Working With Africans

Visiting the largest bookshops in Nairobi gives a broad overview of what Kenyans read and how they get prepared for their working life.

In the Business section, piles of imported books feature the golden rules paving the way to successfully doing business… Titles such as How to get what you want in the workplace? …Marketing Effectively…Effective People Management…Negotiations… Not Bosses but leaders… Practical Guide for Improving Communication… caught my attention.

You may wonder why I pinpoint these books as you might have seen them on shelves located in other countries.

These books are in total contradiction with the messages conveyed by foreign business scholars and by many overseas business schools: they do not distill the recipe of these books any longer because business education is constantly influenced by the experience and knowledge gained by business players. 

Experienced gained on global markets taught business players that culture matters and that a range of business practices, fields and techniques should stop being considered as universally effective, whichever the context!

Nowadays business schools and universities in countries such as Australia, Canada, USA, UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark and France (just to cite a few) raise their students’ awareness on the numerous cultural differences that impact on managing people, on effectively negotiating, on communicating or even on developing and implementing effective marketing strategies and policies.

Courses or even degrees in cross-cultural communication or in cross-cultural management or other marketing across cultures are widely offered.

This new approach to crafting disciplines and techniques in accordance with local cultural values stems as much from global players’ experience as from comparative research.

Unfortunately Kenyan managers and other business players do not read these scientific reviews. They are therefore trapped by assertive foreign gurus who have little experience of their art beyond their own borders and whose main intention is to sell as many books as possible.

Many public speakers venture into Kenya but also into other African countries in the hope of sharing their experiences summarized in the books that they sell. Africans thirsted of developing their capacity may naively swallow their supposedly universal message and recipe.

Welcoming uncritically these imported recipes holds as long as people have little experience of how business is conducted across their borders. And this is maybe what characterizes Kenyan managers and other business players. Too little exposure to a wide variety of work and business cultures may mislead them.

So in order to open their eyes to how important global players take cultural differences in the work place, let us examine how they select their global leaders and experts.

Before offering an oversea assignment to an employee, multinationals identify the best ones, based on their technical expertise and experience but also on their ability to adjust to cultural differences.

A wide range of assessment tools are available on the market such as Overseas Assignment Inventory, Global Assessment Inventory, Cross-cultural Adaptability Inventory, Global Competencies Inventory, Intercultural Development Inventory, International Mobility Assessment, Intercultural readiness Check… This list is not exhaustive but it gives enough weight to the importance granted by global firms to the need to adjust to the local way of conducting business and managing them.

In a further stage the selected candidates will go through a cross-cultural training enabling them to build trust, manage people, lead change, transfer know-how, develop and implement sound marketing and operation policies while taking into consideration the cultural values of their foreign employees, suppliers, clients and other third parties.

Such evolution of business practices and expectations makes it difficult to believe that Kenyans are well prepared to venture into foreign markets if they believe that there is one best way!

This holds for their ventures into neighboring markets in the frame of the East African Common Market but it also holds for their ventures into far away markets.

Such peculiarity of Kenyans valuing an imported way of doing and managing business rather than crafting their own is unusual in Africa.

From decades onwards South Africans have devised an African management style that they have come to realize does not apply across the whole continent. Others are willing to distance themselves from Western models.

Out of the 22 countries where I have conducted some research, Kenya is the only one that does not value a typical Kenyan way of conducting and managing business. Usually Kenyans’ perception of cultural specifics revolves around using indigenous languages. That is the only area where they would claim the respect of their cultural identity.

However cultural specifics span across a much wider scope than that of the use of a language; overlooking these specifics is a predictor of future misunderstanding and ineffectiveness in cross the borders interactions.

In order to prepare for international business transactions, Kenyans should craft their own business style and learn about cultural differences.

Finally I would like to encourage Kenyans but also all Africans to reflect on the message of the outgoing Chairman of the Commission for Higher Education in Kenya. Professor Thairu Kihumbu challenged Africans to rediscover who they are, independent of their assimilated Western values and ways of thinking and behaving.

In short, they must decolonize their mind.