http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/12/31/china_management/

Last year, I attended Alice Law’s presentation to AmCham Shanghai on Developing High-Flying Potential. Alice Law. Apr 2007. Alice did an excellent job of relating employees’ needs and expectations related to professional development. For small/medium-sized American companies who are new to China, I believe there are several key points:

1. Select and retain employees according to job-fit. You are likely to have to train your employees anyway, so choose to develop employees who fit with the culture and have the personal characteristics to excel after they have received proper training. Alternatively, you could target experienced professionals who can jump into a role during company start-up, and then plan for them to leave after 1-2 years. You are then able to hire a potentially less-talented employee (at a lower wage) who can grow into the position with less business risk to the stability of the company. The latter strategy will still necessitate development opportunities and allowance for a learner’s curve.
2. Use evaluations and development plans to clarify the kinds of experience employees want, and the obstacles they are facing. In these conversations, distinguish between depth of experience and breadth of experience available. Young employees are likely to have an “I want it all” attitude toward experience, instead of distinguishing the difference between a business generalist moving toward a GM-type position, or a specialist known for depth of expertise. Once these differences are clarified, determine the obstacles that the organization can remove while still achieving improved business targets.
3. Foster a shared learning mentality. Talented employees commit longer and have stronger relationships when managers commit personal time to their reports. This time could be as little as 1 hour of one-to-one time with subordinates, but can also include introductions that strengthen the subordinate’s professional network, or pearls of wisdom from personal experience.
4. Promote a culture of excellence. Employees will expect promotions, and often connect those promotions to length of service rather than evidence of increased professional skill. Encourage managers and subordinates to record subordinates’ skill development, and use promotions as a time to praise skill. Chinese employees are known to leave companies because the new job comes with a status-enhancing new title. Retaining employees will mean explaining your organization’s use of promotions to recognize excellence, and that excellence can be independent of authority over others (i.e. management positions). At the same time, excellence is directly related to reward and other forms of prestige.

In fact, talent development remains one of the most persistent and pressing concerns of business leaders operating in China, as attested by both the US-China Business Council and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

So, before you dive into the foaming waters of China business, talk with HR and other strategic leaders on how your business will address these talent development issues:

• Best Practices and Organizational Learning- when you bring in your best practices, talk with your Chinese staff about how and why these practices delivered business results. Throughout this conversation, you will need culturally literate people who can discern differences between Chinese and international business environments. Your Chinese team will be called upon to exercise their critical thinking skills to recommend modifications, and the inter-cultural savvy to communicate the changes while determining tolerable levels of risk. I can personally attest to seeing mid-level Chinese managers who were tasked with implementing a foreign-developed best practice that they knew would not work in China. These managers were not able to persuade foreign leaders to modify the practice, the Chinese managers were left frustrated because their performance was then judged by their ability to execute a seriously flawed plan.

• Market Intelligence- In order to respond to current and new customer segments, your Chinese team requires general business acumen to separate the chaff from the wheat of profitable opportunities. Business acumen includes an understanding of aspects like: operating costs, profit margins, and key customer preferences. Ideally, these topics form part of the common language of all employees. When employees do uncover a new business opportunity, they will be in a better position to articulate its value.

• Industry intelligence- Chinese staff will have greater access to informal channels for recognizing subtle but significant changes in the business environment and monitoring competitor activities. Although traditional Chinese culture values “guan xi,” don’t assume that your younger staff practice the most effective relationship-building skills. Powerful guan xi relationships come from a sense of interdependency and connection to a networked community. Although many Chinese maintain contact with former colleagues and classmates, younger (around age 30) employees from single-child families are less likely to have adopted the requisite communal mindset and networking skills.

Without even mentioning the demand for technically skilled employees (like engineers and software developers), China poses talent development challenges that, if unanswered, create sluggish new operations that fails to adequately compete. Therefore, entering China means executing a crafted plan for acquiring the best talent you can find, retaining your Chinese team, and developing talent that will deliver the fastest return on investment.

