Get the Family Settled First

You can’t be effective in your new role if your family is struggling. It’s crucial to have in-depth conversations about an international assignment with your spouse—long before you make specific decisions about which opportunities you are (and are not) willing to pursue. You’ll both need to consider and discuss all the dimensions of change: the magnitude of the culture shift, the distance from “home,” the type of living situation you’ll be in, and, if applicable, the types of schools your children will attend. Particularly if it’s your first international move, you’ll need to limit the overall intensity of the change. For Oscar and Jennifer, the move to China was an enormous leap on many dimensions. Jennifer’s reaction was prima facie evidence that they didn’t take enough time to look at the combined impact of change on so many dimensions.

Once you’ve carefully considered the opportunity along these dimensions and decided to make the move, there are ways you can minimize the disruption for the family and thereby increase the odds that everyone will thrive in the new setting. If you have children, try to time the move to coincide with a natural breakpoint in their schooling. You should also arrange for extra support—from family or paid help—for your spouse during the period when you are spending significant time away from the family. This in-between time can be very stressful for everyone, especially for your spouse, who is left trying to hold things together while you head off to start an exciting new assignment. Remember, it’s no fun to be stuck at home while the “hero” heads off on an adventure.

Then you’ll need to focus on rebuilding family support networks as quickly as possible. If possible, identify resources (spousal support networks and advice services for expatriates) that can help at your new location before you make the move. Try to build some connections before you arrive, perhaps even establishing e-mail relationships so that from day one, members of your family know people in the new country. If you have children, you might try to identify other expats with children who are the same age or attending the same school. At the same time, you’ll want to maintain connections to friends and family back home—regularly sending updates on the move, inviting them to visit, perhaps even establishing a Web page that recounts your family’s adventures in your new home.

Oscar and Jennifer compounded their difficulties by choosing not to live with other expats in a community already set up to meet their needs. The impulse to live “with the people” is laudable but highly inadvisable when the culture change is significant and when you’ve never relocated to another country. A crucial factor in making a smooth transition is to retain as much of the familiar as possible. So don’t just put everything into storage: if you can recreate the decor of critical family rooms in the new house or apartment—placing familiar pictures, pieces of furniture, and other personal items in bedrooms and the kitchen—it helps give family members a sense of control.

Finally, recognize that hard times for the whole family are ahead. It may take a year to reach a new point of comfort; it may take longer. But have faith that you will get there. And when everything and everyone’s in doubt, go home for a visit if you want. A plane ticket is far less costly than ending an assignment prematurely.

Make the Most of Your Arrival

An actor walks onto a stage and takes his mark. Even before he opens his mouth, the audience has already come to some conclusions about what he’s about to do or say. The same holds true for the executive walking into the office on the first day, first week, first month of an international assignment. It’s all too easy to create the impression that you’ve been sent from the home office to be the conquering hero who fixes all the problems. (This is especially the case if your new role has been billed to you as a turnaround, as it was to Oscar Barrow.)

Suffice it to say, the way you “arrive” in an international assignment matters a lot. Does the manner of your arrival encourage people to share information with you, or shut them down? Does it help build your personal credibility, or undermine it? Your early actions will lay the foundation—positive or negative—for how all subsequent moves will be interpreted.

There is a natural tendency for new leaders to focus on the problems first—fix what’s wrong. But this approach can be problematic when you’re accepting a leadership role in a new land. You risk sending the message that you believe “there is no good here” to people who may already have a defensive mind-set about an outsider coming in; and it will take only a little reinforcement to cast “the boss’s negative impression” in concrete. While this dynamic can arise in any transition situations the potential for it to cause problems is often amplified by the anxieties new leaders face in taking their first international assignments, specifically the desire to prove they can add value. Even in the worst business environments, finding some good to build on will lift your team and give them some confidence to deal with the real issues.

To avoid this trap, you should start by asking questions, not making statements—even if you’re pretty sure you know what the central issues are. Let the members of the organization validate (or disprove) your theories. Don’t worry about setting up your office; go to the front lines right away, wherever they are. Talk to salespeople and others in the field, and really listen. If you start doing this on day one, the word will quickly spread across the organization. People want to believe in their leaders, and seeing them up close makes a material difference. A memo will never take the place of a conversation.

