Looking a Culture in the Eye

INSEAD (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Working with people from all places and races, it is always a challenge. And in my experience, language is the first barrier to be broken down - it is tantamount to knowing the culture by knowing the language. But then again, it may not always be the case.

What your experience?
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ERIN MEYER


I teach cross-cultural management at the international business school Insead, near Paris. For 15 years, I have studied how people in different parts of the world build trust, communicate, make decisions and perceive situations differently, especially in the workplace.

While traveling in Tokyo recently with a Japanese colleague, I gave a short talk to 20 managers. At the end, I asked whether there were any questions or comments. No hands went up. My colleague asked the group again: “Any comments or questions?”

Still, no one raised a hand, but he looked at each person in the audience. Gesturing to one of them, he said, “Do you have something to add?” To my amazement, she responded, “Yes, thank you,” and asked a very interesting question. My colleague repeated this several times.

Afterward, my colleague was unsure how to explain the phenomenon. Then he said, “It has to do with how bright their eyes are.

“In Japan,” he continued, “we don’t make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West. So when you asked if there were any comments, most people were not looking directly at you. But a few people in the group were looking right at you, and their eyes were bright. That indicates that they would be happy to have you call on them.”

That is not something I learned from my upbringing in Minnesota, or during my years spent in living in Europe and Africa.

After the trip I returned to my classroom, where the students are managers from all over the world. I felt both embarrassed and unsettled to see that I had been missing a lot of bright eyes.

In Japan there is an expression, “kuuki yomenai,” which refers to someone who is unable to read the atmosphere. On my trip I was reminded that, with a little curiosity and some help, I could improve my ability to read the Japanese atmosphere.

In today’s economy, an Italian might be negotiating a deal in Nigeria or a German could be managing a team of Brazilians.

In France, I was surprised to hear Americans complain that their French teammates were disorganized and always late. Yet some Indian colleagues were frustrated about those same people being rigid and unadaptable.

I map cultures on eight behavioral dimensions: communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling.

For example, the French culture falls between the American and Indian cultures on the scheduling dimension – hence the opposite impressions about chaos versus rigidity.

If you lead a multicultural team, you need to find the flexibility to work up and down these dimensions: watch what makes local managers successful, explain your own style, and perhaps, learn to laugh at yourself. Ultimately, it means learning to lead in different ways.

Focus on understanding behavior in other cultures, and keep finding the bright eyes in the room.


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, September 27, 2014

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Termites Work Together as Guardians in the Soil

English: These termite mounds were most impressive. From the park sign: Cathedral Termite Mound This mound is home to a colony of grass eating termites, Nasutitermes triodiae. It's about 5 meters high and could be over 50 years old. Kingdom:Animalia Phylum:Arthropoda Class:Insecta Subclass:Pterygota Infraclass:Neoptera Superorder:Dictyoptera Order:Isoptera Family: Termitidae Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia i09_0501 027 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is definitely a science feature, but there is something to learn, especially for leaders. We don't always get to give. It is what we are, how we do, and where we thrive. That will spell our survival for the next milleniums to come...
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By NATALIE ANGIER


The giant termite mounds that rise up from the sands of the African savanna are so distinctive it is tempting to give them names, like “Trumpeting Elephant” or “Flagrantly Obvious Fertility Totem.”

Whatever the metaphor, the megaforms dominate their landscape, and not just visually. As scientists are just beginning to appreciate, termites and their habitats are crucial to the health and robustness of an array of ecosystems: from deserts to rain forests to your local park.

Researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey reported in the journal Science that termite mounds may serve as oases in the desert, allowing the plants that surround them to persist on a fraction of the annual rainfall otherwise required and to bounce back after a withering drought. The mounds could prove potential bulwarks against climate change, preventing fragile dryland from slipping into lifeless wasteland.

“Even when you see desertification start to happen between the mounds, the vegetation on or around the mounds is doing so well it will keep reseeding the environment,” said Corina Tarnita, a professor at Princeton and an author of the report.

While the public may view termites as pale, blind, centimeter-long vermin that can damage homes, only a handful of the 3,000 or so known termite species are pests to people. Many of the rest, you can thank for the ground beneath your feet, which is where the majority live and work. The closer scientists look, the longer grows the list of subterranean tasks that termites take on.

“They’re the ultimate soil engineers,” said David Bignell, an emeritus professor at Queen Mary University of London.

By poking holes as they dig, termites allow rain to soak deep into the soil rather than run off or evaporate. Termites mix sand, stone and clay with organic bits of leaf litter, discarded exoskeletons and the occasional squirrel tail, a blending that helps the soil retain nutrients and resist erosion.

The stickiness of a termite’s feces and other bodily excretions lends structure and coherence to the soil, which also prevents erosion. Bacteria in the termite’s gut can fix nitrogen, extracting it from the air and converting it into a fertilizer, benefiting the termite host and the vast underground economy. “Over all, termites are extremely good for the health of the soil” on which everything else depends, Dr. Bignell said.

