand that you should know what your companion’s position is among his fellow countrymen who have a similar set of “tactical and technical” characteristics as you do.

For example, if you are a male, married, with children, aged 30—35, and your vis-à-vis is over 50 and has grandchildren, then you are one or two levels lower, so you will be treated like a junior. All your suggestions and opinions might not be taken seriously, if only you are not a representative of someone “higher”, officially authorized.

The second question is what kind of resource you are for your companion at the moment.

If you understand these two aspects, you will be able to communicate properly and play by your own rules.

The main thing you will learn is when and how to “log out” of this system. All your local colleagues, partners and buddies have already placed you in the structure, formed the principles of communication and got it right (according to them) how to use you. Even your employees are slaves of the system. They aren’t dedicated to the work you have hired them for (you are still a resource). You should understand that. Knowing aims, methods and expectations of the opposite side is a great advantage. I will tell you about a relevant case from my own experience that made me fully review my communication approaches and principles of dealing with local employees.

I guess it was my first year in Asia. I was trying to start a business. In spite of the fact that I had already hired some sales staff, I still preferred to deal with the key customers and solve large problems by myself. We mostly worked with midmarket local companies; so all negotiations were carried on with the aid of Vietnamese interpreters.

One day we had to hold talks with the owner of quite a large distribution company, an elderly woman. The company claimed the status of an exclusive distributor, but there was a big overdue delinquent liability to us on their side. Some of my employees tried to discuss debt payments with her, but in vain. They still owed us a considerable amount of money. These were two reasons (prospects of future cooperation and the need of getting money) why I decided to take part in these negotiations personally.

My translator was a young local girl who had spent a long time in Russia. She spoke both languages seamlessly and worked as an accountant’s assistant in our company, so she was fully aware of the situation, its circumstances and the overall goal of this meeting.

The first hour of the meeting was full of mutual assurance of far-reaching prospects and great opportunities of future cooperation. It was traditionally cute and friendly. After that they strongly hinted that it would be perfect to call it a day for now. But since the delinquent payment issue hadn’t even been brought up, I insisted on further discussion, all the more so as the list of questions had been approved beforehand. As it immediately turned out (to my great surprise), nobody was even going to raise this question. My partners hadn’t prepared any documents from their side for reconciliation. Of course, they still admitted they had a debt. When I tried to ask some polite but very specific questions about the reasons for having this debt for so long and why my staff couldn’t solve this problem it in the regular course of business, all the answers suddenly turned into something like “we wanted to pay on time, but there were so many reasons why we didn’t – sometimes the western wind was too strong, once we lost the key from the shop, another time the sun set in the east… we just couldn’t, you see that we have good excuses… You can understand it. We will pay very soon. Especially if you sign an exclusive contract with us and supply more goods on trust. We also need some budget for marketing”, etc. When I was listening to the translation of this monologue, my vis-à-vis was friendly smiling at me and repeating that I shouldn’t have worried – everything was fine, it just turned out like this.

But after my polite (I was really polite) request to start talking more realistic, make a schedule for the repayment of debts signed by the owner and agree to suspend shipments on trust until the debt redemption, the interpreter asked to talk to me one on one for a minute.

When we were left alone she said that now it would have been the right thing to thank the partners and leave because since I was much lower by my social status than that old woman, I just couldn’t say such things to her. As for the interpreter, she was even lower by her status so she also couldn’t translate what I asked her, because that old owner of the company could have been her grandmother. I asked her what I was supposed to do with that flow of pure garbage (some kids in a kindergarten would have sounded more sensible, to be honest) that they had offered as reasonable excuses for delayed payments. She said that in this case the best way to act would be to pretend politely that you had believed it and get back to negotiations later. Also it would be much better to trust local staff to negotiate next time.

I guess, someone less peaceful than me would have already started to feel overemotional about the whole situation. But I realized that anger wouldn’t help so I decided to try a different method.

I asked the interpreter to say that she was extremely sorry personally but her boss told her to translate word by word everything that he was saying. After that I politely described my whole vision of the situation and how, from my point of view, it was possible to continue our cooperation. I also genuinely expressed my real attitude to the so-called reasons for the delay of payments.

It had a bombshell effect on them. I could read it from their faces. Their minds were completely blown. I was sure this lady had never met a person twice younger than her who would have dared speak to her like that. For a moment I thought that they were going to say that our cooperation was over. A minute later the lady came to her senses (which I couldn’t say about my employees) and said that in spite of the fact that “the terms of the contract had been violated by themselves” and none of it was their fault, they promised to think about it and let me know about the decision.

I will tell straight off – we worked together about a year more after this. I met her again once or twice (when it was really impossible to avoid personal meeting). She always said to everyone that I was very hard to deal with.

I have drawn a lot of conclusions from that case. I will give further consideration to all of them in the following chapters. But I can mention the main one right now – if you know how to immediately “sign off” from the position you were automatically placed, it gives you a huge advantage. Of course, you should fully understand the motives of the opposite side.

If you manage to control this “bombshell effect” it will let you control your opponent while they can’t really get what is going on. You can do whatever you want until they find another suitable “niche” for you in their minds. This is a real opportunity to manipulate Asian people that derives from their mindset, and their mindset had been crystallized a few thousand years before this “civilization of social status”.

However, it’s crucial to use different reasons for these “bombshells”. If you repeat yourself every time, they will finally classify you as a caddish fellow and won’t deal with you again. This isn’t what you need.

