Lifelong Lessons from International Assignments

I’ve been around the block. Many times.

From empanadas in Santiago, to Kenyan beef samosas, to pelmeni warming up a winter’s day in Moscow, I’ve seen and experienced a lot.

I’ve learned all about Islam and how the focus on the family unit is something really special that has stayed with me.

I’ve seen service given with reverence in Tokyo and Bangkok, where the customer really is treated like a King. I’ve taught workshops in Dehli, and witnessed the hope amongst the poverty that showed me the true meaning of GRIT.

So in the first of a periodic series - I’ll lay out a few lessons I’ve learned from my travels around the world - and I hope it inspires your own self reflection and continuous learning spirit too………..

RUSSIA - If Someone Acts Like They Hate You - Find Out Why……

So here I am in Russia as a very green “retail consultant”. Fresh from a great operations job in the UK running a large area for Vodafone, I was seconded to their international “Partner Market” team for 3 months - which became 3 years.

The early days were tough - being away from my wife, a lonely apartment in Moscow, and it was COLD. I started in January, and our rented Regus office across the city gave me great views of the snow covered architecture in the city, just down from Novy Arbat, on Smolenskaya.

Novy Arbat was a great shopping street, pedestrianized in parts, with some ‘western’ comforts in McDonalds and the lovely “John Bull Pub” which is a sort of British style pub chain across Moscow. Home from home indeed haha!

Work wise, the project started fairly well, and we split the projects into workstreams, though I found some of the meetings slow going, working with a translator who tried to make sure my “northern” English was understood. I had spent quite a bit of time learning Russian and the cyrillic alphabet, so I was able to give myself a head start in making pleasantries with people and trying to fit in. Lots of smiles. So far, so good.

My counterpart in the project, lets call her “Natalyia” was a senior director who has worked for the telco for a long time, had a great reputation, and was from Belarus initially. I found her cold but functional, and we soon settled into a rhythm of meetings and action items across the major workstreams. I would spend a lot of time at the client office rather than our own, which was a habit instilled into me by our very tall, and very charismatic country lead on the Vodafone side. A 6foot 6inch Dutchman with a glorious grey mullet, he was sharp and a great leader, with a nuance for just what was happening. One weekend he called me unexpectedly at about 6pm on the Saturday, and literally just asked me to meet him in the pub in 30 minutes. I was very down and very lonely that weekend, I’m sure he didn’t know fully the details, but he knew something, and 3 hours later and a few beers later and he’d given me some advice and I’d cheered up.

Back to Natalyia. As our greetings grew more and more regular, she developed a habit for rolling her eyes, and was very ‘sharp’ in her requests, and in repeating herself to make sure she was understood. Her English was average, and my Russian pidgin at best, but we continued to make progress, apart from one area of the project where things were always slow - my requests for information. In order to prove the ‘value’ of our project with the client, we needed to gather certain base lines of information to prove the uplift in sales from the respective workstreams. Each request of mine was met with a rolling of the eyes, the occasional ‘tut’ - and I just shrugged it off as ‘cultural’, and blamed Natalyia for being grumpy.

The Pivot Happened After I Took a Risk

After about 6 weeks or so - the first phase of the project was behind. Natalyia kept inviting me to meetings at 7:30pm on a Friday evening, not unusual for a Moscovite, but certainly so for a Brit. I didn’t mind, as I was alone in the city, and didn’t have much of a social circle as yet. But I could tell things were strained and I worried about it. Natalyia started to up the ante of her own information requests, slowing things down further.

One Friday evening, I snapped. I’d been so professional until that point, and I don’t know what made me do it - but I slammed my hands down on the table after one too many eye-rolls.

“Natalyia. We cannot go on like this. We are meant to be PARTNERS. Every time I ask for information you delay things, or ask for many more things yourself. WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?”

WIN 1 - I stayed silent and maintained eye contact. Not in an aggressive way, I was genuinely trying to understand her point of view.

Her reply gave it all away;

“If you do not give me the information, I cannot trust you.”

From there it clicked. She didn’t hate me. She just didn’t trust me - yet.

We then had a long conversation about how this project had been very controversial, and had been agreed by C-level executives many times higher up the chain than she was. She didn’t fully understand the benefits that her company would get from the project, and hadn’t been briefed of the transformational support they would get further down the line once the baseline had been established.

She then told me how the Russian culture views outsiders, with suspicion, and a core tactic, especially in business, was to test out your counterpart, to see if they were worthy of trust. She admitted that she didn’t need ALL of the information she had been requesting, but had simply wanted to see if I was someone who could help make a difference, or would I just follow orders and plod methodically on. The fact I had challenged her, and strongly, meant she now had more respect for me, and we agreed to change some of the project cadence as a result.

WIN 2 - I listened as she spoke. Intently. It took a while as the conversation challenged her English and my Russian.

The Outcome - Win / Win, and a River Cruise.

I often tell people that this was the best meeting of my life. We cleared the air, we found a common ground, and agreed a new way of working.

The next day, she called me at 1000am. Could I meet her at the river at noon, and she’d like to bring her husband? What followed was a delightful few hours where I found out all about her early years in Belarus, and all about her husband, a born and bred Moscovite, as we cruised along the Moskva river and back, which ended in a superb steakhouse for a late lunch.

She became a friend, but although I stayed in Russia for the best part of 3 years, sadly she only lasted about 6 months of my journey, as she got a promotion that took her to Minsk and back to Belarus.

THE LEARNINGS - stand your ground. Act with the best of intentions. Seek to understand. Listen. Be humble, but don’t be a pushover. I had a job to do. And I made sure I did it……..

Have you had any international projects that have been similarly thorny?

Any lessons learned?

Any lessons to SHARE?

I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below - thanks for reading.