Mix culture and coordinator

I didn't write any thing in long time any blog or article in long time, university works took all the focus recently. And honestly, the main reason is laziness strikes again.

After spending quite a long time in Singapore, I could observing many interesting things on how different people from different culture behave differently. Before that, i used to wondering how could Singapore can transform itself in just a very short time. Mix culture plays important role here. Conflict does help to push things forward, encourage change. But how about the negative side of it?

Here I don't want to discuss about big scale things but only team-level only. Not thing big, no national-level, my writing is only came from the observation from my study in Singapore. The key factor is coordinating. From my observation, people not always respect the differences between them. It is not always visible, obviously, people rarely say that out loud. But most of time it is the root of problems.

Then how to know the problem is out there? Unfortunately, there is no clear answer. Most of the time it is based on intuition and experience. In some cases, people throw their perception to each other face, of course, it is the extreme situations and we want to avoid it. Therefore when there are more than one person come and work together, the utmost important decision is who will be the coordinator.

I use the word "coordinator", not "leader". In most of the case, leader will be the one who play coordinator role, but there is always exception (depend on group relationships, leader's skills and personality, etc). In those case, the  role of "coordinator" sometime surpass the "leader" since he/she is the one who maintain relationship and synergy. In another word, he or she will be the link that link members together and ensure that they go in same direction, while the task of "leader" is to set the right direction.

I always believe that in order to play "coordinator" role, certain power should be given to that person. Otherwise that so call "coordinator" is only running around and begging group members to do this or that, which end up with nothing will be done. I faced this problem myself, and end up at do everything by myself, which is not a happy memoir. Power, or i could say "ability to influence", could come from many sources: rank, authority, experience, knowledge, age, etc. Regardless of form, it enables the coordinator to perform his or her role, and only then the group will perform as a group.