How to be tactful to your global business associates in times of disease or danger
Cities locked downwards, factories shut, cruise ships quarantined, foreigners flown out. What practise you say to the Chinese contacts you made on your travels as yous watch their land ravaged by the coronavirus? What is the best thing to say to your business contacts anywhere when you hear of problem in their habitation cities?
The easiest is an e-mail saying that you are thinking of them and hope that they and their families are all right. This works for epidemics as well every bit natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and bush fires.
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A quick bulletin hoping everyone is safe is the right response to terrorist attacks too. I was grateful for all the messages I received on the day of the bombings on London transport in July 2005, peculiarly from those who knew I took the Tube to work. I sent similar messages to contacts in New York after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
When troubles have a domestic political tinge, things are trickier. Nothing in my six visits to Hong Kong between 2022 and 2022 prepared me for the contempo television images of tear gas, riot police force and Molotov cocktails on the streets. True, the umbrella protests had happened in 2014, but when I discussed them with Hong Kong professors, their tree-lined campuses were tranquil and easily reachable on the Mass Transit Railway, the well-nigh impressive metro system I have ever used. Over the past year, those campuses have been barricaded and besieged and protesters take been pursued into MTR stations.
It's a mistake to presume that you know what position your contacts have on political events, in Hong Kong, Chile, Republic of zimbabwe or anywhere else. Even natural catastrophes tin divide people politically. It may be obvious to you that Australia'southward bush fires are connected to global warming, but climate change denial is nonetheless strikingly prevalent there. Last month, James Murdoch criticised his father Rupert's Australian news outlets for their climatic change scepticism.
The fact that people have unlike views doesn't mean y'all need to abandon yours, nor that you shouldn't probe theirs. If you practice concern in a place, it'due south of import for yous to notice out what'south happening now and what'south likely to happen next. Information technology's merely that it'south best to practise it face-to-face up the adjacent fourth dimension you run across rather than via email. Call up also that there are places (not Commonwealth of australia, obviously) where you lot could endanger people past asking them to criticise their government's policies.
When you do next run across people, it's best to inquire open questions – "And so what do yous call up I should know about the situation here?" – rather than directly ones, such as "Exercise you think the government is doing the right affair?" That mode people can assess how much they trust you and what they experience prophylactic in saying. When I was concluding in Shanghai a decade ago, a local broker in a busy eating house said to me that if you believed Marx on the ineluctable march of history, you would assume that China would one day become a multi-political party state. A colleague who returned recently from Shanghai told me the same conversation would be unlikely today.
Exercise not make the alternative error of thinking that people automatically agree with their governments. Once when I was travelling in America, someone told me how grateful he was for Tony Blair's support for the Usa over Republic of iraq, with a look that suggested not but that I would be gratified at the compliment but that I would acquit the message back domicile. I was amused; in other circumstances, people could be insulted. Your business contacts are individuals. Don't treat them as authorities representatives.
By Michael Skapinker © 2022 The Fiscal Times
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/experiences/how-to-be-tactful-to-your-business-associates-177246
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