Outward-turning anger seethes against environmental restrictions, economic obstacles, and criticism of social/government policies by Western peoples and Western governments. Chinese critics blame foreigners for stunting the growth of China as a dominant global power, and feel outsiders hypocritically comment on the state of China’s internal affairs.

Does this form of anger exhibit itself in the Chinese workplace and affect learning?

Due to intense patriotic sentiment, it is likely that some attitudes affect the quality of Chinese employees’ contributions in foreign-owned companies. Unless employees feel connected to the foreign entity, there exists the real risk that Chinese staff will resent “foreign devil” businesses that sap the wealth of China in exchange for their monthly paychecks. Other people may simply shift into indifference toward the company because foreigners own it, and it is therefore not part of “our China.”

Faced with such hostile or apathetic attitudes, how can you gauge the level of company commitment among your Chinese staff?

Farh and Organ have conducted research on organizational citizenship behaviors that may give clues on how well your Chinese employees view their foreign employer as a partner rather than opponent of their motherland. I include my comments on a few of what I believe are key behaviors.

Self-Training: Self-training includes learning on one’s own through formal and informal avenues. But self-learning, in and of itself, does not necessarily constitute a behavior of a company citizen. Many employees continue their learning only to increase their personal competitiveness in getting promotions or finding a better job. Self-training best serves the employee and the company when it is practiced with organizational (shared) learning. Management fosters shared learning by: creating a compelling, shared vision, celebrating successes derived from shared learning, and clearing structural/systemic obstacles that bottleneck the adoption of shared learning. In effect, show your company that you want them to be successful, but tie personal development to organizational development.

Social welfare participation: Many foreign companies miss the opportunity to show how much they do care for China. Charitable organizations continue to strengthen their impact on the country, and provide an opportunity for employees and expat leaders to volunteer together. Domestic organizations like Hope Schools and international groups like Habitat for Humanity both provide avenues for colleagues to bond with the company while serving others. When combined with regular, personal interaction, social welfare participation allows Chinese and foreign staff to commit to the company and communicate their hope for China’s success.

Protecting and Saving Company Resources: I know a consultant with an international firm who deliberately boarded his company-purchased flight to Europe, even though he was well aware that the business meeting in Europe (the original and only purpose of the trip) had been cancelled. Excessive waste of company monies often originates from a “it’s the rich foreign company’s money” attitude.

Organizational citizenship ideally includes investing for the future. A former colleague of mine liked to use the phrase “penny wise and dollar foolish.” A committed member of your organization should feel encouraged to look for new opportunities and explore possibilities. Savings and efficiency are not to be held in disdain, but my friend’s quote referred to benefits lost because of excessive focus on cost control or risk mitigation. Reward team endeavors into new opportunities and their strategic cultivation of customer goodwill with intangible and financial rewards.

Your company may not face riots and protests, but leaders can promote organizational citizenship behaviors to ward-off anger, apathy and disdain while fostering commitment and effective learning.

Farh, Zhong, and Organ: Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the People’s Republic of China. Organization Science, vol 15 no 2, 2004

As one reads the stories of life in China, one theme gains prominence. Change takes place rapidly and sometimes violently in the Middle Kingdom. Change shapes the course of family and personal life, and rapid, effective learning continues to provide the ballast for navigating unsettling change.

One article in particular struck me as especially relevant to the topic of learning in China. Young Bella Zhou is not yet a teenager, but she and her parents already feel the stress of a competitive nation seeping into every aspect of daily life. I won’t go into the details of her highly regimented, academically strenuous life; I will instead focus on the implication that such a lifestyle has on corporate learning.