While you’re still planning for your arrival, you may want to take stock of the stereotypes you might be associated with based on, say, your national culture or your history with the company. If people coming from the home office are perceived as being “too far removed” from the realities of working in developing country environments, or arrogant in their long-distance prescriptions for what international operations should do, you’ll need to counter that perception. It can be powerful to play against these stereotypes—using the local language, say, or demonstrating in meetings and memos that you have taken the time to try to understand the history and strengths of the organization. Such small gestures can go a long way toward convincing people you’re there to work with them, not simply to highlight their weaknesses and make quick fixes. In the process, you can change the perceptions not just of you and your leadership style but also of the corporate center.

Finally, take the time to develop a written plan for your entry into the company. (For guidelines on how to do this, see the box “Preparing to Enter a New Country.”) Share it with your new direct reports, regional HR staffers, and your boss so they’ll understand where you’re coming from and how you intend to lead change at the organization. Doing so can help facilitate buy-in from these critical groups and dramatically accelerate your ability to learn about the situation and identify the critical changes you’ll need to make. Additionally, this written commitment will help you and your people stay focused when there are challenges or setbacks. Call it the power of the paper.

Make Sure You Are in Compliance

Business standards and the “rules of the game” can change dramatically when you move from one corporate climate to another—which is why it’s critical for transitioning international executives to consider, identify, and manage compliance issues. This is especially important for leaders who are responsible for sales and operations; the risk factors here might include questionable deal-making practices (in sales) and poor quality control or contaminated raw materials (in operations). Such missteps can easily set your transition back months or more; instead of being focused on growth, you end up playing defense 24-7.

You can’t assume that just because you’ve communicated your standards, perhaps through mandated training videos or workshops, everyone will automatically comply. Local perspectives on what’s appropriate for business (and what isn’t) won’t necessarily match yours or those of the home office. Indeed, some behaviors considered illegal under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act may actually be customary, if questionable, in your new environment. Local auditing and other compliance systems may not fully protect you.

To avoid compliance calamities, you have to take on the unofficial role of chief compliance officer. You and other members of the senior team must ask those people on the front lines detailed questions about operations—“How exactly did you persuade a customer or distributor to act in that way?” or “How exactly have you managed to hit your sales target, on the nose, every month for the past three quarters?”—and keep asking them until you’re all confident that business is being conducted the right way, as you’ve defined it. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

As you settle into a new role in a new country, you’ll need to recognize that an appropriate amount of personal focus on compliance is critical for building a culture of good decisions—and that all initiatives in this regard must start at the top. People need to know that you and your team believe in certain standards of quality and ethics and abide by those standards in visible ways. From day one, you should talk explicitly about the importance of meeting social, ethical, and corporate standards in your meetings with critical stakeholders in the company—and keep doing so for a while. You should make a point of working with your direct reports individually, preparing them to ask the right questions of others in their quest to ensure compliance up and down through work teams and units. You may also want to create mechanisms through which people in the company can safely, perhaps anonymously, report problems or ask questions.

When potentially unethical situations arise—and they will, sooner than you think—you must be decisive and consistent. “Zero tolerance” should be your guiding mantra. If you start making compromises early, you’ll find yourself on a very slippery slope. Early during Oscar’s tenure, for instance, local Chinese officials asked him to endorse a visa application for a group of politicians from the local community that was planning to travel to the United States. Thinking he was building valuable relationships, Oscar signed on the dotted line, without understanding that some of the officials had been linked to corruption or that the trip should have been vetted through corporate headquarters. His acquiescence triggered several negative outcomes. First, he was viewed by officials as someone who would “play ball”—perhaps opening himself and his organization to a flood of requests. Second, and potentially more damaging, Oscar lost credibility with his own people, many of whom felt that their new leader’s talk about compliance was just that. He soon realized his mistake and the delegation turned out to be relatively innocuous. He was much more careful after that, identifying wise local counsel he could rely on to help vet compliance issues, questions, and requests.

You’ll need to move fast once you’ve identified problems. Oscar was impressed, for example, when the GM of the China business to whom he reported terminated one of the top sales representatives for unethical conduct just two weeks after learning there was an issue. There will always be some excuse: “Our rivals do the exact same thing—how else can we keep up?” or “I wouldn’t have hit my numbers otherwise.” But there can be no flexibility in this area. Additionally, sharing information about the misdeeds and their consequences can send a clear message about your own conviction to do things the right way.

