Simple put, if you report into Beijing, you very quickly realise you are overwhelmingly an outsider and deemed inadequate at your job and inferior to the favoured Chinese team members - your experience and expertise are wholly irrelevant. My management were wholly inexperienced to manage any non-Chinese native employees and acted unprofessionally even in meetings with external stakeholders to where I received complaints frequently. Secondly, the levels of toxicity from the management in Beijing is unfathomable - even for someone who has worked in senior positions across multiple industries. During my time at Bytedance, I was belittled in front of my junior team and senior internal and even external stakeholders. I made huge strides in my short time here which was recognised and publicised by western senior management but it was never acknowledged by my management. They felt dead set on poking holes and questioned everything and anything I was doing and constantly belittling you about how inadequate they felt you were. I have a 12 year senior management career across multiple industries in large scale global organisations, yet I have never been criticised week in week or even questioned about the traits my China team flagged. My experience, my seniority, my understanding of my role and the culture, my lack of profiling were all questioned, despite no training being provided for my role or my orientation with working with the China team. My management were dead set on using emotional bullying as a technique to manipulate you into questioning yourself into a very negative headspace. This was why ultimately I left the company.