LEARNING PRIMARILY SERVES INDIVIDUAL, PERSONAL GAINS:

The ultimate achievement in Chinese schools is to pass college entrance tests. To this end, students take weekend and evening courses and do extra homework assigned by tutors so that they increase their chances of being placed in a higher-ranked university. Children from single-child families (China continues its one-child policy) listen to teachers lecture, and peer-study sessions are almost non-existent. Group or team-based learning in the classroom is rare, and would likely prove less successful because teachers drive competition over collaboration among young learners. The result is an unspoken belief about learning- knowledge should be hoarded to provide intellectual advantage over others.

HOARDED KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORKPLACE

Subconsciously, Chinese employees carry this mindset with them to the workplace. If presented with a situation that requires sharing knowledge to help a colleague, knowledgeable employees assess the value of sharing learning with others. When providing knowledge gives a lower individual payoff (e.g. low return on personal promotion, salary increase, or other reward), and others will be blamed for the resulting failure, employees will opt to reserve knowledge. Those being blamed for failure are in a weaker position, and sharing knowledge then has a potentially higher reward payoff.

UNLEASHING HOARDED KNOWLEDGE

Organizational leaders play a pivotal role in creating a collaborative environment that taps individual learning. These steps can break the cycle of competition and reward increased group contribution.

1. Mentor- Give younger employees the opportunity to learn from more experienced leaders. This time together communicates the company’s respect for leaders who succeed by helping others learn. Ideally, mentoring is propagated and sustained informally so that knowledge-hoarding blocs do not arise.
2. Reward- Remove incentives for individual contribution, and increase tracking of group achievement. Promote individuals who are recognized by their peers for helping others learn.
3. Equip- Provide resources so that employees understand how to better contribute their knowledge. Make sure that employees have general business acumen for placing learning in the proper context. Articulate the roles that team members have in learning- while some people are have an innate talent of memory (knowledge recall), others are better at synthesizing knowledge or creative adapting information. Finally, map the learning networks within your organization so that people know who to tap for knowledge, who best synthesizes knowledge, and who disseminates learning effectively.

MNCs HAVE A MORE MATURE LEARNING STRATEGY

Learning strategies yield better results when they include:

· ACTION/LEARNING PLANS: whatever you prefer to call them, the likelihood of learning being applied increases when learners take time to set specific goals for applying learning. These plans take on even more power when a learner’s manager signs off on the plan, indicating his or her approval that the goal is worthwhile. Manager approval also opens the door for managers to provide new opportunities for using learning, and managers can provide specific resources as needed.

· SUMMARIES: Many training topics lend themselves to summary of key points. Summaries are great for several reasons. First, they give HR and management an understanding of the extent to which learners can synthesize, integrate, and communicate what they have learned. Secondly, if learners effectively summarize their learning for their colleagues, they market the program to future participants. Also, don’t forget the importance of support and accountability- learners do better when peers and superiors have clearer expectations about how they will use learning to improve personal and team performance.

· SITE VISITS: Following training, learners try on their new skills and knowledge by observing new needs and opportunities in a fresh environment. A visit to another plant or site gives learners greater understanding of what works and what doesn’t when they apply learning. When management from the site is engaged in the learning program, a give-and-take occurs as learners and management exchage insights from their learning-related experiences. The site and the learners become winners as they exchage ideas.

Despite the rise in labor and shipping costs, companies in China increase their competitiveness when they implement a robust learning strategy. What else do you do to ensure:

· Peer and management commitment to learners’ application of new skills and knowledge?

· Learners have a laboratory for seeing how learning is applied, or relevant experiences of how application takes place in different work environments?

· Learners can grasp, integrate, and synthesize learning to real situations?

Now teleport yourself to China, and you will find Chinese business activities being conducted in virtual worlds like Second Life and HiPiHi. Sure, you can also stop bullets in these on-line worlds if you want, but why not help your Chinese business innovate, collaborate, and learn while you’re at it?

