Company Zombies
Last week I wrote about horror movies, this time about the horror of real life
I attended two company related trainings recently, one about intercultural competence and one about project management. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the contents of those seminars but rather with an observation concerning some (Japanese) colleagues participating in such seminars.
First of all some (very simplified and shortened) take-away from the intercultural seminar: in Asia people learn “Confucius” style in school – they absorb information top down and do not challenge the teacher and prove what they learned in tests. In Europe and the Americas people learn “Socrates” style in school – they debate, they challenge the teacher, they ask why and the more “active” you are, the better is your evaluation.
This brings with it that Asians are “listener responsible” = it’s your fault as a receiver if you don’t get it, and Europeans (and North/South Americans) are “speaker responsible” = it’s the teacher’s fault if the students don’t get it. This makes Asians good listeners and Europeans (and North/South Americans) bad listeners, and bad speakers vs. good speakers respectively.
Another “result” of this general behavior (of course there are always exceptions) is that in Asia students tend to be rather passive, also in all the courses that I am sitting in either as a student and recently ever more as a teacher.
In the stuff I teach (moderation techniques) people are forced to be active by the sheer nature of the methods conveyed and the issue did not “jump” at me so badly. One of the reasons for that is that the people who come to my courses usually want to do it and bring some motivation and mental preparation with them. But the four day project management course I just attended as a student showed me the “usual” reality again in sledgehammer style.
We were 14 people and four of them were Europeans, the rest Japanese and Chinese participants and who ran the show? The four Europeans. (Well, actually one Australian, and three Germans). There is the issue of language barrier of course, since the course happened in English, but it’s so much more than that. It’s that passive versus pro-active behavior.
One guy drove me nuts. Over fifty, stiff as a log, not participating in any teamwork, just standing/sitting there with a hunted and scared expression on his face. He did not say more than 50 words during the entire four days and produced no idea, or contribution whatsoever. He was obviously sent to the seminar by his boss, and it was a total waste of time, money and resources to “educate” this guy. A zombie from The Walking Dead would have had more benefit from the seminar than this person.
Confucian system or not, I also see a lack of mindset behind learning. I am eagerly jumping at whatever opportunity I get for learning and it doesn’t get into my head that other people don’t want that. Well, it should get into my head, since I know from all my workshops that people are not fond of change, but nevertheless, it don’t understand how people can be so passive and bare of energy. The desperate attempt of this guy’s boss to breathe some life into the zombie has in this case miserably failed.
Another observation I am making again and again in seminars I am attending as teacher as well as student is, that Japanese women are way more active than Japanese men – at least in our company. Let me introduce a zombie ratio.
Categories: alive – zombie – positively dead
Japanese male colleagues: alive 60% – zombie 25% – positively dead 15%
Japanese female colleagues: alive 90% – zombie 8% – positively dead 2%.
Since our female staff is quite much in the minority, the girls can’t save the day.
Anyway, it saddens me to see the passivity of the Japanese colleagues and to see the “Westerners” taking over – as so often. I have not yet found a recipe or an idea about how to tease these zombies back to life… if I find a method, I’ll write a non-fiction book about it and it’ll sell millions of copies. I already know the title, if unfortunately not the contents: “How to re-animate your company’s living dead”…