Another very important thing is that you can’t be real friends with your boss or your subordinate employee. It doesn’t conform to local hierarchical models so it doesn’t exist. Well, it can exist just for show, in order to take advantage of this behaviour pattern (because you are a resource). Please do remember, if someone has much higher or much lower job position than you do, or they are much older or younger than you are, or they have different marital status, don’t even dream about sincere informal communication and friendship on equal terms. You will never have it from “the opposite side”. If you are the one who has a “higher position” you won’t be rejected out of pure politeness but they will try to take advantage of you in any possible way. If you are “lower” it’s much worse because they’re going to manipulate you. Some exceptions are possible in romantic relationships, but I guess I might be mistaken because I don’t have such experience. My personal observations rather indicate that even love affairs here should be subject to “civilization of status” rules.

There is one more aspect you should be aware about. Foreigners often feel perplexed and even offended because of not knowing it. Traditionally, Asians never say a firm “no”. When during the conversation you hear “yes” from time to time it doesn’t necessarily mean that they agree with you. It just means they are listening. Never rely on such “yes” even if it seemed very definite to you. Any “yes” from an Asian person is, first of all, a sign of politeness and attention. It’s neither consent nor a decision. Don’t ever forget that.

Here is an example. You are talking to an Asian friend or a colleague and saying “Let’s go to the cinema on Friday? There is a show at 11; I’ll buy the tickets. We could meet at 10—40 at the cinema.”

Your companion replies “Yes, of course, let’s go. What an excellent idea!”

After these words you see the green light – you are ready to buy the tickets and wait for your friend at the cinema as agreed. But for your Asian friend it was just an abstract idea that can potentially be turn into reality. He might come if he doesn’t have anything else to do, if he doesn’t forget, if he finds the film interesting, if, if, if… In none of the cases he will inform you about it. He could say “yes” just because he felt uneasy to refuse.

If you want to put this abstract idea into action you will have to get minimum two more “yes” from your friend before the event. Otherwise, it won’t even occur to him that you have really planned it. He would think it was just blabbering.

But that’s small beer that will hardly do any harm to your relationships.

You might have really dire consequences for yourself personally and for your relationship if you express or imply that you have some problem that you are currently unable to solve.

Remember what you have just learned? It is impolite to say “no” in Asia. You are in the “civilization of status”. That means that whoever you talk to they will immediately offer you their help. First, they think so because they automatically regard your story as a call for help. Second, it will “elevate” them in their eyes (or maybe not only in theirs) because since you are asking them for help you trust them and think they can manage something you can’t manage by yourself.

From this point forward you’ve got new problems in your life. These problems can be of different severity level. The worst you can do is to wait for your problem to be solved, especially, if you have a deadline.

There are some exceptions though. For example, you mention your problem in front of someone who is an expert in this field. It’s easy to understand from the conversation. It is also fine if someone introduces you to someone else so that you could ask for advice. You’re lucky then. Unfortunately, 90% of cases have the same above-mentioned script with slight alterations.

You assume that after you discussed the problem and your friend told you he would help, you will get the result at some point. It makes sense from your point of view. But in most cases nothing happens. Most probably, no one was even going to deal with your problem in spite of cordial assurances of support. If you got it right and never disturbed the person with your request again, it’s like nothing had ever happened. You simply had a conversation. He might have improved his status though by mentioning to his friends how powerful he is – even foreigners ask him for assistance!

If you start reminding about yourself and asking what has been already done or what you can do to contribute, you automatically activate another program. Finally, according to this new script, you will be the one to blame for not solving the problem. It is you who has given all the wrong explanations, you haven’t provided the necessary information or documents, or you have sent wrong documents, to a wrong person, at a wrong time, at a wrong place… You have basically done everything wrong.

As a result, you just wasted so much time of such a busy and important man, but he is so generous and kind-hearted that he holds no grudges. He is even willing to invite you for lunch with his friends in order to tell them all the details about how he wanted to help this stupid foreigner, but the foreigner was so useless that simply ruined everything himself.

At this stage all you want is to cut off contact with this person. Sometimes you are even tempted to apply some physical action. Unfortunately, it will happen every time you would like to ask someone for help.

There is only one way out. You will hardly ever change your skin so much. It’s quite hard to avoid such conversations all the time. It’s not necessary to avoid them though. When someone insists on helping you, tell them that everything been already sorted out or is going to be sorted out shortly, so no need to bother such an important and busy man. But in case something goes wrong you will surely ask him for help. It’s enough to show that you obey courtesy rules. By the way, after you say it, you can easily ask about your companion’s opinion about possible solutions for this problem that he himself would have chosen. If he seems to be professional in this field you can choose to really ask him to help you.

I think it’s enough for a general idea of local communication style. If something seems too general and “universal” to you, don’t get upset. Later on I will make more specific examples of building communication bridges under very different circumstances.

I hope the most important thing you have got out of this chapter is how not to be a hostage to your own communication model. We will learn how to take advantage for ourselves later. Now remember how not to harm yourself. When you live with the permanent lack of communication and native cultural environment even the slightest psychological discomfort can easily turn to craving for the familiar mindset. Sometimes you’ll be wildly eager to give the finger to everything, pack your things and be off to the airport.

But if you want to be a success in such a hot place as Asia you need to learn how to keep your head cool all the time.