Power distance, engineering teams, and leadership

There's an emotional distance between you and your team, and it can mean the difference between success and failure.

This is a post from a book I wrote about a decade ago. I’m releasing a few excerpts here, and hope you find them interesting. This is part one from the chapter on power distance and managing multinational teams.

You can think of power distance as the distance separating a boss from an employee socially. It’s the strength of social hierarchy, or the imposed psychological distance between a boss and employee.

Throughout the East and Asia, businesses rely on structure. Employees stay within their defined role and authority. In contrast, Western management increasingly relies on “low power distance” and empowers their employees. This creates an impedance mismatch between cultures, where differing expectations are directly at odds with each other.

An Eastern perspective

Most Eastern cultures lean toward hierarchy and structure. Direction comes from the top, and employees look to management to make decisions. Employees expect to work within their role in the organization. Stepping outside of on…