The abbreviation S&W in our name stands for ‚Sprache & Wirtschaft‘ – ‘Language & Business’. Our special business expertise not only enables us to teach Business German in a particularly qualified manner on request.
Our ability to convey an understanding of the special features of German business and management culture to our clients is also based on this business expertise. This happens not only in our intercultural seminars on ‘Germany & the Germans’:
Intercultural topics are also frequently discussed as part of our intensive German courses.
Over the years, many of our clients from all over the world have completed a questionnaire on their perception of the ‘typical German manager’.
You can find an analysis of these questionnaires here:
https://sw-training.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TypischDeutsche-Manager.pdf
One positive aspect is that German managers are recognised as having a high level of professional expertise. In this respect, the assessment has also remained very stable over the decades.
German managers are seen by their international colleagues as clearly bureaucratic, inflexible and formal. Managers from the USA and the UK in particular emphasise these characteristics.
In these three categories, however, there is clearly movement in a direction that is seen as positive. According to the survey, German managers were significantly less bureaucratic and less formal in the ten years from 2014 to 2023. There are still managers who expect to be addressed by their surname – and, if possible, their academic title: Dr Mustermann, for example.
But in many German companies, the internationally customary ‘first name culture’ has gradually become established. German managers today also appear to be much more flexible than in the previous ten-year period.
Clear trends are also emerging when it comes to the objectives of German managers:
Germans are now considered to be more profit-orientated and no longer as sales-orientated as they were at the turn of the millennium.
And as far as the time horizon is concerned, short-term orientation seems to be increasingly replacing the traditional long-term perspective of German managers.