Entry for coaching assignment Ladder of Inference

Chi Phuong NGUYEN

Last semester, I had to work in a teamwork for a class. Our team contained five people and one of the girls was a Vietnamese. I believed that having a Vietnamese girl in the team would be easier for communication. Indeed, we have the common beliefs and similarities in the culture. I knew her in person before as M. (her name) was a friend of my wife and helped my wife when my wife started studying in University Laval. M. had started the program since two years and she did have a lot of experience. I received many useful information from her to prepare for the courses. She was a nice person, giving us  many helpful advice. She passed the courses with good grades. I also had some other classes with her but we didn’t have the chance to work together. I observed that she was a serious person, attending the regularly. Moreover, she worked for a famous foreign bank in Vietnam before going to Canada to study. Selecting those facts: her right attitude for the courses, her serious attendance in the class, her high grades, her experience with the courses, her willing of sharing the information with us, her work experience and combining with the assumptions that we are Vietnamese, speaking the same language and we are students who travel to Canada to study, I came to the conclusion that I could work with her and made a great team.

However, I discovered that it was not easy at all to start working with her. Both of us, we had different opinions regarding the project. We all contributed actively to our project but sometimes, our opinions were quite different, even in contradiction. We spent time to discuss and defend our opinions. For example, in a meeting, we dealt with the IT part in our business model. I kept talking about outsourcing the IT tasks to save costs whereas M. wanted to hire the IT team in Canada as they could have a better knowledge in culture. We kept our own opinions and defended ours with all our energy. Apart from work, we were still good friends and went out with my wife and her boyfriend to have dinner together several times. After that discussion in which I lost a lot of energy, I tried to change my behaviour. I prepared well the plan, strengthening my ideas with justification and I tried to integrate several ideas of M. in the project. Some of her ideas were really interesting for the project. It helped us to work more efficient and better. Lesson learned: gathering all the facts and assumptions is not enough for us to draw conclusion about someone or something. We had to experience by ourself to confirm our assumptions. Cultural dimensions are very important and should be taken into account. In this case, M. and I come from two regions of Vietnam, I come from the North whereas she comes from the South. We have different cultures and different values.