Today’s English lesson with one of my students was pretty interesting. She recently started working for a Chinese company that finds English-speaking Western teachers (primarily Americans) and hires them to teach seminars here in China. Lately, most of our lessons have consisted of her showing me copies of the emails she’s been sending out to these teachers and asking for my input. Usually the grammar and word choice mistakes are minimal, but there are often suggestions I have regarding the tone of her writing. In English, there’s a tricky balance between formal vs. stuffy and casual vs. sloppy, and it’s not something that can be tuaght overnight.
But one of the bigger problems is actually pretty easy to correct, and it applies to business and branding, so I thought I’d share it here.
As I’ve mentioned before, Chinese culture places a heavy emphasis on “face”. As a result, people put themselves through great pains to create or maintain a reputation that may not necessarily reflect the truth.
A simple example of this is a scenario I experience regularly when shopping. If I walk into a grocery store and ask a random employee where a particular product is, I will get one of two answers. A) It’s over there, or B) We don’t have that item here. The employee will tell me this whether the item is actually over there or not, and whether their store carries it or not. In the entire two years I’ve been here, no one has told me “I don’t know” nor have they proposed a solution to find the answer from someone who does. This puzzled (and infuriated) me when I first got here until I realized what it stemmed from: they were simply saving face. They believe that to say they don’t know would reflect poorly on their abilities as an employee.
This save-face-at-all-costs mentality has a chokehold on businesses here, and a situation that my student mentioned today demonstrated this. Her company has been working tirelessly to organize a seminar here in China taught by foreigners and attended by expatriates. Because of schedule conflicts with one of the professors, the seminar was cancelled. So, under the direction of her boss, my student sent out emails to the attendees explaining that they would be refunded due to the class being… “full”. A lie.
Why lie? Because a cancellation, in this company’s imagination, would look bad to the attendees, while a “full” class would create the illusion of high demand.
Of course, this company forgets that it is dealing with Westerners, who view this matter from the exact opposite angle. I encouraged my student to think about the consequences of this lie, and how it would affect the business down the line. Eventually, attendees would talk, and would find out about the cancellation, and realize the company had lied. And when us Westerners are lied to, it pisses us off. We consider it a breach of trust, a personal affront, and are wary to proceed any further with the relationship.
So if you own a company or are thinking of starting one up, know the concept of CANDIDNESS and make it a pillar in your enterprise.
Sure, we’d all like things to go smoothly 100% of the time, but the fact is that there are too many variables sometimes, and people make mistakes. If and when that happens, be candid about it. If the problem can be fixed, propose a solution, implement it, and move on. Sure, your customers may be momentarily inconvenienced by your fault, but in the end, their trust will grow, provided they can guarantee you learned from the experience and it won’t happen again.
This concept of candidness and transparency goes beyond how you handle your mistakes, too. It should be reflected in the very persona of your company, which is easiest to maintain if it’s an extension of yourself. If you’re a small startup running things out of an attic space, say it. You won’t scare customers away. In fact, you might actually attract folks looking to support the little guy.
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