Build the Team by Building the Business

Oscar’s first instinct going into the China business was to focus on assessing the existing team and deciding who should stay and who should go. A perfectly reasonable approach, to be sure; after all, the benefits and desirability of having a team of great people to lean on are indisputable.

But the way executives in international assignments go about building their teams often has to be very different from the norm, for two main reasons. First, it can simply take longer for the transitioning manager to figure out who’s really good and who isn’t. Remember, employees’ behavior is likely to be shaped by a wide range of local factors that can take some time for the new leader to figure out—among them, domestic-market dynamics, previous leadership, and cultural norms in the company and country. And so, six months into his new assignment, Oscar was grateful that he hadn’t acted on his initial negative assessments of two key people. Both eventually proved to be highly capable leaders, but had been holding back in the early days of Oscar’s tenure, feeling out the new GM before sharing their ideas and energy in full.

And second, in some international markets, where institutional infrastructures are still weak, it can be that much harder to quickly find suitable replacements for critical senior positions. So instead of using aggressive assessments as a jumping-off point, you’re better off taking a more measured approach: When you factor in the time and cost of finding replacements, is it better to purge, develop, or simply stand pat with the talent you have? The obvious exception to this approach is when a team member engages in unethical behavior, or refuses to comply with the new direction in which the team is headed.

Leaders who are adjusting to vastly different cultural and organizational contexts are particularly vulnerable during those first few days and months. In some cases, because of their own insecurities, transitioning executives may shine an unnecessarily harsh spotlight on their team members’ perceived shortcomings; Oscar came close to falling into this trap. In order to justify their own presence or prove to their superiors that they are serious and capable, they go into problem-finding mode. It’s as much an ego-protection exercise as a diagnostic one.

But even if the new leader’s intentions are good, his single-minded focus on early assessments can create a defensive environment, one in which team members can turn on one another in their struggle to stay on the island. This mind-set can ripple through the organization; alliances form, and people spend more time trying to influence personnel decisions than managing the business—all of which can make success in your new role that much more difficult to achieve.

A better way for new managers to build a team is to focus everyone on a series of short-range goals designed to begin to build the business. Not only does this approach provide an early rallying point for the group, but it also gives the leader invaluable feedback about team members: how they respond to this management approach will speak volumes about their capabilities. As you do this, though, be careful about raising expectations too high. The truth is, you’ll almost certainly want to make some changes to the team. So it doesn’t make sense to encourage deep bonds until you are reasonably confident that the core group is in place. At that point, your team-building efforts will have much more meaning, hopefully heartened by some early wins for the group to celebrate.

Take a Fast First Cut at Strategic Priorities

Leaders in their first international assignments often are shocked to find out how little information they have on which to base critical judgments about the performance and directions of their businesses. Accustomed to relying on rock-solid market and operational data, and overwhelmed by the complex and unfamiliar dynamics of a new business in a new market, it’s all too easy for these executives to end up in the “foreign freeze.” They become overly fixated on wringing insights out of data that just aren’t there, or setting up entirely new information systems, rather than focusing on the information at their disposal and what it really suggests about strategic priorities.

Transitioning leaders need to recognize that operations in developing countries (owned by companies based in developed nations) can be highly fragmented, and that solid operational and market data can be hard to come by. Often these businesses were built through a series of acquisitions that were assimilated but never fully integrated, resulting in businesses that are struggling with competing priorities. Although this fortunately was not a problem for Oscar, it’s not unusual for these businesses to churn through a series of leaders in a short period of time, especially if the operation is being used as a training ground for high-potential home-company executives. Most important, performance metrics (and systems of measurement) may be absent or weak.

But rather than freeze your focus on the data that’s missing, you should begin to shape direction and priorities based on the information you have, taking a reasonable first cut at defining your strategic priorities and drafting plans to execute on them, while simultaneously determining ways to get the information you’re missing. Better to develop some reasonable direction than no direction at all.

Without the usual base of data, this can be a challenging assignment—but it can be done, if you pay attention to four critical factors. First, make the most of the high-level information you do have. What do the numbers say about your business? Which parts of the organization are doing well, and which aren’t? Which products and services are making money, and which aren’t? Competitive intelligence may also be limited, but you should still be able to figure out who’s winning in your market or adjacent ones, who’s losing, and which of your rivals’ business models and best practices might be worth emulating.

