I got a firm reminder of being in India some hours ago at work.

One of my local colleagues had a problem he couldn’t solve by himself, so he came to me for help. I didn’t know the answer either, so he told me that he knows a technical expert who knows about these things. The expert works in Oulu, so the Indian wants to know if he can send e-mail directly or if he has to go through some process with it. Mind you, my colleague and the expert he’s talking about are on the same level in Corporation hierarchy, with similar tasks and responsibilities.

Finally the simple e-mail gets sent (with me in CC, though I don’t have anything to do with this) and a reply is received some moments later. Our primary contact doesn’t know the answer, but he gives us the names of people who do. And again the Indian dude comes to me, asking if he should e-mail these persons to ask the same question. I again try to assure him that he doesn’t have to get my permission to do his job, and he can take responsibility by sending out the e-mail without asking anyone. So why do the locals think a foreigner will EAT YOUR FUCKING HEAD every time he is bothered with questions?

Yes, yes, thousands of years in hierarchical culture and blahblahblah. But these guys aren’t stupid or anything. They can learn and communicate effectively when they want to, but something in the back of their heads still makes them afraid of us foreigners. The exact same thing happens when they communicate with their superiors, and maybe for some reason they consider every Finn and German as one. Or maybe we are scary just because they don’t know who we are? The bottom line is that I don’t know what causes this behaviour, I just know it slows down our work.

I’m trying to figure out an incentive to my teammates so that they could communicate more easily, without the unnecessary burden of asking for permissions every time they need to contact someone. Apart from saving their efforts, it would leave me and their managers more time to concentrate on something relev- no, wait: that could leave one level of managers completely useless. What would happen to them?

Tags: colleagues from India, culture, time, ways of working, what is different, work