Then all of a sudden, you are no longer wallowing in the generalities of some vague China-US differences. Now your management challenge becomes more tangible; it begins to be specific.
The arrows in the above picture – pointing in the opposite directions – are showing that it is very likely that your teams in China and in the U.S. are operating with a misaligned understanding of how the company expects them to operate.
In my experience, tracing these misalignments to specific qualities – such as the mindset, the execution skills, the process, the expectations and the habits in the company – is a lot easier, and effective, way to adjust these misalignments. But we often make the mistake of coming at them with a big old “China-US cultural differences” paradigm, which just makes the issue so much more difficult to even define.
