How Chinese culture can convince Singapore staff to be team players

‘Teams’ has long been a popular concept in the workplace, as it’s common sense that “two heads are better than one” and “many hands make light the work”. However, people don’t always work together well, whether in their families, on sports teams or in the workplace. Thus, encouraging your people to function efficiently with colleagues presents an on-going conundrum for managers. This blog offers two concepts from Chinese culture that may help.

The principle of enlightened self-interest provides the foundation for these two concepts. Enlightened self-interest means that by spending time and effort to help others, we are actually helping ourselves. Helping others to help ourselves contrasts with unenlightened self-interest, otherwise known as greed or myopic self-interest.

Here is an example of the difference between greed and enlightened self-interest. A new staff member asks two colleagues for help using new software. Do the colleagues say they are too busy and continue doing their own tasks, or do they put aside their work for a few minutes to help, in the hope that later the new staff member will be willing to help them? Or, maybe you, their manager, will walk by while they are assisting and be impressed by their cooperation.

Or, increased productivity by the assisted staff member may lead to bigger bonuses for the entire department. Yes, greedy staff  who refuse to help might profit in the short run, because they finish their work faster that day, but such a short term view may prove to be myopic if, in the long run, it deprives them of possible larger gains.    

The two concepts from Chinese culture that link to enlightened self-interest are guanxi and renqing. Guanxi means to build relationships. When some of your staff members perform well in their groups, word will quickly get around.

As a result, others will want to work with them, and they will build relationships for the future, whether those relationships help the cooperative staff members with promotions or with finding a good tutor for their children. Indeed, staff who forget about relationships ignore at their own peril the insightful proverb, “Often, it is not what you know but who you know that determines your success”.

Renqing means to return favours. By contributing to their colleagues’ welfare, your staff build the pool of favours from which they can later collect from those colleagues and others. Similarly, to be seen as reliable, your staff need to return the favours that colleagues do for them. Here is an example from my days as a graduate student in the U.S.

I needed something translated from Japanese to English; so, I called a Japanese couple I knew who were studying in another department at the same university. I said, “Hi, this is George”, and asked them to do the short translation task for me, but they replied that they were too busy.

Five minutes later, they called back, “Sorry, George, we thought you were the other George (another graduate student named George). We’ll be happy to help you”. In other words, I had built a good reputation among my fellow students. I had done favours for others. Now, as a result, I was in a position to successfully ask favours from others.

Whether your staff are attending HR training or doing their normal tasks, they need to understand that the smart choice lies in building their guanxi and renqing by working cooperatively with colleagues.