I always get surprised, with no failure, but also get very intrigued by the Northern American (USA + Canada) sensitivity to criticism and the idea that person equals idea and idea equals person.

Let me start from the beginning though:

When I moved from strenuously paced London UK, to ambling Vancouver/Canada and accepted the job to lead a quality team at a national clothing company, things seemed easy: I was doing what I had been doing for way over a decade, the team was experienced and the company was eager to learn from my experience.

Moving on a couple of months, I was given a promotion to add and lead a team to my group, more challenging, more complex and with the added difficulty of removing the people from their previous team to start this new one.

There were a lot of challenges revolving loyalties, change of process, inheriting team members versus hiring what was needed. 

So I made it a point to always keep my door open to new ideas and allow my team members to go down their own routes, find their own mistakes, backtrack, start over and once a month I would be correcting that course if necessary. 

Two things happened:

I was pleasantly overwhelmed with ideas and intriguing starters mostly made by young and eager employees wanting to shine, wanting to show their exceptional self to move on up in the team and be invaluable.

The second thing was a bit more sour and a big surprise. People were getting emotional and feeling hurt if told that a specific idea or process would not apply well “can you reconsider and come back with alternatives?”. I had never had to deal with anything like this. How was I supposed to as a manager, lead my team to their goals, in a relatively good timeframe if not being able to dissect their ideas and discuss when, from experience, something would not work?

It came to light that every single European manager that was working in the company, and in my husband’s company was facing the exact same problem: hurt feelings, crying (!), accusations of “Harsh critiquing”, and behaviour that my fellow Europeans and I found quite challenging, if not childish.

During management training, I was fortunate enough to be coached by a British guy, who explained it to me “Person is the idea, idea and person is one. You can’t separate them here, it is how people think, it is how they are raised”.

So it wasn’t a big surprise to me, but a surprise nonetheless, when the other day during a study group I participate in, I spoke in a negative manner on a feature of the school I am attending. To me, it was not a reflection to the school, the people involved in or in any way reflected my displeasure with my school. It was, to me, An Observation “This thing is pants”. This one little process, the one project/goal/work/result does not define the whole of the school, or the staff. It also doesn’t come from a mean place, or does it serve a purpose. In fact, it is not even mandatory, so what is the big fuss? A take-it-or-leave it comment if you like which whenever with Europeans, no one questions its origins or purpose. In the best of cases it could spark a rhetorical argument exploring different sides of things.

I was immediately accosted with the question from a fellow student “What do you have against [x-person-not-named-here]?” and THAT was a big surprise to me…

To see that someone would leap so far into the wrong direction and assume I had an issue with the person in charge of the project that I wasn’t a fan of, was quite new to me.

It made me think more about cultural differences and how alien expats must appear at times to the local culture. The challenge is, of course, when people don’t see you are not from within the culture and they don’t take it as such; but that is something to explore a different time.

I have no solution to this as there is only that much I am willing to change (mostly in the workplace) my cultural background to suit my new home as I am proud of my roots.

More on this topic soon.