Getting Past the Silence
Part 1 of a weekly series entitled, The Bamboo Ceiling: Managing Chinese Employees Beyond Stereotype
by William R. Dodson
A Chinese woman who worked in the kitchen of a multi-national hotel chain suffered sexual harassment at the hands of a Brazilian immigrant. The Brazilian also terrorized the kitchen staff, which was predominantly Chinese. American managers knew nothing of the stressful conditions in their own kitchen, because the Chinese staff did not want to complain. The Chinese were afraid that they would lose their hard-won jobs if they complained about the situation. Without support from her co-workers, and lodged against the Chinese traditional value of renzi -- suffering in silence -- what could the harassed woman do?
Chinese people not born in America or other Western countries are conditioned from childhood to maintain the harmony of a group in which they are involved. Indeed, it is a matter of personal responsibility for an individual to remain quiet for the sake of the appearance of stability and well-being in a gathering. The Chinese concept of renzi is a central component in understanding the Chinese response to conflict in a Western setting. Renzi literally means, “enduring difficulty in silence”. Renzi is an admirable quality to Chinese people. Someone who is able to endure the unendurable in silence is truly a strong and remarkable character. It is a show of weakness of spirit and bad upbringing to cry out in pain or to complain that something is unfair. Buddhism as an implicit part of Chinese society comments that “Life is suffering,” and so to cry over the injustice is to not understand or to appreciate the nature and the right-ness of the suffering. Also, the history of Chinese people over 4000 years of famine, plague, war and invasion has made suffering in silence a necessity in light of the fact of the sure knowledge that millions of other Chinese in the most populous country in the world were also suffering. In other words, it became socially unacceptable to complain about one’s lot, when everyone else’s lot was just as bad if not worse.
A Chinese executive at an American multinational company commented, “What Asians really lack is the skill to handle confrontations. In the US, confrontation is part of life. People are not afraid of expressing their opinions, right or wrong, or whether it bothers other people. They are in your face all the time. Asians typically try to avoid confrontations at any cost... Seldom will they disagree with someone in public… This sometimes is construed as ‘not taking a position,’ or ambiguity in communication or simply poor communication skills… They will fall into passive aggressive behavior. If they are unhappy with their job, there is little likelihood that they will report to their manager… They are more likely to look for a job outside. And they may not tell you during their exit interview [why they are leaving].”
Mangers must be aware of renzi as a problem-solving approach for Chinese. Renzi can be a risk factor in some project settings in which the project manager requires a realistic assessment of team members’ challenges. If a Chinese says merely that everything is “ok” or is under control, it could mean the individual is suffering mightily under current circumstances but feels he or she must resolve the issue(s) on his or her own. A Chinese feels he/she shouldn’t burden the team with matters that are his/her responsibility. The project manager must be sure they have probed the the staff member’s condition well enough to be sure that if there are risks to project success, Management is able to devise mitigation strategies to avoid failure.
If managers feel renzi may be a risk factor in the effective delivery of a project, they should take the Chinese employee aside, privately, and discuss the approach to communication and problem-solving that will help the team or organization; that is, the group or unit in which staff works. Making the team a safe-zone for the employee to work and to express herself will reduce the chances of the employee feeling threatened should she communicate a work status that is not rosy.
In the case of the Chinese kitchen worker, she eventually broached the matter of the Brazilian bully with American management. Managers told her what she needed to do so they could act constructively on the situation: she needed to articulate a chronology of the all the events of harassment the Brazilian inflicted on her specifically. She asked me to help her put the chronology together in way the Americans would accept and act on. When she passed the declaration to Management, Management quickly censured the Brazilian worker. His behavior in the kitchen changed overnight. Immediately the stressful condition in the kitchen changed for the better for everyone. The woman became a hero to the Chinese kitchen staff. She had successfully broken thousands of years of conditioning on her own, and had not lost anything of her self or her culture. Instead, she had gained, just as a caterpillar gains new wings in its bid to evolve.
William R. Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road Advisors,
L.L.C., a management consultancy that develops and positions products and
people for success in international markets. He is the contributing editor on
international business to the American Management Association’s (AMA) MWorld Journal
of Management, and writes the weekly column “The Cultured Business”, found at www.silkrc.com. He is Managing Editor of The China Alert, a
publication of The United States-China Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached at sradvisors@gmail.com or +1 (847)722-7817.