I’ve been in Kunming, in Yunnan province for six solid days, and this has been my longest foray into China so far.

My host company’s brief to my team has been, I would like to think, unique among the China Lab projects this year. The company, a 12-man startup, has requested that we look into why it has been unable to retain its staff.

We started out thinking it might be a compensation problem, and five days, one survey, 10 in-depth employee interviews and several meetings with the founder-CEO later, we find ourselves plumbing the murky depths of the organization’s culture and the implications of the CEO’s leadership style. In Sloan MBA-speak, I’m doing an organization processes (OP) project all over again. Only this time, it’s all in Mandarin.   

It has been a fascinating process of sifting through the various narratives to find that the same few themes keep emerging. And it has proven that issues of leadership, growth, and its impact on organizational culture, are startlingly similar whether one is in the US or in China (and I daresay in all the places in between as well).

Additionally, in the past week, I was struck by how much a person's effectiveness is tied to his or her ability to communicate.

On a personal effectiveness level, working with a cross-cultural, dual language team has required me to find new ways of communicating, and to suspend my usual expectations of how a team should work together. Because of the need to translate or to check for understanding and correct any misunderstandings arising from language differences, meetings can feel clunky and slow-moving. For someone used to problem solving through active discourse, it is easy to correlate the slower pace to a reduced effectiveness, and to become frustrated at the rate of progress.

Even though I speak more Mandarin than most of my MIT classmates here, and more English than the Chinese MBAs, conducting meetings with a cross-cultural, dual language team has required a lot of patience and creativity. I’ve also found myself thinking about whether the usual practices and modes of operating in a group need to be changed to account for a dual language environment.

On the level of leadership effectiveness, I’ve also been reminded that the ability to connect and communicate is fundamental to being an effective leader.   

One of the issues we’ve discovered is that our company’s CEO has not taken the time to speak with her employees, and misunderstandings have arisen on both sides that have festered and gone unchecked. We’ve all probably had some experience of this before, and may even be able to cite personal stories of how leaders who were able to connect with us tended to be better at motivating their staff, so I won’t belabor the point further.  

Here’s my closing thought on language and communication. I tend to assume that people will understand me as long as I share a common language with them and I have some competency in the language. As a default, I don’t stop to check for understanding. However relaxing this default assumption has come more naturally to me here in China, and this has given me more practice at putting myself in the shoes of my peers. (I’ve had a few humbling occasions where I’ve articulated what seemed to be very clear to me in my mind, only to find a wall of confused faces, and the uncomfortable sense that I made sense to neither the native English nor the native Chinese speakers in my team.) Putting myself in the shoes of my audience - it’s a generalizable lesson regardless of the language environment I’m operating in, and a takeaway that I expect to revisit many more times, in China and beyond.