Working With Americans: Corporate Structure
Does the American management style differ from the British style?
The American management style is different from British approaches and one of the ways that it's different is in terms of the way hierarchies work. It appears in the U.S. that you have a flatter organizational structure most of the time and it's quite OK to have much more informal conversations with your boss than it is maybe in the UK. However, the appearance could be deceiving. because if you disagree with your boss, how you manage and air that disagreement is very different in the states than it is in Europe. In the U.S. you'll very politely broach the subject and politely disagree without wanting to necessarily feel that you're being insubordinate in having an outright row with your boss. How I can say, for being in the U.K. and living in Europe for half my life, that I've seen many instances where disagreements get quite heated, quite passionate, where it's quite OK to disagree with the boss in Europe whereas in the U.S. the way you manage that disagreement needs to be much more tentative and polite, not necessarily adversarial.
How do job titles differ in American institutions?
Job titles in the US differ quite a lot from Europe. For example, in the UK, and other parts of the EU, if you are the head of finance, you're called a Finance Director. If you're head of personnel or HR, you're called an HR Director. In the US, you have titles that maybe don't quite explain exactly what the person does. For example, an HR Director can be called a Head of Talent, or a Head of People. So we have job titles that sort of describe what people do, but may not be quite as direct and accurate, or consistent, as they are in Europe. So if you're unclear, it's perfectly all right to ask, "I see you're Head of Talent, or People. Does that mean you're like an HR Director, or Head of HR, or VP of HR?" So it's okay to get clarification. Yes, the job titles can be quite confusing sometimes.
How important are job titles in America?
Job title in the us isn't necessarily as important as it is in Europe. So even though there's status behind the job title it doesn't necessarily describe the level of the person and the organization quite as clearly as you might think. So in banking for example, you have a lot of people, at senior management level, called vice-president. Now the assumption is: There's only one vice president, this person is the vice-president of this big bank. Wow they must be very important. But actually, there's lots of vice presidents in that particular bank, and many other banks. So needing to understand what level of management that the person is that you are working with is quite important, and you can ask that politely, and come up with an equivalent of how that might be in your European organization, and let them explain to you where in the hierarchy they sit.
Is America more or less diverse than the UK?
The American business culture is much more diverse than in the UK. Purely because you have more ethnic minorities in the United States; black, Far Eastern, Indian, from all over the world. I mean, America is of the world. So it's going to be very likely that not only will you have more women in the contractual negotiations or the business dealings that you have, but you're going to have many more ethnic minorities. So one of the things that is perhaps confusing sometimes, or maybe uncomfortable sometimes, is the extent of that diversity and the fear that you might have about communicating, "Well, gosh, this person's a Hispanic and a Mexican-American, so, gosh! Maybe I need to use different vocabulary for them than with the Chinese-American in the meeting, or the black American -- African-American in the meeting." But you actually don't need to do that, because the American business culture is fairly homogenous. So all of these ethnic minority professionals still play by the same rule book about American business. But it's worth bearing this in mind, because the political correctness movement means that you can't actually marginalize anybody, there's a cost economically to marginalizing ethnic minorities in the US. It's a networked economy. They tell 20 people that you said something incredibly rude and impolite and politically incorrect, and there's a knock-on economic effect to that, because they tell more people, who tell more people, who tell more people. And because of our view of the world that what goes around comes around, it really doesn't pay to risk marginalizing anyone, because of the economic power that they wield.
Does the number of women in senior positions differ to that of the UK?
You're definitely more likely to find women in senior management positions in the states than in other parts of the world. The reason we care about that isn't because you necessarily need to be more polite or do anything necessarily different other than be aware of the fact that if you're uncomfortable working with women you're going to have to find you're working with a lot of American woman more often than you are in other parts of Europe so you may want to temper your biases about women in senior leadership positions because there's just so many more of us.
Does the average American employee have more or less responsibility than the British?
I think American executives have the same levels of responsibility as their UK and other European counterparts. One of the differences though that comes with that responsibility is that American executives generally have more prescriptive approaches that they use to follow and more procedures, if you like, and more processes than you find in Europe and the UK. The US is a very processed oriented business culture. So we have checklists, we have rules, we have spreadsheets for how we actually do things and do our jobs. And you don't find European business as process driven as you do in the United States. So even though the levels of responsibility are the same how your American colleague goes about his or her is going to be much more prescribed, maybe much more procedural than it is certainly in Europe.
How do undergraduate degrees within the workplace compare to that of the UK?
What you'll find in most American companies is that most employees will have undergraduate university degrees. So it's typically the norm to hire people that have been to university. And in sheer numbers terms a significant higher number of people have gone to university in the US versus the UK and other parts of Europe.So there is almost an expectation that you have a university degree before you get hired in a US company. They're typically looking for degrees around economics, around business which degrees are much more common now then they ever were before. People pursue business as an undergraduate major as I did for example. Where as before it was liberal arts degrees very often and you would then maybe migrate into business. So an undergraduate degree is almost an entry ticket into any kind of American corporate.
How do postgraduate degrees within the workplace compare to that of the UK?
In terms of graduate degrees, one of the things you find with the MBA is that again in the US. the more senior you are, the more likely you have an MBA degree. Very often it's sponsored by your employer your sent on the MBA program that they pay for. Part of the reason for getting the MBA its because A) professional development on going learning is part of the American business culture. We are the number one culture in terms of how to books of any place in planet so how to improve yourself is part of American life and business life as well. So the MBA degree is increasingly the other norm if you're aspiring for choosing for senior management positions in the US.
