Being “Overly Friendly” in Business?

A friend with an Asian back­ground com­ple­mented me recently on being “blunt” about things. While, I agree that being straight-forward in con­vers­ing with other peo­ple, it’s not really in my nature to be that way. You see, I’m also half-Asian and half-Italian — born and raised in the United States and prob­a­bly have a much dif­fer­ent “way” of con­duct­ing myself than most West­ern­ers. The “Chi­nese way” of deal­ing with oth­ers whether in busi­ness or rela­tion­ships has  a lot rid­ing on some­thing they call “guangxi” — or “rela­tion­ships.” The Chi­nese busi­ness model — if you can call it that has to deal with how one per­son inter-relates with another. Their busi­nesses have a lot to do with fam­ily and devel­op­ing friend­ships and tak­ing a busi­ness propo­si­tion from there.

For instance, if some­one wants to start a busi­ness in Tai­wan — let’s just use a “teashop” for exam­ple, these indi­vid­u­als can turn to their rel­a­tives and friends for sup­port — to help them pool-in and finance their busi­nesses. How­ever that doesn’t always mean that a busi­ness is going to be suc­cess­ful. In fact, when I taught there I used to go to teashops to meet peo­ple and work on les­son plans on a reg­u­lar basis. One day my favorite teashop would be open, and the next day it would be closed. Then right around the cor­ner from there, another one would “mag­i­cally appear.” The same applies to their restau­rants and shops as well. And that’s not an exag­ger­a­tion. For the most part, it is a model which has worked fine for Chi­nese cul­ture for many thou­sands of years and their cul­ture con­tin­ues to oper­ate in this fash­ion to some degree.

How­ever, in the United States — while some busi­nesses do start with famil­ial sup­port, many busi­ness own­ers take the “famil­ial” por­tion out of the equa­tion and often sub­sti­tute their start-up and oper­a­tional costs with loans from their local lenders. In this way, their deal­ings seem less “per­sonal” and per­haps more “pro­fes­sional” by West­ern stan­dards and prac­tice. The whole method tends to be more direct and to the point.

Now, I’m not advo­cat­ing “wrong” or “right” here. But there def­i­nitely is a cul­tural divide which hap­pens between the two cul­tures. I acknowl­edge from both sides that it exists.

As much as I would some­times like to “take” the Chi­nese way of doing busi­ness out of me, a lot of this is habit­ual and stems from my upbring­ing. By nature, I tend to be polite and gre­gar­i­ous towards oth­ers. I don’t hes­i­tate to make “small talk” or even “nego­ti­ate” (another stan­dard Chi­nese prac­tice) with peo­ple — in fact I enjoy it and it comes some­what nat­u­rally. How­ever, I’ve noticed over the years of run­ning my busi­ness that these rules and habits don’t seem to trans­late too well for busi­ness prac­tice in the United States.

For many years, I’ve spo­ken with some of the biggest devel­op­ers and archi­tects in this coun­try. Some of these indi­vid­u­als wield more finan­cial power than entire coun­tries. Some of them can make or break you. Some­times it’s a phone call, and other times it is an email or two. One thing that I’ve dis­cov­ered is that when I’m talk­ing with a head or pres­i­dent of a major cor­po­ra­tion in the US is that they often don’t make small talk. I say that with some cau­tion — I don’t want to come off as stereo­typ­ing — this is just my own per­sonal obser­va­tion. Usu­ally, it entails get­ting straight to the point — “how long will it take?” and “how much will it cost?” That’s the essence — the “meat and pota­toes” of a con­ver­sa­tion. They don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to know the ins-and-outs of what may poten­tially go wrong or what prob­lems you may encounter. They don’t want to know that you’re busy because “fam­ily is com­ing in from out of town.” They just want sim­ple, straight-forward answers. And the few times I’ve tried to make small-talk when I first started out, I think there’s times where it may have actu­ally back-fired on me ( I’ll never be 100% sure if that has ever occurred.)

I think that there may be some sort of dis­con­nect which hap­pens in busi­ness when the East meets West. I often think that if you’re “too friendly” in your busi­ness deal­ings, West­ern cul­ture tends to inter­pret this as being untrust­wor­thy, or it’s marked with a red flag. And if the reverse sit­u­a­tion occurs, West­ern­ers can be viewed as being “short” and per­haps even “unfriendly.” From a busi­ness psy­chol­ogy stand-point, this is actu­ally a form of “com­mu­ni­ca­tion bar­rier” or even “lan­guage bar­rier” and can lead to some major mis­un­der­stand­ings — whether it involves peo­ple directly, busi­nesses, or even on a global polit­i­cal level.

So it’s unfor­tu­nate, but when I’m on the phone with clients nowa­days, I’ve become some­what “straight to the point” as well. I don’t mess around with people’s time because I don’t want to lose a poten­tial project on the sim­ple fact that I was “being friendly.” That’s not to say that I am being “unfriendly” — I do in fact occa­sion­ally joke around with a client if we’re feel­ing com­fort­able with one another — but per­haps it should be con­sid­ered “pro­fes­sional” by West­ern standards.