Found in Translation
I was recently in Beijing, China for a four week pro-bono consulting engagement to help support a local Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital. This project was orchestrated through the IBM Corporate Service Corps Program.
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Traveling helps to put life in perspective. Your “normal” is not the “normal” somewhere else — the experience, food, environment and …Chinese bathrooms are different….very different! These past four weeks I got a serious dose of perspective on the art of language, communication and translation.
I’ll start from the beginning …
Active Listening is one of the most important aspects of a being a consultant, and on this project, it was no different … except that the client didn’t speak English!!!!! This posed a couple of challenges for the team and me:
- We couldn’t get a full grasp on the answers to our questions
- We often walked away from conversations with gaps in our understanding
- We sometimes struggled to get our point or question across (we could tell by the confused facial expressions!)
This quickly got us to pause, think and come up with some strategies to communicate better. The best idea we had was to leverage our Project Assistance (PA) as best we could (they were basically our master translators / communicators). Rather than just have them translate word for word, we taught them our process and our thinking. We brought them along on the journey, asking for feedback and input ALL THE TIME! Not only did this help them walk away with a great understanding of the work (so far two of them talked about IBM Design Thinking during job interviews!!), but also they were able to speak to our client from their mind and not just their ears —( i.e., repeating what we said without thinking about what we meant.) This was a beautiful thing to witness; they all grew in confidence and it was a true highlight of my CSC journey.
A couple of things I learned in the process:
- Patience — a conversation that normally takes me three minutes in America took ten minutes in China. You speak, it’s translated, the client answers (and sometimes there is some dialogue back and forth in Chinese), it’s translated — imagine this back and forth for an entire interview / presentation / dinner! I had to be okay with not knowing the response immediately and to be honest — I loved it!!! It gave me a chance to really think and take in all the expressions and body language.
- Trust — we had 4 weeks … that’s not a lot of time. While I knew our Project Assistants were some of the smartest students I ever met … they never had exposure to or an experience like this one. Processes, tools and methods that came easily to my IBM colleagues and me were confusing and sometimes out of context for them (of course!). We had to trust each other and make the PA’s feel comfortable to say “Elaine, I have NO IDEA what you’re saying!” We also had to trust they were understanding and communicating with the client effectively. This one was very hard for me, as I know words are powerful — one wrong word in a sentence and the entire meaning of what you’re trying to say changes. I had to really put my trust in our PA’s, trust that they understood and could communicate. In the end, even though I really had no clue what they were saying, they spoke with confidence and I saw head nods in the crowd — so I truly believe they captured our voice and shared it flawlessly.
- Lastly, focus. Like I mentioned there was basically no such thing as a super quick chat the past four weeks. With all the distractions — cell phones, computer — and the inability to understand basically half the conversation, it was super easy to loose focus and wait for when English came back into the conversation. Rather than give in to the lure of technology, I made it a point (or at least tried REALLY hard) to not get distracted. I did my best to look in the eyes of the person talking as if I understood every word. By staying focused, I got a sense of their emotion while they were talking, of their comfort and body language. After each discussion I would ask the PA’s “how do you think that went?” to see if my impression was far off. We almost always agreed on how the meeting went based on their perception of what the client said and my observations of how the client felt.
I could go on for hours about how incredible our Project Assistants were, but I have a feeling you would all stop scrolling — so I’ll leave it at >> the women helping us these four weeks made it possible for us to deliver great work to our host organization. They also taught me so much and I am so grateful to have traveled on this challenging and fun journey with them. Thank you Ada, Vivian and Christine for being rockstars and #ladybosses!