Termites also provide a model for understanding the origins of social life, the division of labor, and a sort of altruistic, self-abnegating behavior. In a new study of “panic escape” behavior among termites as they seek to flee from danger, researchers at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center determined that the one thing the termites do not do when disturbed is panic. They don’t start running, pushing and shoving, or clambering over the fallen. They don’t behave like people in a crowded theater when somebody yells fire, or like ants whose nest has been harrowed.

Instead, the researchers found that when they placed 110 termites on round plastic dishes and gave the plates a shake, the termites started running in an orderly fashion, depending on whether they were ordinary workers or soldiers dedicated to nest defense. The workers fell into single-file formation. The ones infront decided whether to turn left or right, and the rest followed at a uniform speed and spacing.

The soldiers migrated to either side of the flow, snapping their mandibles as though preparing to do battle. If one termite stumbled or slowed, those behind would stop and wait for it to right itself.

That organization distinguishes termites from their more famous counterparts among social insects, the ants. “Ants will crowd over each other and get trapped at exits or intersections,” said Gregg Henderson, an entomologists at the agricultural center and an author of the report, which appeared in the journal Insect Science. “But I’ve seen no evidence of selfishness in termites.”

That may be because they have had a lot of practice. Termites, Dr. Henderson said, “were the first animals to form societies,” starting about 200 million years ago, some 50 million years earlier than the ants and their hymenopteran cousins, the bees.

With the help of symbiotic bacteria and protozoa packed into their stomachs at what might be the highest microbial densities in nature, termites thrive by eating what others can’t or won’t: wood, dung, even dirt.

The great termite artists of Africa, the mound builders, cultivate a fungus in tunnels and galleries deep inside vast palaces built of sand, clay and termite excretions. The termites eat a small portion of the fungal spores and use the fungal enzymes to help break down fibrous food sources.

The termites, in turn, offer their fungal partners water, nourishment and a temperate and well-ventilated haven free of competing fungal strains. The mounds also protect their builders against the sun, the seasonal rain and predators.

The largest African mounds can measure nine meters high and house millions of termites. In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, antelope congregate around termite mounds, and not just for the grazing opportunities.

“The mounds are cooler in the heat of day and warmer at night,” said Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton and an author of the report in Science. “They’re a very pleasant place to hang out.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, March 14, 2015

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Liar, Liar? Easier Said Than Seen

Liar Liar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is this technique applied during job interviews? At work?
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BY JOHN TIERNEY


Like most people, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. In the United States, the Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.

But critics say there’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The T.S.A. seems to have fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.

Most people think liars give themselves away by averting their eyes or making nervous gestures, and many law-enforcement officers have been trained to look for specific tics, like gazing upward in a certain manner. But in scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars. Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better at it than ordinary people even though they’re more confident in their abilities.

“There’s an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a person’s body,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. “Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers.”

The T.S.A. program was reviewed last year by the Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its effectiveness. That recommendation was based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.

In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the time. Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average at 54 percent, only slightly better than chance.

“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,” says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Researchers have found that the best clues to deceit are verbal – liars tend to be less forthcoming and tell less compelling stories.

One technique that has been taught to law-enforcement officers is to watch the upward eye movements of people as they talk. This is based on a theory from believers in “neuro-linguistic programming” that people tend to glance upward to their right when lying, and upward to the left when telling the truth.

But this theory didn’t hold up when it was tested by a team of British and North American psychologists. They found no pattern in the upward eye movements of liars and truth tellers.

“There is no Pinocchio’s nose – no one cue that will always accompany deception,” says an author of the eye-movement study, Leanne ten Brinke, of the University of California, Berkeley.

She and others argue that it may nonetheless be possible to detect certain kinds of “high stakes” lies by looking for an array of body cues. Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia says the poor success rate in studies is caused partly by the limitations of laboratory experiments in which subjects are asked to lie about things that don’t matter to them.

Last year, psychologists at the University of British Columbia trained professionals in forensics to look for facial expressions and other signs of stress or inconsistency in someone telling a story. Then these professionals looked at news footage of people pleading for the return of a missing relative.

Some of the pleaders were sincere, but others were lying (as eventually revealed by evidence that they had murdered the relative). The trained professionals were able to identify the liars with an 80 percent accuracy rate.

That’s an impressive record, but it’s only one experiment, and many researchers question how reliably these techniques can be applied in the real world.

Why do we intuitively believe we can read body language? After writing a book on the topic, Dr.Epley has an explanation.

“When you’re lying or cheating, you know it and feel guilty, and it feels to you as if your emotions must be leaking out through your body language,” he says. “You have an illusion that your emotions are more transparent than they actually are, and so you assume others are more transparent than they actually are, too.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, 05 April 2014

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Idea of Work-Life Balance Hits Wall Street

Goldman Sachs Headquarters, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This idea of work-life balance is now becoming one important factor in a person's life these days. For what would you do with your tons of money, when nobody is around you anymore to share it with? Or you are no longer healthy to at least enjoy it yourself?


