Team members in other countries

Objective

Anyone who has ever been based in a country away from head office – especially one with a significant time-zone change – will probably already know that it is a significant and formative experience. There may have been a sense of liberation from HQ bureaucracy, and a greater feeling of entrepreneurship from being close to developing markets. There may also have been an opportunity to gain a broader commercial experience by managing functions (e.g. HR, facilities, finance) that in HQ were central services.

The experience can also have significantly negative aspects:

• for a ‘local’ team member – the challenges of different business cultures, knowledge and possibly language, and a lack of familiarity with the organisation’s home-country culture;
• for the expat team member – the challenge of different ‘resident-country’ culture and business practices, isolation from the organisation’s home-country centre of gravity, and probably remoteness from family.

As a leader of overseas-based staff you have a major responsibility to ensure that you pursue your goals on a common basis, while respecting the specific challenges arising in different countries.

Context

As a leader of any business activity with an international scope, you must be acutely aware of your organisation’s strategic positioning – export, international, global or glocal – (see p. 163). On a day-to-day basis this will inform who are employed as key team members in other countries, where they come from and with what experience, and what performance expectations are set for them.

Some factors which influence choice of key team members include:

• whether the international operation is ‘representative’ or ‘trading’ – each has different commercial requirements;
• what languages are required for business transactions;
• the level of interaction with governmental and regulatory organisations – this affects the requirement for skills in negotiation and diplomacy;
• the balance between general-market and industry-specific knowledge;
• the scale of the business operation and associated levels of support – this affects the extent to which a key team member needs to be ‘self-starting’;
• how frequently you expect to be able to meet the team member face-to-face – this may drive the required level of independence;
• whether previous international organisation experience is required.

Immediately you will see that the process of employing staff outside your home base is significantly complex.

Challenge

The starting point is for you to acknowledge that there are differences if you have team members in other countries. This is a complex set of differences because the overseas team member may belong to one of four categories:

• from the organisation’s home country and employed overseas as an expat;
• from the organisation’s home country and employed on a local basis;
• from the country where they are based;
• from neither the organisation’s home country nor where they are based.

This variety is becoming increasingly common as more business people are educated internationally, and work and travel internationally. Each of the four categories above brings with it a set of unique challenges.

• Culture – the issues and stresses associated with working in a foreign culture, especially for a manager doing this for the first time.
• Family – the associated stresses related to moving families – notably education, health and childcare.
• Spouses and partners – the particular issues relating to spouses who themselves may have to give up their jobs to move, sometimes to new locations where work permits are difficult to obtain.
• Finance – the major financial implications for expats arising from working abroad. These are often very positive but can be undermined by inadequate advice and planning for tax, pensions and social security.
• Global strategy – the challenges which can arise in attempting to implement global strategies and values in environments where business is conducted differently, and the expectations of senior managers vary.
• Regional strategy – the challenge for senior managers in regional international roles, where they may face as many differences in cultures within their regions as there are between their regions and the culture in the home country.

If you are responsible for sending or ‘posting’ a colleague to another country, it is vital that your commitment to supporting them starts with the relocation process. This means ensuring that:

• the remuneration package suitably reflects the environment to which the direct report is being moved;
• they have an adequate opportunity to assess the fairness of what is being proposed – say in terms of cost of living;
• they recognise that tax, pensions and social security planning assistance is probably necessary;
• you set timeframes and work expectations that reflect the demands of moving a family (if this is the case).

Success

For your team members based in other countries, it is vitally important that they feel in the loop. In many cases, being involved in running businesses away from head office will offer them a blend of:

• the greater challenges associated with a wider span of control;
• the enhanced freedom of doing things in the way they want.

But cutting across this will be their feeling of not wanting to be isolated. Your response must be to feel that you are over-communicating, remembering the maxim that ‘you can never overcommunicate’. You will have to compensate for the personal distance created by physical distance with some artificiality and excess in the ‘inclusive’ strategies you implement. These will include:

• 121s – organising a weekly telephone one-to-one, less to deal with ongoing objectives or issues, more to provide a relatively fixed point in the calendar to touch base and identify any general concerns;
• Meetings – including overseas direct reports in all relevant meetings, by telephone, videoconference or WebEx, is a matter of course not exception;
• HQ visits – invite direct reports to periodic meetings in the home country to ensure that personal relationships with colleagues are maintained;
• in-country visits – plan regular visits to your direct reports’ overseas locations to demonstrate to them and their colleagues that your view of international business is not based exclusively on views from head office and/or by summoning staff there.

Some of this may sound obvious or even trivial, but its importance cannot be overestimated – the goal here is to ensure that staff based overseas feel and believe that they are being accommodated, listened to and included. This approach will be seen as insubstantial and superficial if it is transitory. If, however, you make it a permanent part of your leadership modus operandi, it will be credible and you will be seen to be truly international.

Pitfalls

Colleagues working in different time zones may often be on the receiving end of what appear to be thoughtless actions from managers back home. For example:

• phone calls at home, at apparently random times;
• requests to participate in teleconferences at impossibly early or late times of the day;
• teleconferences, meetings or visits scheduled with no regard for differences in public holidays or customs;
• e-mail and other correspondence in terms not suited to local cultures;
• business processes not tailored to individual market requirements;
• employment arrangements following company ‘standards’ rather than customised to suit market requirements;
• sales and marketing planning processes too head-office, ‘centre’-driven rather than based on local market insights.

These are just some of many common examples that could be listed – they are all avoidable.

The moral for leaders with team members in other countries is to be aware that effective sensitivity to cultural difference depends on attention to detail.

Leaders’ checklist

• Always bear in mind that no matter how the world looks from your office, the ‘centre’ is only where you choose it to be and the world looks very different from other locations.
• Ensure that all overseas managers reporting to you have appropriate employment terms – dissatisfaction about terms is extremely corrosive and is magnified when staff are at a distance.
• Be aware that when it comes to managing overseas locations, actions really do speak louder than words. You have to be seen to be engaged, you have to be visible, you have to be seen to be learning from different places and cultures.
• Even as you seek to create an international business with common strategies and values, you have to talk the language of difference – respecting difference for the value it creates.
• Speak with your direct reports regularly – paradoxically, perhaps even more regularly than with the colleagues based in your location.