HOT TOPIC


For both companies and their relocating employees, choosing the right location and cultural fit is critical to the success of an international assignment or a new overseas operation. David Sapsted examines the pros and cons of relocation hotspots around the world, from the employer and employee perspectives.


T


he question is not only when, how and why corporate employees should be dispatched on international assignments, but also where – and it can prove disastrous


for both companies and individuals when the decision is the wrong one. “It takes more than technical expertise in both your job and


a foreign language to succeed at a new job abroad. Expatriates swap horror stories about talented managers being groomed for the top who fail miserably in unfamiliar settings. Yet in many of these cases, it wasn’t the executives’ fault. The company failed to determine if the managers had the right personalities for the particular assignments,” according to Tony Lee, publisher of CareerCast.com and JobsRated.com Ron Pilenzo, a former president of the US


Society for Human Resource Management and CEO of the Global HR Consultancy, in Florida, says most companies simply try and match skills but pay little attention to the economic, political and cultural differences inherent in an overseas assignment. “Most expat failures are attributed to a


mismatch of the individual’s spouse or family members, and companies believe that pre- assignment training and counselling will fix the problem,” he says. “But the most critical mismatches of an expat with wide differences in values, beliefs, managerial style and team orientation in a different cultural setting will blow up the assignment and leave a wake of destruction behind. “All the training and preparation in the


world cannot fix the wrong person going into the wrong country or region, where the differences are so huge that they cannot be overcome by preparation before or during an assignment.”


The right fit Michael Tucker, an industrial psychologist and president of global talent consultant Tucker International, in Boulder, Colorado, cites the example of a “modest, hard-working manager who made friends easily” and who was sent by his US company to a production plant in Indonesia. Unfortunately, the quality control manager’s “participatory approach and outward uncertainty” caused the Indonesians to lose confidence in him very rapidly, and he was forced to return home after only a few months. “If he had been more formal and said that he would provide the answer to each problem in a day or two, his expertise wouldn’t have


Such concerns have been somewhat ameliorated by the


increasing emergence of a new type of expatriate based on commuter and short-term assignments, where spouses and children often stay at home. “The cultural impact of this trend is more significant,”


according to the ExpatCareers.com website. “Traditional corporate expatriates did not integrate and commonly only associated with the elite of the country they were living in. Modern expatriates spread amongst the classes and work within all corners of the globe. Integration is incomplete, but strong cultural inf luences are transmitted.” ➲


been questioned,” says Mr Tucker. “This was a case of someone who was sent overseas based on the job’s requirements, not on his ability to adapt to a third-world factory environment. “Many companies mistakenly select people to go overseas using


the same criteria they would use for domestic positions, instead of using a systematic approach to find out who will do well in a certain country and who won’t.” Mr Tucker, who has developed a list of 14 predictors of success


on foreign assignment, suggests that a forceful manager who might well succeed in Germany, where business assertiveness is valued, might find great resistance among fellow managers in the likes of Mexico or China, where personal relationships must be developed before business is discussed. Individuals themselves might also harbour doubts over the


wisdom of the destinations chosen for some assignments. Quite aside from concerns over career progression, the would-be expat might have concerns over anything from spousal contentment to the local climate, cultural differences to the efficacy of children’s education, language problems to the cost of living.


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