Management tips…culture and management

As a successful manager, you must pay close attention to people around you, nothing more exciting for a global manager than learning management styles in different cultures.

One of my biggest challenges with my daily work here in Doha, Qatar (a small Arab state), is communicating with my employees and tell them what is expected from them. People here must be told what to do, if I am late to work one day, the office janitor will not clean my office, I actually have to ask him to do so each morning.

An American colleague, himself as a manager with different company, complained to me one time about his office janitor, he said “the janitor would sit there all morning doing nothing, how can I get him to do his work?”

I told him to print a list of duties he is expecting his janitor to perform and hand it to him, and if that doesn’t work, than he will have to order him to do his work. In the American work culture, workers generally don’t like to be told what to do; there is a general understanding between the management and the workers of what is expected from each side.
Working at global level with very diverse groups of people gives me as a manager a better understanding of various cultures and what to expect from my work force.

I found out that, is this part of the world, it’s ok to give orders to your employees and tell them what to do, in fact, in many cases they are expecting to be told what to do.