Second, develop some hypotheses about the key drivers of your business. In particular, identify today’s base (the businesses that are contributing the most currently) and tomorrow’s potential (the businesses that promise to contribute heavily in the future). Using this information, you can begin to draft a strategic plan that focuses on securing the base, capturing high-potential opportunities, and, perhaps most important, halting business activities that don’t fall into either of these categories.

Third, based on your first-cut conclusions about strategic priorities, identify a few ways to achieve early wins and build momentum. This might include devoting a critical mass of resources to a small set of high-leverage initiatives—for instance, Oscar might have focused on figuring out how to make some rapid improvements in quality. Or it might mean killing those business activities that don’t create value or whose model proves unsustainable.

Finally, you can use the information you collect during this first-cut prioritization and planning process to sketch out an early road map. The map will give you focus, help you understand how to deploy resources and talent most efficiently, and accurately underscore areas of need—for instance, where it is most important to address knowledge gaps. (Indeed, this stage is where it makes more sense to consider whether and how to build whole new information systems.) As you gain traction with your first-cut efforts, you’ll need to follow up aggressively, of course, with a comprehensive, data-driven, strategic-planning process. But these initial actions are critical for creating and communicating the longer-range vision that the whole organization will get behind.

Don’t Be a Tourist

You think you’re an executive tackling a challenging professional assignment. But for the longtime staffers in the organization you’re joining, you’re a short-timer, there just long enough to be able to include the phrase “international experience” on your resume or in your development profile. And the staffers know that what the manager-as-tourist cares about most is not having anything bad happen on his watch, so they become very effective at telling the boss what he wants to hear. They keep their heads down and find ways to delay and defer taking difficult actions, figuring there’s a good chance that this leader, too, shall pass.

In fact, some leaders do behave like tourists—learning the basics about the organization but not taking the time to immerse themselves deeper in the corporate and national culture, and therefore missing out on important insights and signals from employees, customers, and consumers. This is a huge mistake. Good decision making from the top and productive collaboration across the organization both flow from the leader’s ability to assess and adjust to the environment.

This is not to say, however, that you should fully assimilate at the expense of what has made you an effective leader in other contexts. You’ll need to strike the right balance between acculturating yourself and seeking to change subordinates’ behaviors that stand in the way of achieving high performance. It’s all too easy for people to use “cultural differences” as an excuse for inaction or poor performance.

Recognize, too, that understanding a culture involves much more then figuring out whether to kiss, bow, or shake hands.¹ The surface differences in customs are important, of course, but the real challenge is to understand the deeper assumptions that underpin every organization and every society—for instance, who legitimately wields power, or which groups or activities create the most value. These insights won’t just help you tailor your leadership style; they are often imperative for making good decisions about how to build brands or position products or services.

So how can you speed up your ability to understand and operate in a new culture? Beyond the obvious value of reading good cultural overviews, it is definitely worth acquiring a working knowledge of the local language. It will not only differentiate you from “tourists” but may also give you unexpected insights: the structure of languages is very much a reflection of the cultures in which they developed.

Additionally, be sure to identify some “cultural interpreters”—inside and outside the company. These are people who understand both your culture and the local culture, and can help you bridge the two worlds. Ideally, you will find at least two—an expatriate who has a lot of experience working in the culture you’re moving to, and a native who has a lot of experience working with expatriates. They can help you translate your intent in context-appropriate ways.

Oscar Barrow got an object lesson in the perils of cross-culture management a month into his transition when he decided to recognize the outstanding work a plant analyst had done in creating a new production-forecasting model. Oscar made a point of lauding her contribution in a meeting of all the plant supervisory staff. The reaction surprised him. Everyone looked down while the analyst squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. Only later, in a conversation with his head of HR, did Oscar realize that his public acknowledgment of one person’s work ran counter to traditional Chinese culture, which emphasizes collective achievements over individual ones.

Oscar’s intentions were good; he had wanted to recognize excellence as a way of encouraging others in his organization to pursue it. But he needed to reward high performance in ways that made sense within the culture. He could have framed his acknowledgments differently—perhaps offering praise and gratitude to the analyst one-on-one, but then recognizing the whole team in a public forum and taking a moment during that meeting to thank the analyst for her terrific leadership of the group.

International moves are among the most exciting transitions that leaders undertake. The personal and organizational challenges are many. But with the right mind-set, planning, and execution, these assignments can substantially stretch your capabilities and assumptions.