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"To Ming or not to Ming, that is the question." This was the heading on an email I received from a team member in the USA who was working with a Chinese woman in Shanghai on a corporate account for a client based in the US. The project involved setting a strategic plan with the customer and having vendor representatives at worldwide locations coordinate implementation of the plan.

The lead sales rep in San Francisco convinced the client to buy communication service for their division office in the Philippines using undersea cables from the sales rep's telecommunications firm. The US sales rep used a sales rep named Ming in Shanghai to support the project. Ming worked with the customer’s division head in the Philippines. The decision was made over the phone with all team members involved, to use the main Philippine telecom provider. As Ming worked with the division head in the Philippines she suggested another carrier, due to cost and ease of access; he agreed to her suggestion. So, Ming placed the order. The lead sales rep in San Francisco had no idea this was happening until she got a call from her customer in San Francisco that a carrier different than the one they had all agreed to was being used in the Philippines.

That is when I received the email that the team member could not trust Ming and wanted her off the project. Upon further investigation, we found out that Ming’s decision was the right one. But, she had failed to communicate with her counterparts before she placed the order. Her intent was to provide the customer the best and most cost-effective service, which she did. But she lost the trust of her teammate due to inadequate communication and the misperception that she was going around his back and could not be trusted.

In the U.S. we expect constant updates and feedback from our peers as we work together; especially if it is a project or a team that is servicing a customer, we all need to be “on the same page” (which is a common saying). Ming, on the other hand, felt she was responsible for the customer and was providing them a better and less expensive service. Because of this, she did not feel it necessary to notify her peers in the US. The customer was still buying the American half of the circuit from their company; only the half for the Philippines was being ordered from another firm. The responsibility for the customer in the Philippines was hers, not her counterpart’s. What we had was a failure to communicate and a project team that was not even close to the norming stage, the stage of team development when team members that work towards shared goals. Norming requires that trust be established between team members, and differences in communication style and values can make it difficult to build this trust.

The Olympic teams going to China this year have worked for years together to get to the stage where they work as one. They come from the same country and may have similar communication styles and values. But it still takes them time to become a solid unit that can compete as a solid team. 

This international business team should have started by learning about each other’s values and communication style differences. It is this kind of incredibly costly, frustrating, and avoidable intercultural miscommunications that motivated me to leave my line management responsibilities in order to focus more directly on improving intercultural effectiveness.

This team would have benefitted enormously from using the Cultural Detective USA and Cultural Detective China to help them communicate on a more productive level. It would have helped this team show a united front to the customer in implementing their strategies. They could have learned much by dialoguing about the Values Lenses, analyzing some critical incidents, and using the Cultural Detective Method to analyze and learn from this real-time issue.

Ecotonos is another program I often use to aid team problem solving and trust building. It is an entertaining, interactive simulation in which participants better understand the problems they are having working as an international team. By the end of the program team members have guidelines for communication and decision making, as well as enhanced skills for collaborating across cultures.

In this case, I would also recommend using Redundancía. It’s a nine-minute activity in which participants speak the Redundancía language with one another—a language that none of them yet speaks fluently. It provides a great tool for talking about language issues on a team, learning how to better listen to and understand one another, and it also serves as a platform for discussing how team members share information, when and how.

So what was the answer to the question in the email, “to Ming or not to Ming”?  The team did in fact replace Ming, due to their lack of trust in her after the above incident.  They lost a committed, customer-centered, talented and experienced sales representative due to a lack of cultural understanding. No doubt it cost more (lost revenue, hiring, training) to replace Ming than it would have to improve team members’ cross-cultural savvy—savvy that would reap long-lasting benefits for the organization.

Paulette Markel is an independent intercultural consultant and trainer, founder of Imua Associates. She uses the Cultural Detective^® Method as the "backbone" of much of her work, and is a frequent user of many of our other tools and activities.