The Pied Piper of Tianjin

It was early Saturday morning and the light was just beginning to permeate through my curtains. As it was the weekend, I was looking forward to rolling over and enjoying two or three more hours of blissful slumber. Unfortunately, my plans were wrecked by a rasping voice piercing the silence from outside. In a vain effort to escape the awful din, I pulled my pillow up over my head to block out the noise. Alas, it was to no avail. So, crotchety and bleary eyed I shuffled across my bedroom floor to my window. I pulled the curtains back to see what was going on.

Beneath my apartment block is a large hair salon.Considering I lost my hair at 20, this place normally has no impact on my life whatsoever. However, on this particular Saturday, things were different. The manager was standing in the doorway of the salon holding a megaphone, screaming at his employees. The situation made me chuckle. The manager was clearly irked about something, and was making his feelings known. Unfortunately for him, his employees seemed oblivious. I could tell by their blank stares and vacant expressions that absolutely nothing was sinking in.

This leadership style is one that I have seen countless times in northern China. It is one in which managers and supervisors do not look to stimulate or motivate their teams to help generate new ideas and better performance. Instead they just expect them to blindly follow instructions. This reminded me of the old children's tale the Pied Piper of Hamlin. In this story a town in Germany is infested with rats and is desperate to remove them. So, the mayor hires a piper to play beautiful music to make the rats follow him. The piper does this and leads the rats to the river where they are all drowned. Everyone in the town was delighted. However, when the mayor refused to pay the piper, he used his music to lead all the children in the town away, just as he did with the rats.

The manager of the salon was trying to emulate the piper. Unfortunately for him, he did not have a magic flute and his staff were certainly not following him.
This is an all too common scenario in China. Too many managers believe leadership is simply about making others follow their lead. Sadly, because of this, their employees grow increasingly de-motivated. Here are a couple of examples that I have encountered:

1. My first example came when I was training staff at a major multinational in Tianjin about meeting skills. I asked how useful - on a scale of 1 to 10 - they thought their meetings were. To my surprise, I heard lots of 2s and 3s. "Why, so low?" I asked. "Our managers" they replied. "They talk, we listen. And, then, they make the decision .... We do not even need to be there."
2. The second example was a little different because the manager in question actually realised there was a problem. She was the sales manager for the DongBei office of a major multinational and was frustrated because her staff were reluctant to offer ideas and simply wanted to follow her lead - whether she was heading in the right direction or not. There were two reasons behind this (i) her predecessors followed the pied piper school of leadership and expected obedience rather than ideas from the staff, and (ii) the sales manager was imposing both in physique and personality and, as a consequence, scared her subordinates. The problem was that even though she recognised the problem, she did know how to solve it.

It took me a little time to grasp the relevance of the manager who woke me that Saturday morning - I was still pretty sleepy after all. As I am sure you will have read in my previous entries, top-quality talent is in desperately short supply here in China. The area where this shortage is most acute is in qualified managers. There is a McKinsey report that I have quoted several times in Network HR that illustrates this clearly. It found that by 2015, China would need 75,000 MBA qualified managers to ensure its continued growth. However, in 2005, it had less than 5,000. To make up this shortfall, most organisations still look away from mainland China for their managerial talent. By simply importing managerial talent, China is handicapping itself - it needs to develop homegrown talent to plug the leadership gap. China needs to put down the megaphone and major organisations need to invest in training to help develop leadership talent.

Customer Service Conundrums

So, it was Sunday and my girlfriend and I were out shopping on Binjiang Dao - Tianjin's major retail area. We were not looking for anything in particular, rather we were just browsing. As we ambled around the Nike store, I noticed a rather nice Olympic T-Shirt with 'Great Britain' written across the front. After my native country's surprisingly competent performance in Beijing, I thought the shirt may be a nice memento. And, better still, it was 33% off.

Up until this point, my story is relatively mundane, right? Certainly. However, the events that followed certainly were a break from the norm. One of the sales assistants and approached me. I was expecting her to follow the standard procedure of offering a "ni hau" before standing awkwardly next to me and thrusting products I did not want under my nose. Yet, to my complete surprise she did nothing of the sort. Instead, the remarkable following conversation ensued.

"Can I help you sir?"
"Oh, yes, I am looking at these 'Great Britain t-shirts. Do you have an XL?"
"Let me see ... I don't think so. Because they are on sale. We have 'USA' in XL, would that be ok?"
"Not really. I want the other one because I am British."
"Ha ha, ok I see. Let me see, we have XXL, but it is a Chinese size, so it might not be too big. Why don't you try it. The fitting rooms are over there."

The shirt fit and I purchased it. Even though it looked great on me, I left the store thinking more about the great service I received. The sad is that high-quality customer service employees are a rare bread in China, so much so that when you do encounter good service, it leaves you pleasantly surprised.

Now, let me contrast my experience at Nike with the travails I encountered at Starbucks a few minutes later. My girlfriend was in need of a Green Tea Frappuccino and quite fancied a latte. Both of these products require milk. Something you would expect a major coffee chain to have in abundance. However, apparently, this was not the case. I visited three different stores along Binjiang Dao, and in each, I was told, "No Milk - Only Soy". In the first two outlets, when I asked why, I was met with only an embarassed stare and a repetition of "No Milk".

It was only at the third store that I got any form of explanation.
"Because there are problems with milk in China at the moment, we are only using soy milk."
This was quite a rational explanation - certainly one I would have no qualms with after the recent scandals regarding milk in China. However, I was not satisfied. I had wasted my time trapsing around three different locations, and still I had no coffee. Why couldn't they have told me at the first store and saved my time and energy? Let me tell you why. Because customer service talent is so scarce here in China, many organisations are forced to settle for less. However, the key issue is a lack of training, particularly in communications.

The sales assistant at Nike was such a surprise because she was happy to talk to her customer. When she didn't have the size I wanted, she was able to offer me alternatives, one of which brought the sale. Starbucks, on the other hand failed to effectively communicate that they had no milk. They could easily have put a large poster in the window explaining the problem. Had they done so, my girlfriend and I may have chosen a different product. However, after visiting three stores without success, I was so frustrated we simply went elsewhere - presenting Starbucks with a loss of 60rmb!