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In the first installment of Thinking Differently with Lynn, I shared some surprising differences between the cultures of my home, the United States of America, and the countries where I have lived. Adjusting to differences was challenging, and it remains so as I make my home in El Salvador. I am constantly on guard to avoid making a faux pas or insulting someone.
On a personal level, those differences are superficial. They impact how I interact with others but are external to my psyche. However, culture shock can go deeper than that, making us question who we are and how we see ourselves. My crash course in Kenyan employee relations is in that category. It was painful and transformational; the emotions I felt and the lessons I learned are as salient now as they were seven years ago.
Can we talk about that at work?
I was hired by a luxury boutique hotel in Nairobi to build a revenue management structure and manage a team of six reservations agents. I knew revenue management and didn’t think this would be any different from any of the other hotels I had worked with. What I forgot was that I was brand new in a foreign country, on a continent on the other side of the world, throwing myself headfirst into a new culture to which I had never been exposed and knew nothing about. It didn’t go well.
My rusty managerial skills and lack of reservations experience did not help the situation, but worse was my oblivion to not knowing what I didn’t know. And there was a lot I didn’t know. As I soon learned, the line between professional and personal that we take for granted in the U.S. is not culturally universal. In Kenya, it seemed like there was no line at all.
Not only were personal topics not off limits for a boss to discuss with direct reports, but it was also expected—case in point: a pregnant employee. In the U.S., you acknowledge this fact and perhaps reference it occasionally, if impersonally, but you don't ask too many questions. Not so in Kenya.
The Reckoning
I knew that I was not in line for boss of the year, but I was not prepared to be called into HR for a sit-down. E, the Head of HR, informed me that the team thought me cold and insensitive for not expressing the requisite interest in her pregnancy, nor the baby once it was born. My external lack of interest in the personal lives of the rest of the team reinforced their opinion, and the fact that my feedback was “too harsh” made me mean, to boot.
And then came the words that I will never forget. E told me that I should consider a different career, that I don’t belong in hospitality because I am not a people person.
Not a people person? Come again? Say what you will about the triteness of the phrase, but my perceived people person-ness is a foundational part of who I am. I consider empathy a defining trait and consider myself as much an educator as a manager.
I tried to explain to E that, of course, I care about the team as people, but where I come from, you can get sued for showing that you care because asking questions is often laced with ulterior motives. This fell on deaf ears. Just as I couldn’t understand her culture’s expectation of the personal in the professional, she couldn’t understand the litigiousness of mine. Nor should she even try. I quickly realized the obvious fact that I was in her world. If I wanted to exist there, I needed to learn to operate within it rather than try reshaping it to match mine. It was a jarring but relatively painless wake-up call.
Much more painful was the hurt and shame of being told I wasn’t a people person. For a hospitality professional, this might be the biggest insult imaginable. Learning that not only was I unable to lead a team, but I was also unfit for the only career I had ever known cut me to the core.
After much crying and the benefit of time, my pride began to mend enough for me to think clearly. I revisited my interactions with my team, but rather than replaying each instance through E’s eyes, I remembered them from my point of view. Doing so allowed me to measure them against my own standards, developed over 35 years of life in the capitalist, individualist, high-achieving United States. To my relief, I was comfortable with most of them.
I needed to come to terms with not being a people person in their culture because their definition is different from mine—not better or worse, just different. Their version works in that context because that people person operates under an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and experiences than I do.
It didn’t make sense for me to either try to become that kind of people person or try to make them accept mine. And to be honest, trying to fit in was just too hard. If I couldn’t begin to understand their interpersonal standards, how would I achieve them? It's better to stick to what I know.
Not everyone is going to like me, but I need to like myself.
As difficult as that experience was (so difficult that I considered throwing in the towel and moving back to Washington, DC), it taught me one of the most valuable lessons of my life: Not everyone is going to like me, but I need to like myself. That can only happen if I stay true to myself and not try to contort myself into somebody else’s version of who I should be. And that just means I won’t be a people person everywhere I go.
Lynn Zwibak is the Founder and President of Zwibak Revenue Management, which provides revenue management training to non-revenue managers. Her mission is to educate the hotel industry on revenue management principles so that hotels can be more profitable. She is also a professor of revenue management at Virginia Tech University. Lynn has lived and worked in Kenya and the Philippines and now lives in El Salvador.