Cross-National Work Experience Assignment

For the Cross-National Work Experience assignment, I interviewed Lintao Shi on December 2nd, who is a non-American business person with working experience with Americans. He is currently working in Siemens JV Company as an accounting manager in the China division. He has an American boss and his colleagues are mainly from American and Germany. Because of the inconvenience of the location, I interviewed him through phone call for about 40 minutes. This is the first time I talked to Lintao Shi. Through our conversation, I can see that he is a prudent and talkative person. We both enjoyed talking with each other and I learned a lot from our conversation.
In our conversation, he mentioned a lot about the cultural differences. He said, “there are …show more content…
Shi’s is that setting a goal is important. He indicated that setting goals will let people do their work more effectively and can motivate people to work harder to reach the goals. He said that he always set long term goals for his workers to reach in a year and short term goals for them to accomplish in one or two months. Mr. Shi likes to use goals to motivate workers. To set a good goal, using goal-setting theory is one of the best way. It is important to set SMART goals. S stands for specific, which means that people should set a goal that has a lot of details. M stands for measurable, which means that the goal can be measured by a criteria. A means achievable, which means that people can attain the goal. R is reinforcing, which means the goal should be consistent with the mission and beliefs. T means time deadline, which means that there should be a time frame for the goal. Managers should set goals based on these five aspects, so that they can make a very effective …show more content…
Shi also talked about the how to be a good manager. What he did most is to communicate with his workers. For his daily job, he needs to talk with his colleagues and get feedback from them. During the conversation with the others, it is difficult to hold emotions. Different people have different ideas, so there may be some variances in thoughts on the work between the manager and the workers. People may get angry because of their differences. A good manager should have a high EQ (emotional intelligence). According to Goleman, who wrote in his article “What Makes a Leader”, there are five qualities that people need to have to attain a high EQ. The first one is self-awareness: the ability to understand your own emotions. Next is self-regulation: the ability to control the moods and then motivation: the energy in pursuing the goal. Empathy is to react based on others’ feelings. The last one is social skill, which means people are good at managing relationships and building social networks. Mr. Shi did what a good manager should do. He cared about his subordinates and well managed the relationship among workers. In conclusion, Mr. Shi and I had a really fun time during this interview. From the conversation with him, I learned a lot about the differences in eastern and western cultures in areas including making decisions, the hierarchy in a company, and personality differences between Chinese and Americans. Also, I learned to set goals to motivate others as well as high EQ is