“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?”
Fear letting go
“There are a lot of benefits to doing product development regionally. But our colleagues in Germany are not open to that. Nothing is made in U.S. We buy internally from Asia or Europe. Why? The German fear of letting go. We had no other choice but to find a source in the U.S. Under the radar, of course. How can we convince our German colleagues to let go a bit of control?”
Who likes to let go of control?
Sincerely, folks, I can fully understand the perspective of headquarters in any company operating globally. All those regions, far away, foreign cultures, unfamiliar markets, colleagues who you may or may not trust as competent, constantly coming up with all sorts of half-baked ideas about how “the company can make a lot of money.”
Especially when it comes to product development. Remember, the German economy is the fourth largest in the world with only about 80 million people. And the strength, the core, of the German economy is their science and technology, in the end their products.
And what is at the core of a product? It’s development: science, engineering, manufacturing. Who wants to give up, or even share, that core?
Now, if you are sourcing within the company from other regions, then your German colleagues will have to react at some point. Because if that sourcing goes well – technically just as good as what comes out of Germany, and less expensive, and more flexible to the needs of your customers – well then Germany will have to respond to that company-internal competition.
So, let’s get back to the key issue here, which is product. Americans and Germans have different product philosophies, meaning how they respectively define what makes for a good product.
Get clarity on those differences. Perhaps your German colleagues would be more open to letting go of some of their control if they better understood what you are proposing.
Consensus vs. Top-Down
“As a practical matter, how does German consensus-style decision making differ from the American top-down approach? Is it more efficient? Does it produce better results? Is it easier to implement because of the buy-in of all the parties? Can these factors even be measured?“
Well, you can’t get more practical than making decisions and implementing them.
You ask three questions. 1. Differences between German consensus-building and American top-down decision making? 2. Which is more effective, and easier to implement? For every decision is only as good as its implementation. 3. Can decision making styles be measured?
Question 1 – Differences. This is a very complex topic. Please see my analysis on the divergences between Germans and Americans in their decison making in the lefthand navigation.
Question 2 – Effectiveness. Both countries, societies, economies are successful. Not without problems, not without ups and downs, but still the largest and fourth-largest economies on the planet, with more than a handful of first-rate global companies. So we can safely say about both cultures – therefore business cultures – that they know how to make decisions and implement them.
Which approach to decision making is more effective is an extraordinarily complex question, and would have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. I would not want to be the person who has to come up with a method for such analysis.
But that comparison is not all that relevant, anyway. American and German collaboration is not about judging which approach is better, but instead about first understanding the differences between the approaches, in order to define how best to combine their inherent strengths. “In order to”: the reason for, the task, goal, the great pay-off.
Imagine what Germans and Americans could achieve if they truly understood their respective decision making logics, then sat down to map out how they make decisions together! This is the true high art form of working across cultures.
Question 3 – Measureable. I’m not sure if “measure” is the right term. But there certainly are indications – let’s even call them KPIs (key performance indicators) – for decision making processes which work and those which do not work. See the five divergences between German and American decision making which I address. These can be understood as KPIs.