Last year I had the opportunity to work at an international luxury hotel in China. I worked in a restaurant of the hotel which had two enormous glass walk-in wine cases. As the wine bottles had been taken out and put back in quite often, they were no longer perfectly arranged by country, brand, red/white, etc, which made finding the exact bottle for a guest time-consuming. I offered to the restaurant manager (a native Chinese) that I or my colleagues and I could rearrange the bottles in order as they once were, to make finding the right wine easier. He snapped at me: "are you the manager here? It's fine the way it is." I was so shocked that what I thought was a good initiative to improve productivity was immediately shut down and not appreciated. I was also surprised that he had appeared offended by my suggestion. I vaguely knew what it meant to "save face" in China, but it was not until then that I learned just how important it was. By directly suggesting a way to improve something in "his" restaurant, I had made him feel as if I thought he wasn't running an efficient operation and/or should have thought of this bottle-rearranging idea before. It was even worse that I had done this as a subordinate, as Chinese are hyper-aware of rank in the workplace. I was very careful from there on out to find very subtle, indirect, "face-saving" ways of bringing my ideas to the table.
Lauren (female), United States
