When Ways of Leading Collide
Aligning German management and Chinese staff at a five-star hotel in Beijing
The situation
A German-managed luxury hotel in Beijing engaged me to address what leadership described as a standards problem. Service basics defined in checklists were inconsistently followed. Staff who did strive for excellence were quietly resented by peers, who saw them as making everyone else look bad. Information moved on a need-to-know basis: functions shared nothing proactively, and even routine handoffs between departments stalled at functional boundaries.
When the general manager asked all staff to treat visible problems as everyone's responsibility, for instance picking up litter in a corridor regardless of one's role, the request did not land. Staff understood responsibility as belonging to a function.
The diagnosis
My interviews across the German leadership and the Chinese staff and management surfaced what neither side could see from inside. Two coherent and incompatible sets of operating assumptions were in collision, and neither had ever been stated aloud. Motivation and capability were not the issue.
- German management assumed that excellence is a shared norm everyone signs up to, that information flows proactively to whoever might need it, and that ownership of the whole is everyone's job.
- Local assumptions, shaped by the danwei work-unit legacy, held that employment carries protections that make minimum performance safe, that standing out above the group creates social risk for the individual and friction for peers, that responsibility is bounded by function, and that information is shared when required.
One exchange captured the whole collision. The general manager pointed to his open-door policy: anyone could come to him at any time with a challenge or an issue. A Chinese leader replied that he had an open door but not an open heart. In the staff's frame, walking into the boss's office meant bringing trouble to the boss. The open door stood unused, and the general manager read the silence as an absence of problems.
Each side experienced the other's behavior as a character flaw. In fact, each was following an unwritten contract the other could not see.
Until those contracts were made explicit, every standards initiative would be absorbed and neutralized by the system.
The method
The engagement followed a five-stage process I have since repeated across industries and team types:
- Listen. Confidential stakeholder interviews on both sides of the divide, at leadership level and below it.
- Map. Surface the differing assumptions and pain points, and show each group the coherent logic behind the other's behavior.
- Prepare. Work with each group separately, so that each can absorb the map and rehearse the harder conversations without losing face in front of the other.
- Integrate. Bring the whole system into the room together for a facilitated working session.
- Agree. Build explicit new operating agreements: what excellence means here, how information will move across functions, what collective ownership looks like in observable behavior, and how leaders will model and protect the people who follow through.
The change
The implicit contracts in conflict gave way to explicit agreements the whole system had authored. Standards stopped being a foreign management demand and became commitments the staff had negotiated. Recognition was redesigned so that performing well no longer carried social cost. Cross-functional information sharing moved from need-to-know to defined proactive norms, and collective responsibilities were named as specific behaviors.
The adaptation ran in both directions. The general manager stopped waiting behind the open door and took the staff's own recommendation: get to know people personally and manage by walking around, meeting issues where they arose. That single behavioral change, proposed by the Chinese leaders and adopted by the German manager, did more to open the flow of information than any policy had. The two sides also left with a shared language for naming the next collision before it hardened into resentment.
By the close of the engagement, German and Chinese leaders and staff described the same shift: the invisible had been made visible, and for the first time they could co-design operating norms on ground both sides could see.
This engagement predates my current practice of building measurement into the contract from the outset. The outcomes reported here are the ones the general manager and I observed directly, and the ones the system itself named.
Beyond national culture
The setting here was national culture, and the same five stages apply wherever two groups work from different unstated assumptions, such as a headquarters and a subsidiary or two merged organizations. In each setting the work is to surface the unwritten contracts, prepare each side, bring the system together and reach explicit agreements.