Delegating Across Cultures? Welcome to a World of Mysteries!
| Jan 30th, 2012 | By Fabienne | Category: Au fil des jours, Video Energizers |
What about a refreshing break?
Sit down, lay back and relax. Feeling comfortable? Now push play. Watch and enjoy !
Now go through the following questions, taking a moment to answer them for yourself, each in turn :
How did you feel watching this process?
What thoughts crossed your mind?
Any judgements you feel ready to share about China?
Did you even know such a calculation method exists?
How many calculation methods do you know?
Which one do you prefer?
Why?
…
This video experience is a beautiful example of what might happen when delegating across cultures. You might give a task to someone, even a very simple one, and suddenly see your team members start doing some very mysterious things… Of course this is not what you expected. And as a team leader, you’re in charge of making sure that the right things happen.
So what do you do?
Here is a great quality you want to develop when leading across cultures: observe, and then communicate, sticking to facts. First describe what you see and how surprising it is for you – then discuss with your team member what it means and whether or not it’s the appropriate way to proceed.
Only then you’ll know whether your team member needs some more guidance… or whether you’re the one who still has a lot to discover when working across cultures!
With time you’ll become more and more skilled at recognizing whether a “surprising” way of doing things is an indication that things are on track or not…
How did you feel watching this process? Amazed by all these cools tricks I don’t know yet.
What thoughts crossed your mind? “This is cool, must be an Indian or Chinese trick”; “This must be like expanding the product”, “How comes a coach can teach a computing trick to a mathematician!”, “Am I prejudiced ???”
Any judgements you feel ready to share about China? Diversity is great.
Did you even know such a calculation method exists? No
How many calculation methods do you know? Four: the one taught in France, expansion of the product, the rectangle formula, and the egyptian multiplication.
Which one do you prefer? The one I was taught as a boy, which is unfortunately one of the slowest !
Why? Because my brain is stuck that way
I’m glad you liked it and it stimulated you to go through these coaching questions!
Let me know if you’d like a few development tips based on your answers, I’ll be glad to share them
You immediately thought of India and China – does that mean they’re both equally “famous” in the world of maths for having very unique/different approaches?
In any case, I hope you immediately tried out that new technique
We watched it yesterday with Nastya & Kostya and thought that it’s a cool, but a bit lazy way to make calculations 8))) You don’t need to remember how to multiply actually. You just need to be good in counting from 1 to 9
)
But it looks really great, more like art then math
… more like “our representation of” arts, and less like “our representation of” maths
Who said maths needs to be about numbers and cryptic formulas?
I like your comment because it reminded me of that beautiful exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, about mathematicians. I very precisely remember how one mathematician passionately refered to his “search for truth and beauty”. He loved maths because that’s what he identified it with : a search for truth and beauty.
And when confronted with a choice between the two, he recommended to chose beauty, because at least you’re sure it’s there, whereas you’ll never be sure that you’ve found truth
I also like the point you made about what you need to be good at to reach a result: with one method, you need to be good at visual representation, to be precise and systematic in counting from 1 to 9… With the standard method taught in Europe, you need to remember the “multiplications’ table”… We might appear pretty lazy too, you know? In a way, we “just” use our memory, we don’t spend time making some precise drawing, and going through detailed counts of its archs… And I don’t know the other calculation methods that Julien was referring too but both our European approach and this Chinese approach might appear pretty “unefficient” to some other, much faster technique, who knows…
So as always when changing cultures – it depends from the point of view you’re taking, and from the criteria you’re focusing on. Is your goal to train your memory? To use your visual skills? To be precise? To go fast? Depending on the value you give to each of these criteria, you’ll prefer one or the other approach
I still find it less lazy to remember multiplications table
But yes, I totally agree that math is not only about numbers
Really enjoyed reading this information and finding your website.
Also, look at the work of Dr. Mansour Javidan. Dr. Karen Walsh. Dr. Denis LeClerc for their insight too.
Thanks for the positive feedback as well as the references, very much appreciated!