The Dutch Team: it's like herding cats!

Originally published: The XPat Journal, Volume 21 issue #1, Autumn 2018

By Alette Vonk

A German friend of mine came to work for a car company in the Netherlands. She was to head a relatively small production unit and expected that it would be fairly easy to manage this team of around 15 employees. To her frustration, however, it proved to be much harder than she thought. It seemed to her as if the employees were frequently doing other things than had been planned. During team meetings, they would discuss the progress made and the way forward. Every time, all appeared clear and fine and they would agree on how to go from there. However, once the meeting was over, everyone would go off in different directions, often carrying out activities that had not or barely been discussed, let alone agreed upon. As a consequence, my friend felt as if her employees were not delivering the promised results. To her, managing this team felt like herding cats, or, as the Dutch saying goes: it's like a wheelbarrow full of frogs. The frogs were continuously jumping off left and right and it felt impossible to handle this team!

Why Weren’t They Following the Plan?

My friend did all she could to stop this behavior. She talked to her team, pleaded with them; at times she actually had to hold her temper in order not to shout at them. She couldn’t understand: what was wrong with these people? Why wouldn’t they do what they had agreed upon? Why didn’t they stick to the plan, which had been so clear for everyone during the team meeting? In order to be able to monitor their performance, she decided to increase the frequency of the meetings. Once they met more often, it would be easier to keep the flock together and attain the objectives, she thought. Also, she made a point of improving the quality of the minutes, by clarifying and spelling out the decisions taken, as well as the actions that needed to be executed.

A Rolling of the Eyes

To her surprise though, this didn’t go down well with the team. She noticed a rolling of the eyes and the somewhat cynical jokes, when she insisted on a precise formulation of the goals. As team leader, she was able to take some of this heat, though, and she dealt with it – thinking it was part of being in charge. After a while, however, she noticed that her employees seemed unmotivated – and this started to worry her. Some people were slowing down instead of aiming for the goals and results that they had set for themselves. Truthfully, my friend found herself in a complicated situation. The more she tried, the less her employees were willing to work hard and use their creativity to solve any issues that came up and to keep production going. What was going on and what could she do to turn this situation around?

Subconscious Assumptions

Living and working in a different cultural environment than the one you have grown up in, can be an amazing and sometimes frustrating experience. The basic assumptions of one’s cultural upbringing have in fact become so subconscious and ‘logical’ to most people, that oftentimes they don’t have a clue as to how things are perceived by people from a different background. When it comes to decision making, setting objectives, following up and achieving results within a professional setting, all these phenomena have proven to be pretty culture-sensitive. In other words: they take different forms within different cultures. ‘Management by Objectives’ (MBO), for instance, is a technique that works in certain cultures, but that simply does not work so well, or even acquires a different meaning, in others. As for what motivates people to do a good job and go the extra mile, the answers also vary widely across the globe.

Cultural Differences

Cultural differences can be very interesting and their mastering actually requires life-long learning – because of their complexity. However, not everyone has the inclination and/or time to study these differences in all their detail. Getting to know a few basic differences though, can help a person or a company move forward and turn this complex field into a manageable aspect of international, professional life. Thus it becomes possible to include the aspect of culture in a company’s strategic thinking and decision-making process and to convert if from a nuisance or a hindering factor, into a competitive advantage.

 A fix or flex approach to objectives

Going back to our case above, we may ask ourselves: which basic cultural difference may have been at play in this situation? Research shows that in Germany, generally speaking, there is more emphasis on achievement, success and rewards in life, while in Dutch society there is more emphasis on the quality of life and on serving others. Of course we’re talking about relative differences, as all of these aspects can be found in both societies. However, in societies where it is more common and important to demonstrate one’s successes, one will strive for the formulation and achievement of very clear objectives in the workplace, which create the opportunity to highlight the results and receive the reward that comes with them. If this manifestation of success is not so important (and interpreted as ‘showing off’ or even arrogance), then goals and objectives tend to be less precisely formulated, and people seek cooperation rather than competition for a reward, inclusion rather than ‘the winner takes it all’. In this situation objectives and activities might shift and change along the way, when new people and/or new information come into the picture. Hence, people work more with emerging insights that possibly create the need to diverge from the original objectives.

What’s the Point?

I remember vividly a conversation during one of my training sessions, when this very same issue came up. Some of the English participants (the UK resembles Germany in this aspect of their culture) were complaining that their Dutch colleagues were not achieving the results agreed upon during the meetings. The Dutch participants defended themselves, saying: “But after the meeting, we received new information, making those earlier agreements obsolete.” One of the English participants reacted: “But new information simply increases the challenge, so we just work harder to reach the agreed-upon results!” The Dutch participants almost fell off their chairs. “What’s the point in doing that?!” they cried. It is a beautiful example of this basic cultural difference in its purest form: what is considered challenging and therefore motivating by one, can be considered redundant and therefore very demotivating by the other.

Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation

In fact, this cultural aspect not only determines the approach to objectives and results, it is also very much tied up with motivation in the workplace. An employee in a German or British society is more extrinsically motivated by the reward (financial, promotion etc.) of having achieved the agreed-upon results; while the average employee within the Dutch context is more intrinsically motivated, for instance, by being able to make a valuable contribution to the team and the production process. The introduction of more meetings and precise minutes, as the German team leader had done, simply demotivated her employees. It made them feel as if she, the team leader, didn’t trust them and didn’t take their contribution seriously. Instead of using this type of micro management, she would do well to try the opposite, by focusing on the broad outline, making sure everybody is on the same page concerning the direction in the far future, correcting employees only in the light of this broad outline and complimenting original solutions to newly-emerging issues.

It is a fascinating yet frustrating truth: within intercultural management, the best solutions often go against what our own inclinations might dictate. Therefore, it is wise to continuously be reminded and made aware of the existence and nature of these differences. 

Alette Vonk is a University lecturer and consultant on Intercultural Management, as well as an Associate Partner at Hofstede Insights, and one of the founding members of Connect2us. You can contact her via [email protected].