By Ernie Tadla

That same trend continued when I started working. Most managers played the cop role, correcting what we did wrong, and pounded us if we continued to get it wrong.

Newspapers, TV, magazines, radio all told us about what was wrong with the world and dwelt on human failings, whether it was with our leaders or the man on the street.

Fortunately, that’s changing. There is a growing school of parental training and business management development programs that focus on our strengths, re-enforcing the positive things we do instead of beating us up for our weaknesses or mistakes.

Everyone has been doing this in China for more than 2,500 years. It began with Confucius and is called face, respect for the other person.
 
When I first landed in China, everyone I met said nice things about my country and me. They said only nice things. Being in my judgmental, distrusting mode, I doubted their sincerity, wondered what they wanted, and was curious what they said about me behind my back.

It wasn’t just me. It seemed that everything they said about anyone or anything was positive, rosy, cheering, complimentary, always extolling everyone’s virtue. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It never did. I had heard about face, but with my prejudicial attitude, I deemed it a cultural excuse for not telling the truth.

Back home, as a husband, parent, manager, I didn’t want to follow the example of my parents or previous bosses. I was a student of the D.I.S.C. Behavior Profile System, recognizing each individual’s strengths and weaknesses. There was a management choice: focus on their strengths and not their weaknesses. You can’t do both at the same time. When my boss thinks of me and evaluates my performance, I would like him to focus on my strengths, not my weaknesses.

My strengths are:
1 good people skills
2 communicate well
3 enjoy challenges
4 results oriented
5 good starter-upper, builder, pioneer

My weaknesses are:
1 no administrative skills
2 terrible with details
3 not good at finishing projects
4 impatient
5 not analytical

When you respect someone:
• what do you think about them?
• how do you judge them?
• what do you focus on?
• how do you talk to them?
• how do you treat them?                                                                        
• do you focus on their strengths or their weaknesses?

Generally, the only time we think and talk about people’s strengths is at their funeral. The rest of the time, we dwell on their warts.

The Chinese don’t wait until you are dead to talk, think and be nice to you. They do it while you are alive, to your face, behind your back, to others about you.

Face, respect for the other person, is the most significant fact of Chinese family life, business, and government. It is central to everything Chinese. Its foundation comes from the Confucian code of how people are to behave toward others. He dealt with it at five different levels:
• subject to ruler
• parent to child
• elder to younger
• husband to wife
• elder and junior friends

Face is showing respect to the other person, which means you must be sensitive to the other person’s needs and not your own. You speak highly of them to their face and openly to others about them. You focus on, recognize and talk about their strengths and what is good, honorable, special, and positive about them. Not just to their face but also behind their back.

You never:
1 disagree with
2 argue with
3 contradict
4 poke fun at
5 joke about
6 ridicule
7 correct
8 discipline
9 embarrass
10 or are critical of another person

If you do any of these, you and they would lose face. Let’s take a look at face on a national scale. Chairman Mao Zedong’s embalmed body lies in a mausoleum on Tiananmen Square and a huge poster of him hangs at the main gate of the Forbidden City. His portrait is on all Chinese paper money. A statue can be found in every town and city. Each year, millions of people visit sites where he spent his childhood and every place he ever lived. He has much face in China.

There is a biography about him that’s banned in China. "Mao: The Unknown Story" written by Jung Chang, whose own family suffered under his rule, and her husband, Jon Halliday, who spent ten years going through previously untapped archives and interviewed hundreds of people close to Mao. The massively researched biography portrays a man who was amoral, repellent, and a mass murderer who makes Hitler and Stalin look like choirboys.
• 38 million people died of starvation while he shipped rice and wheat to Russia in exchange for military equipment.
• Millions were killed during his Cultural Revolution and millions of others ruined.
• He was responsible for 70 million Chinese deaths.

In China, Mao is a hero, an extreme example of face on a national level.

With face, there is really never any need for forgiveness. They never judge. They just look the other way. Mistakes are natural occurrences for us humans, so why beat ourselves up over it. What does rubbing our noses in it accomplish? They’d rather focus on the good we do, and believe we will learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. They have a positive view of human nature and believe that we are basically good, kind and well meaning.

Over here, when you chastise, embarrass or punish a child or employee, does that mean they won’t do it again? Does it enhance the relationship? Does it build trust?

I made my share of faux pas in China, but I was accepted just as I was. This strengthened my resolve to not repeat my errors, to do better, to maintain my self-image and confidence, and feel good about myself. The better you feel about yourself, the better job you do.

Confucius says:
“The nobler sort of man emphasizes the good qualities in others, and does not accentuate the bad. The inferior does the reverse.”

That’s face!

Ernie Tadla
www.odysseychina.net

Next week: Lesson 5. Guanxi: Trust me.