Reflections: 3 months of work!
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Shenzhen,
China
Monday, November 13, 2006
I'm feeling much better now, although still a little tired. I've nearly finished writing my end-of-semester exams. It's a lot better feeling that sitting them I can tell you! Once I've got setting and marking the mid-terms out of the way I should get a view on what "normality" looks like around here. The management leaves something to be desired, but I think that's true everywhere. If and when we can see what day-to-day life will look like, I can see how I feel about staying here longer term.
It is an interesting experience and a potentially valuable one from a future employment point of view, but it's tough to meet some of my personal objectives. It's the old trap of needing to commit yourself and give your all to work to get the most from that environment, yet to make that commitment you need to mentally commit yourself for an extended period of time because the payback here isn't immediate. The choice isn't easy, because you can see opportunities you didn't know were open to you and yet your choices about who you want to be and where you want to be are fading before your eyes. You have to figure that one out for yourself everyday, but it's becoming more stark here.
A few cracks are appearing in the foreigner-local working relationships too which make things a little uncomfortable. If I put a Management Consultant's hat on, I would say they are totally due to a lack of definition of roles and responsibilities. That can be tied back to the fact that there's no published set of objectives or organisational strategy and very little obvious executive power being exercised. That sort of clinical clarity of definition doesn't really apply to Chinese life though.
As far as I can figure it out, the fundamental difference in approach is the fact that the Chinese staff are willing to accept they belong to an institution and therefore it doesn't matter if things get done at the last minute becuase people are there to do it anyway. I, on the other hand, have made sure that for the next 8 weeks I'm not going to be anywhere near school from 1400 Friday until 0700 Monday. I think that's raised a few eyebrows and will raise a few more when somebody asks me to be on hand for an event at the drop of a hat.