Just what is all the point there is after all the trouble?
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BY RACHEL L.SWARNS


The hard-working investment banker got out of bed at 11 a.m. First a leisurely cup of coffee and some Greek yogurt. Then after a run, he and three friends spent the afternoon watching college basketball on television.

The junior banker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by his employer to talk to a reporter, was savoring a rarity: a Saturday off.

“It’s weird waking up, saying, ‘What do I do with my time now?’” he said.

In recent months, some of the biggest banks on Wall Street have upended tradition by urging their junior bankers to take weekend days off.

In January, Bank of America Merrill Lynch told its junior bankers to take four weekend days off every month. Credit Suisse and Citigroup have urged their analysts and associates not to work on Saturdays. Last year, Goldman Sachs recommended that its analysts take weekend off whenever possible, and JPMorgan Chase announced an initiative to ensure that young staff members would have one “protected weekend” every month.

“We want them to be challenged, but also to operate at a pace where they’re going to stay here and learn important skills that are going to stick,” said David Solomon, at Goldman Sachs. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Some may view the schedule change for overworked junior bankers as insignificant. But in an industry in which grueling schedules are embraced as a badge of honor, it reflects a significant shift in corporate culture.

The move to rethink workloads accelerated last summer when a 21-year-old intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London office died after an epileptic seizure. Reports suggested that he had worked three nights in a row.

The change also reflects the shifting realities: Wall Street is no longer the inevitable first choice finance graduates, some of whom are drawn to technology firms that often offer flexibility at work and big paychecks.

Sonia Marciano, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said her students expected more than big bonuses. “My students, men and women, talk much more openly about an expectation of work-life balance,” said Ms. Marciano, who has been teaching for 20 years. “It’s a shift that seems pretty real and substantial.”

The junior banker who spent the recent Saturday with friends, said that in his first year on Wall Street, he worked all but a few weekend days. His parents stopped hoping that he would answer the phone. He lost touch with friends and struggled to find time to exercise. “The toll that it takes on you as a person, it’s overwhelming,” he said.

He still works through the weekend when a big deal is imminent and responds to calls and emails when he is out of the office.

But on that recent Saturday, he watched college basketball without his BlackBerry beeping. Later, he and his friends went out for burgers and a night of partying. “A chance to recharge,” he said.

He arrived home at 5 a.m., bleary-eyed and ready for a few hours of sleep. But just a few. It was Sunday, and time to get back to work.


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, April 5, 2014

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Work, a Gender Bias Among Leaders

English: London Business School logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If brokerage is more apt to be for men, then modelling and product promotion is undoubtedly for women...
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BY PHYLLIS KORKKI


Who really makes the changes in an organization? It’s not always the people with the highest executive titles. A growing body of research has pointed to the importance of informal leaders known to researchers as “brokers,” who have the gift of connecting employees in productive new ways.

New research by Raina A. Brands of the London Business School and Martin Kilduff of University College London has uncovered a bias surrounding brokerage roles.

Professor Brands and Professor Kilduff examined what are known as “friendship networks” within organizations. In this sense, friends are the people you turn to for help, advice and information, whether or not they are in your work group. Simply put, you like and trust them, Professor Brands says. It’s within these friendship networks that much of an organization’s work gets done, Professor Brands says.

In a study of two separate groups – employees of an electronic-components distributor and a cohort of M.B.A. students – she and professor Kilduff identified brokers based on the high level of connectivity they displayed. They also identified the people who were perceived by their colleagues to be brokers. (Perceived brokers are not always actual brokers.)

Researchers asked members to evaluate their colleagues, including the actual and perceived brokers. This is where gender differences emerged. The researchers found that people tended to ignore the activities of female brokers and to exaggerate how much men served as brokers. If women were recognized as brokers, they were perceived more negatively.

“They incurred reputational penalties,” Professor Brands says.

“They were seen as more competent, but less warm.” Other research, she says, has shown that men who take on brokerage roles tend to receive benefits in the form of compensation and promotions, whereas female brokers’ careers are negatively affected.

Professor Brands and Professor Kilduff also analyzed the performance of the brokers’ teams. They found that women who were thought by their teams to be brokers tended to perform well individually, but at the expense of their overall team’s performance.

The professors noted that men are traditionally defined by words like aggressive, forceful, independent and decisive. Women, on the other hand, are stereotypically expected to be kind, helpful, and sympathetic and concerned about others.

Women are thought to excel in the social realm – so you would think that they would be seen as good work brokers, the researchers said. But “despite the widespread notion of women as social specialist, perceptions of the network position of women will be distorted because of the expectation that brokerage is man’s work,” they wrote.

Much of this distortion may be below the level of conscious awareness, Professor Brands says, and simply bringing it to employees’ attention could help minimize the reputational bias that women incur at work.


Taken from The New York Times International Weekly, TODAY Saturday Edition, April 26, 2014

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