“Why are we here?”

“Headquarters in Germany wants us to run our business, but they don’t empower us to do so. Frustration in the U.S. is significant: ‘Why am I in this team if our German colleagues are always negative about new ideas we propose?’ We Americans collaborate differently than Germans. When tasked with a job, we’re allowed to go and dig into it, then come back with recommendations, as a team. Do the Germans respect us? What do they value? We never get anything back from them and when we do it’s always challenging questions. So we Americans sometimes ask ourselves: ‘Why are we here?’ How can we convince headquarters in Germany to truly empower us?”