If You Play Alone You Stay Alone

In this post I will, as I promised, explain my theory with regards to the efficiency and initiative-taking abilities of the Chinese people. As mentioned in the previous post about patience, Chinese employees can sometimes be extraordinarily slow and while they may do an excellent job if you tell/show them exactly what to do, they lack a lot of initiative and independence when they need to complete tasks that require some degree of personal input.

I don't want to sound judgmental and overly critical and it took me quite a while to reach this conclusion. Yet, I wanted to understand why so many people were referring to the Chinese as bad workers (most people that I know that have worked with them call them inefficient and complain about the fact that they have to watch their every move.) I also knew many expats in Beijing that told me that it would take 5-6 Chinese people to do the work they could do alone and in half the time. 

I wanted to get to the bottom of this, so I decided to observe the people and ask around. These three observations and facts led to the conclusion that many Chinese people lack skills related to initiative-taking, especially in their working environment:

1. Because of the one-child policy Chinese children don't have siblings and thus they are not used to the interaction with other kids from an early stage, including the conflicts that occur and the games that you create.
2. As a consequence of the one-child policy it is not only a case of the parents but also the grandparents only have one grandchild. Therefore, all the hopes and dreams are placed on this one child and if it is possible the children are being put in the best (and most expensive) schools with reputations of academic excellency.
3. Because of point number 2, the children are being pressured early on to achieve excellent academic results and being the best at other things, such as playing the piano or playing badminton. I noticed that the Chinese children barely play. You often see them together with their parents or grandparents walking to or from school and occasionally playing badminton in the hallway or you get the joy of listening to them practicing on the piano. If you see them in groups they don't really play, but sometimes they run or they yell. You barely see them playing structured games, such as for example Hide & Seek and you very rarely here a child say "I made up this game, do you wanna play?"

At my job at the Chinese academy I met this nice girl that was studying in France who was my coworker for a short while. She came from a city close to Shanghai, but spoke fluently English. One day I asked her about how it was to be a child in China and she told me that it was a nightmare, because you have to study so much and all you wanna do is to play. So I asked her if she had played a lot as a child and she answered that she had not and when she played she played by herself at home or with her grandmother who was taking care of her when the parents were at work. This girl had severe problems with writing her weekly report, as she didn't know what to write. Although she was working in marketing and sales she was neither outgoing nor creative. She was a hard-worker, I must give her that, because she came before me in the morning and left long after me in the evening (she working perhaps 12 hours per day!). However, I couldn't imagine what she was doing and little by little more of her responsibilities were given to me and I had to pretend that I needed to spend 4-6 hours on a task when all I needed was 1 hour, because as my efficiency was that much higher than hers I didn't want to end up with all the responsibilities (this was my decision after having measured the value of my work which was paid with Chinese lessons).

So what's the conclusion of all this? Merely that our childhood has an impact on the way we work in the future. So give your children the freedom to play! Let them invent games and create their rules. Let them use old furniture and wood to build tree houses and let them build fortresses in the garden and use your old clothes to dress up. Education is important because it expands your capacity to learn. Interaction with other people is just as important. Through playing you learn to share, you learn to be creative and you get a place to put all that extra energy that you automatically have as a child. I think that the children that played a lot, both alone and in groups, come out to be the most innovative and outgoing employees and leaders.