Does mobility develop your talent?
And the myth is this: an international assignment is good for your career. It helps you develop a global mindset and gives you new skills.
The statement is wrong twice!
Out of sight, out of mind
Firstly, an assignment is not necessarily good for career development. Often, ‘out of sight’ really is ‘out of mind.’ While you’re on assignment, everyone else is building relationships and finding out about other strategic projects, while your time abroad is dismissed as an extended holiday. As international career development, it fails if you’re not visible to those people you’re supposed to be impressing.
Secondly, an assignment does not magically confer on you cultural intelligence. And if you look at the data, it’s very clear that the myth is exactly that – not at all based in reality.
There is consensus around the mobility industry and in research that between 20% and 40% of assignments fail – assignees either return home early or fail to achieve the assigned objectives. The cost of failure is put at between $250,000 and $1,000,000. Having that kind of price tag on your record is not an attractive quality when you’re next discussing performance and promotion!
And just as importantly, any other talent development strategy that had a 40% failure rate built in would be under much more stringent examination.
Reinforcing one perspective
In fact, there is a strong argument to suggest that working in a foreign country can reinforce your own worldview more convincingly – particularly if you haven’t enjoyed the assignment. That’s why expats gravitate towards expat clubs, expat bars and spend hours talking about politics ‘back home.’ There is an observable phenomenon that people living outside their home country tend to become more patriotic the longer they are away.
An assignment can develop your talent and can give them cultural intelligence, but there is nothing automatic about it.
No shortcuts to leadership development
Global mobility is often a key element of an organization’s talent development strategy and is used as a way of developing future leaders. But too often global mobility is used as a ‘fire and forget’ strategy – send your high value talent to an office in a different country and hope for the best. There is no intentional global leadership training or career plan.
And while you will have several different types of assignments—and assignees—there are some extremely cost-effective, high-impact strategies you can implement to develop and grow your talent. These strategies ensure that assignees have the best possible start in leveraging the power of different cultures with cultural intelligence.
Intentional learning
In 1956, a small organization, the Centre for International Briefing started offering a service to multinationals – cultural orientation for people relocating to a new country. Those intense, immersive courses were five days and involved quite a lot of lectures about social etiquette, how to deal with servants, how to lead the natives and a brief introduction to the history and cultural traditions of the 'exotic' country the expat would be moving to.
Obviously, a lot has changed since then. The internet means that we now know so much more about other countries – we can watch TV from the country, read the newspapers and find out pretty much any statistic or oddity we want without moving from our own homes. And you can also find a lot of cultural advice as well.
Our real problem is sifting through the sheer volume of information and understanding what is true, what is important and what is relevant. For example, you can google "meeting etiquette in Japan" and within the first few results you’ll read that you should always hand over business cards with two hands.
Finding the truth
While it is true that, traditionally, business cards are handed over with two hands, who has a business card in 2024? And if you’re meeting a Japanese colleague or partner, you’re probably on a Teams call anyway. In fact, many modern Japanese have the same attitude to business cards as Americans. They are happy to leave on the desk, write on them or even leave them lying around forgotten! But every website talking about Japanese business will mention this ‘quirk.’
And even if it were true, as soon as your assignee moves to Belgium, this knowledge is redundant.
That’s why investing in cultural intelligence skills is key. Learning how to interact with individuals, albeit it within a country-specific frame, means that your talent gains skills that can be transferred and will grow as they grow. But it needs intentional action.
Start at the very beginning
Early in the preparation stage, as the assignment objectives are being discussed, is the time to start cultural intelligence training. This is the approach taken by a major player in the energy sector, who includes cultural learning as soon as the assignee confirms the move. Cross-cultural management is put at the center of the relocation and is not an ‘add-on’ (if there’s time!).
After all, if your talent is going to build up key relationships, recharge a key part of the business, strengthen a team or contribute to knowledge sharing, cultural intelligence is going to play a central role in enabling those objectives. And it will give the assignee some idea of the scale of the challenge if they start their cultural intelligence training early.
And let’s not forget the family.
The assignee, at least, probably knows the people they’ll be working with, and understands that the work context will not be very different. But their partner may have to leave their job – or at least have a high risk discussion about a transfer or remote working. Children are often considered extremely resilient and it is frequently suggested that they’ll benefit from living abroad. Both are true … to an extent. But they may be leaving a favorite teacher or a sports club. And if they’re teenagers, you will have ‘ruined their life’ (even if you’re not quite sure how!) – you’ve stolen the love of their life, or their only chance of being scouted by a major football team…
Involving the assignee's family in discussions about what the expectations are on assignment, as well as the cultural differences, reduces family stress and helps them feel some level of ownership of the assignment. Families left out of these discussions often feel alienated and unvalued, which builds resentment and sows the seeds of potential assignment failure.
And a normalized family life frees everyone up to get the work-side of the assignment done.
…but don’t leave them alone
Talent left to its own devices will stagnate. Even if the individual is working hard, outperforming expectations and growing amazing new skills, without oversight and regular check-ins, they risk divergence from the talent objectives of the assignment.
Your organization spends significant effort on developing a talent pipeline, aligning the skills you are developing with the skills they think the organization might need in the future. But the temptation is to see an assignment as a complete package of development that goes from a to b without any need for guidance or course-correction.
There are two main problems with this:
- Your talent priorities will change
- Your assignee is developing skills that might be attractive to others
Without regular check-ins, you could either end up with a disillusioned employee with the wrong skills, or with a letter of resignation. Frequent conversations and ongoing coaching are great ways to ensure that you not only align development to the ever-changing world of corporate visions, but that you also show the assignee that they are valued and appreciated.
We frequently hear stories of assignees who feel forgotten – some of whom return to their home country to some made-time work, because no one thought what to do with them when their assignment ended. Having invested large sums in developing your talent, you need to show that there is an intentional and thought-through career progression beyond the assignment.
Innovation, problem-solving, making good decisions, agility, and making sense of complexity are all key skills a leader needs. And they’re all skills that come with the experience of leading in different country contexts. But those skills don’t come without intentional effort and planning.
Focusing on the wrong challenge
If you want to build a global mobility program that builds leadership talent to grow your organization, cultural intelligence must be a central element.
In the struggle to organize the compliance, tax, insurance, immigration and customs documentation, finding house and school, handing over one role to start a new one, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there is a cultural challenge that could limit the success of the assignment. You can have the best tax and immigration policy in place, but if your assignments are not culturally intelligence, they’re not going to meet the organizational needs.
With more than 30 years of experience supporting over one million people globally, we are committed to driving meaningful change. Start your free trial today to access Worldprism and more training programmes.
Alternatively, fill in our form below and we'll be in touch:
Comments