Motivation: We Are All Human

So, Dick has grown the India office from zero to around thirty in 5+ weeks (with another 30 or so to be added ASAP). Not bad, but which is more important, quantity or quality? Are fifteen excellent employees worth more than thirty so-so staff? Can so-so staff be turned into Acme assets? How do you keep excellent staff motivated?

Hard questions, but then if they were easy everyone would want to start a business.

In yesterday's post I touched on how Western managers have to adjust their ideas when working outside the rich, first-world crust. But not everything changes, and therein hides a big lesson: just because some things are different does not man all things are different.

I've seen many an expatriate manager 'discover' that his/her local staff are different--usually after bad results from refusing to treat them differently--and then throw out everything in the Western manager handbook. This 'baby and the bathwater' disposal leads to more bad results. To paraphrase (badly) the "serenity" poem/prayer, success comes from knowing what should/can be changed and what shouldn't/can't, and how such affects your actions.

There are two broad strategies: dumb down policies and procedures to meet local conditions or raise local staff abilities to match normal policies and procedures. Dick is trying the latter, a good choice.

No matter where you manage, no matter the culture, economic level or societal type, people are people. Every (?) human is motivated by the same things: being treated with respect; being thought of as capable of learning and doing more; being treated fairly; and ... by being paid on time.

Certainly there are an uncountable number of unique characteristics between people of different cultures, characteristics savvy managers need to know and pay attention to.* But there are also equally-important "human" characteristics to pay attention to. This is what Dick is doing.

Continued tomorrow, along with what "empowerment done properly" means.

* to be a subject of a later post, for now let me say that there are three types of expatriate managers, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All can "know" about the unique cultural characteristics, yet only Good managers pay proper attention to such.