The Fish Starts Smelling from the Head

Do you remember when you were back in school? How would you distinguish between an excellent and an average teacher?

A good test would be to see what happens when a teacher is called out of class at mid-lesson. If students still keep working, it means that the teacher managed to truly engage them in the learning subject. More often, you’ve probably seen the opposite - how kids behaved if the teacher wasn’t that effective.

If we look at the workplace, isn’t there a strong similarity between effective teachers and effective leaders? Have you seen teams that perform on a high level whether or not the boss is around? And other teams where performance takes an almost instant dip when the manager leaves the office?

Or does maintaining performance depend more on the kind of people working in the team?

That’s what Marty, Head of Finance of the Hong Kong subsidiary of a large American Media Company thought.

“We just can’t find the right people here who are really passionate about finance, accounting, and controlling. So I have to keep being after them, making sure the quality of reports is right and deadlines are being respected. 

It’s quite tiring, but it seems that’s the only way to make it work over here.”

Marty has been working in Hong Kong for the past two years. He was transferred by the New York headquarters due to a successful track record as Chief Controller there.

This is a quite common situation: executives who were able to successfully manage teams overseas struggle to repeat the same success in Asia. So is Marty right? Are there simply not enough people here who are passionate in his field?

In Germany, we have a saying that translates to “The fish starts smelling from the head.” Perhaps you can guess that the fish here stands for the team and the head stands for…the head of the team. So if the team ‘smells’, then there are good chances it started at the head, i.e. the manager of the team.

Getting people engaged in Hong Kong or other parts of Asia might not work exactly in the same way as it does overseas. It turned out that Marty tapped into the limiting beliefs trap.

When his leadership style which successfully worked in the US failed to produce the same results in Asia, he simply put the blame on his Asian team members. He replaced a couple of them which hardly improved the situation.

When this was not working, he changed his leadership style from an empowerment to a controlling approach. Now his results improved somewhat but he felt quite exhausted from continuously checking the work of his team members. What he didn’t realize – as we eventually found out – was the fact that his Asian colleagues were used to a directive style from his predecessor. They needed first to be prepared for a more empowering leadership style.

The paradox here is that on one hand, his people actually wanted to be more empowered which in turn would make them more engaged and at the same time, when Marty tried to do exactly that, it didn’t work because they were not used to this leadership style.

So what to do?

First, Marty agreed that his current style of managing the team is not what he really wanted. So he was willing to make yet another change provided that there would be good chances to achieve what he wanted to achieve: to build a highly engaged team.

Second, Marty needed to open up to his team and share his frustrations without putting the blame on anyone but himself. He decided to run a facilitated offsite half-day event with his team. He agreed to apologize to his team members for his recent directive style. This was difficult for him to do because his own frustration with his team members was still emotionally affecting him.

Third, during the offsite event, after airing his frustrations and offering his apologies, he shared his vision of how to work together and solicited comments from his team. Since the trust level was not yet sufficiently high for his team members to feel comfortable enough to confront Marty directly with their views, the facilitator asked Marty to leave the room and collected their comments.

It turned out that there was actually a close match between Marty’s vision and what his team members wanted. In order to feel more comfortable with taking more ownership, however, they needed better clarification of his expectations. Initially, they felt that he was simply dumping work on them without explaining exactly what the expected outcome was. As a result, they were hesitating which way to go, and this lead to delays and eventually suboptimal results.

Marty was happy to learn that his initial and actually preferred leadership style would only require some modification to work in the same way it did back in the US.

As it turned out, his Asian colleagues could get equally, if not more, passionate than his previous colleagues. All that was needed was confidence in them and a slight but important modification in his approach to leading his Asian team.