Virtual worlds initially look like computer games, but you will notice there is no score, your avatar (i.e. your virtual world embodiment) doesn’t die, and there is no inherent goal to achieve in the world. You set your own goal. Perhaps you want to market to the 69,000 (and growing) members of the Chinese virtual world HiPiHi. Chinese businesses like Origami Frontiers have already linked with the China-developed virutual world HiPiHi to link virtual world communities via mobile technologies. A May 08 article from Business Week tracks how Chinese organizations are already exploring the use of HiPiHi for training and brand enhancement.

BACKGROUND ON VIRTUAL WORLDS

Second Life came first, and has the largest number of residents (over 13,000,000) who span the globe in terms of real-life location. At first, many companies tried to use SL as a marketing and advertizing platform, but that hasn’t proved to be as worthwhile as expected. IBM has created a major presence in SL, and uses the platform for learning, collaboration, and networking among global employees.

HiPiHi was developed in China a year or two after SL, and opened to the public in April 08. No doubt it will experience growing pains similar to those of SL, so SL’s maturity and global reach place HiPiHi in a weaker position as a business platform.

USES OF VIRTUAL WORLDS

Given the current state of the Chinese business climate, virtual worlds provide some creative and sustainable opportunities for conducting business in China:

• Design and Architecture: virtual environments allow users to create buildings, textures and shapes, and businesses can create showrooms for mock-ups, model clothes, or even walk-through tours of building designs. Given the amount of clothing manufactured in China, and the popularity of fashion and design in cities like Shanghai, virtual worlds allow inexpensive brainstorming of creative design.
• Collaboration: as anyone who has experienced the difficulty of communicating in a second language may now, a combination of visual cues, audio, and written communication increase comprehension and expression of ideas. Second Life allows your virtual team to speak, listen, type, and express body/facial gestures at the same time. You can even present information in .ppt format. The novelty of the virtual environment fosters creativity, and breaks people out of the cubic parameters of the office.
• Development and Efficiency: given the increasing cost of labor and fuel, Chinese manufacturers and service providers would benefit from reduced travel costs and more affordable training. A manufacturing site could create a copy of their factory and use the site for employee training, or allow efficiency teams to experiment with processes and production line layout. Virtual worlds enable discussion groups, training simulations, and role-plays among colleagues at remote locations.

Just as Neo broke free from the limitations of his existence, taking an imaginative step into virtual worlds will allow us to conduct our China businesses more efficiently and cost-effectively.

If you would like a tour of practical Second Life sites, or resources on business in Second Life, please contact me: jasonowalker@gmail.com

Does that mean one has to choose between the platforms? Not really. But before we get to far ahead, let’s look at some of the research out there:

1. Traditional, static, methods are still strong: Classroom instruction is still a dominant form of learning delivery, and printed materials are also widely used.

2. On-demand methods had the most increase of use: Yes, that’s right. Podcasts, Blogs, and Wikis were among the top 4.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR LEARNING IN CHINA?

When corporations and learning professionals in China look at this data, they will be in conflict as to how to proceed. One the one hand, there is the cost issue. On the other hand, the data represent a change in thought on learning strategy.

• Issue 1- Maintain Low Cost: Some businesses will look at the relatively low cost of printing materials in China (e.g. a recent US graduate found his economics textbooks published in China and sold for less than 1/10 the price) and decide to rely on their current strategy. After all, outsourcing trainers and ordering printed materials often saves time in comparison with the commitment to a new strategy.
• Issue 2- A New Philosophy on Learning: The traditional strategy has some flaws that some Chinese learning professionals recognize. Classroom learning and printed materials are more static. They deliver a snapshot of knowledge and skill at a given moment. The writer or instructor has to think ahead, predict how learners will apply learning, and capture those ideas in the classroom or on paper. On-demand methods, like podcats, blogs, and wikis allow for quicker revision/update, and encourage learners to access information at the exact time it is needed.

