John Jonas explains why Filipino VAs rarely point out mistakes: the Philippines ranks #4 on Hofstede's Power Distance Index, meaning people fear embarrassing authority figures. He shows real examples of team members noticing errors but staying silent, then offers a fix: give explicit authority and clear job titles so people will take ownership and fix problems themselves.
Chapters
The Power Distance index and why your ofs sometimes work mindlessly. This is the second episode in a series of five or eight about why OFs sometimes work mindlessly or why they don't fix something that seems so obvious to them. There's this German guy named Hofsted. He created this Power Distance Index. And if you haven't seen it, it's worth looking at. You'll understand their mindlessness, this mindlessness a lot better. So the Power doesn't index is a measure of how much a culture respects authority. If you have a boss, what's your distance between them in terms of who has power? He lists countries and cultures, cultures based on country, in this index. And so, like, the United states is like 40th or something like that, or maybe even lower than that. Where. The Philippines, I think, is number four on this list of Power Distance Index. So they are. They very, very much respect authority and power. And if they don't have a clear picture of who's in charge or who's an authority, they'll often assume someone else is an authority because it's not them, and that they are below other people. And when you're below people, you're not really allowed or you're not supposed to question what's above you. So this makes them less likely to tell you that there's a problem or to solve a problem when it's not their responsibility to solve the problem or they don't have the authority to solve the problem. Here are some quotes that my team sent me that are a good indicator of this problem. What was on my mind at those times was, you are my boss. Why would I question or correct you? So this is the next one. This is a really, really telling behavior about how Filipinos respond. We trust professionals and are afraid to point out the mistakes of these professionals, like a graphic designer or writer or editor, et cetera, because we are afraid that maybe we are the ones who made a mistake, and we don't want to embarrass ourselves. This is really like a telling thing between both the Power Distance Index and fear. So, first of all, they trust that this person who's an authority is not wrong, even though it looks to them like they're wrong. They're an authority, so they're probably not wrong. And then to say something and have you be wrong is embarrassing. So they're scared. They fear being embarrassed. They fear being wrong. And. And that person's an authority. And it just makes a. It makes a hard situation, right? So instead of telling you that this is wrong, or instead of fixing this thing, they don't do anything. So this happened to me today. We're trying to create a new web page and where a user is going to submit some piece of information. And the way the copy was written, they're going to send an email to something. And then the designer said, oh, this is better if we add a button that says submit the information, and it takes them to a form. So he designed it in, sends it to the web creator. The person who's overseeing this whole thing reads the whole thing and sees it, and it gets published like this with both a submit your proposal button and instructions to email it. Now, guys, what happened here? There's two. There's two separate instructions for how to submit this process. That doesn't make any sense at all. But I was the one in charge of the whole thing, so I was the one in authority. And I saw the problem. I was hoping that they would fix it. And they didn't fix it. And this is probably why they didn't fix it. And so I said, hey, guys, we have a problem. Fix this. You know, like, find the problem. And they created some edits on stuff, but that's not what they fix. And so finally I was like, why do we have two ways of submitting this thing? And they were instantly like, okay, fixed. And they were probably all looking at it like, oh, this is weird. But he said, it's okay, so we're going to do it. And so in order to create this, you have to make some changes. Let me read a couple more quotes from my team before I talk about that. So next, it takes me around four drafts just to show a specific team member a mistake. Should I start with sorry to correct you or hi, person's name? I might be wrong, but. Or this might be because you didn't see this, but. So next quote. As children, we are taught. Huag some. I don't know, some. Some Filipino phrase which more or less means we cannot defend ourselves or argue against elders. This ingrains the Filipino habit of never talking back to authority, even if we know they're wrong. So what this all comes down to is if you are an authority or someone, someone is in authority over them, even if they see a mistake, they're probably not going to correct it. They. Because this power distance index is really strong in the Philippines, they really respect authority. If you go back and listen to the episode about fear causing mindlessness, you'll see this power distance in that fear all over the place. So you can use this to your advantage sometimes if you're smart about it. So if you give someone authority, you spell out the authority, they're very likely to take that authority as I'm in charge and then they're likely to look for mistakes and correct problems and fix it. But they have to have authority, which in the Philippines typically means a job title and specific responsibilities. You need to spell out those responsibilities. If you have team members, team members need to know, they need to know their title, that person's title. Titles are pretty important in the Philippines. And now when they're the ones with authority and with power, they're more likely to look and say, oh yeah, hey guys, we're not doing this right. Let's fix this because it falls on me. That's what they, that's how they feel about it. So in the next episode, we're going to talk about quantity over quality causing mindlessness.
