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Team working and risk taking
Team working
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Chris Degen
Head of Structures, Cargolifter
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The British and the Americans are a lot happier to work in teams, whereas often the German experience is that they have a meeting to establish the parameters and then the individuals like to be given a very strong direction and be told: OK, go off and do this and come back in maybe 2 or 3 weeks and then we will review where you got to.
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The British obviously are educated towards being good at teams, starting with academic education and extra-curricular activities, very often team and group-oriented. Germans sometimes look slightly more individualistic in that respect.
They like to have a clear specification for which they are responsible. So they want to have their part of the work really being quite clear and being really sort of controllable. They feel uncomfortable if they don't have that part on top of what the team wants.
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Elisabeth Marx
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Shaibatul Macci
Team Leader, Cargolifter
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There is a tendency from a British engineer to say - once you make up your mind, realising the risk element - let's live by that and at the same time don't ignore it, keep a watch on it and work towards reducing that element. And the German mind is sort of 'we have to reduce the risk from the start'. We have to ensure that we try not to take a risk, which can be actually a risk in itself.
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Risk-taking is related to how you deal with ambiguity or whether risk is encouraged in society. And if you look at German society, everything is, from the education onwards to your profession, everything seems to be a neat line basically. So you try to make your life or your professional career quite predictable.
In Germany what's positively viewed is being in a career where you can programme where you are in 10 or 20 years' time. It doesn't really encourage risk-taking.
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Elisabeth Marx
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Being there