OF COURSE, THE COIN HAS 2 SIDES…

The ideal situation is where companies are proficient in choosing from multiple platforms for distributing learning. As a nation, China is home to an astounding number of personal blogs and chat areas, bulletin boards, and other forms of knowledge exchange. Why don’t senior leaders take advantages of these vehicles for delivering knowledge in a just-in-time manner? Although there may be legal issues regarding corporate websites and employee forums, my concern is that the new learning philosophy is being overruled by administrivia.

WHAT TO DO?

1. CREATE PODCASTS:

a. interview senior leaders to record messages that communicate the relationship between learning and strategic business plans;

b. ask trainers to record brief summaries of key messages for review after training;

c. record positive learner feedback as future marketing material

2. FOSTER BLOGGING:

a. Record the on-going, personal experiences of applying learning at work;

b. Supplement classroom and e-learning with comments on how leaders expect learning to be used. Stories serve as useful case studies

c. Add the creative side of learning- add humor and create a personal atmosphere where you encourage risk taking and experimental learning

d. Open the forum- respond to comments and questions so that people feel supported.

e. Provide pre-readings

3. BUILD WIKIS:

a. Create a center for collecting and sharing pre-training assignments

b. Provide models and information that can be updated and revised by learners

c. Contribute to team learning projects

WHAT’S YOUR EXPERIENCE?

What is your company’s strategy on learning delivery (e.g. more traditional classroom/printed material, or on-demand access via technology) in China?

What technologies have you or your company implemented to support learning? What results did you see?

WHAT IS SLEDCC?

SLEDcc served as an opportunity to explore how Second Life is currently being used for learning and education. Many of the strongest innovations are coming from educators and teachers, which is leaving corporate learning behind.

ADOPTING EDUCATORS’ IDEAS TO CORPORATE LEARNING IN CHINA

Esme Qunhua‘s tour of significant sites included a stop on Renaissance Island.

What this place and others shows us is the immersive ability that Second Life allows. Instead of simulating 17th Century England, Second Life allows Chinese companies to simulate their corporate culture, or simulate an escape from the daily work environment!

Suggestions for creating simulated environments for Chinese corporations:

• Orientation: You want people to feel as comfortable as possible, as quickly as possible. A 1-2 day orientation program helps, but people return to their offices and can lose the connections and support they felt during orientation. Why not create a simulated corporate environment where people can re-connect, see interactive reminders of the company’s way of life, and get help from peers and mentors across China (or the globe!)?
• Escape: Creativity and imagination come to life in the most unique of places. An unusual or different environment allows team members to share ideas and “play” in a new environment. Sometimes the best ideas come when drinking virtual coffee.

Did any of you attend SLEDcc? What were your thoughts?

Is leading learning similar to gardening?

Research from the eLearningGuild indicates that creating orderly, fruitful learning is like organizing a garden, and the age of your learners affects how the garden is used. The images below were taken from the research website:

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

First, the research tells us how people learn about new information, especially blogs and wikis. The study doesn’t really say whether people read blogs and wikis for entertainment or practical use, but it does tell us that people are going to these gardens of knowledge on a regular basis because they feel blogs and wikis have adequately collected, organized, and grown the depth of knowledge offered there.

Secondly, we need to understand why people over 30 take advantage of these tools less often than their younger colleagues. Some would simply argue that they are too busy, but a good blog or wiki can consolidate information from multiple sources. Whatever the reason, learning leaders have the task of making sure learners can move through the garden to get the fruit they need.

BLOGS AND WIKIS IN CORPORATE CHINA

If Chinese learners’ habits are similar to those in the US, talent development and HR leaders will want to consider several key points:

1. Create the proper learning garden: it is estimated that as much as 60% of learning takes place on the job. Create blogs, wikis, or use your employees’ preferred method for capturing, organizing, and exchanging learning.
2. Engage people in growing knowledge: the results show that people passively receive more often than they contribute. Find methods for growing knowledge that are easy to use and encouraged within your companies. Development costs do not need to be high- the cost of lost learning is much higher.