The opportunity to manage a company, a division or a department abroad is often a real career builder and a great life experience for many business professionals. But what lessons for managing a company abroad do you need to learn?
Luckily, we found an expert in our own backyard to help guide you through the business of managing abroad. Keith Perry teaches the Global Dimensions of Business class at San Jose State University in San Jose, California and also is the chairman and chief executive officer of a software firm in Bangladesh. His over 30 years of international experience has taken him to 29 countries.
“I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies, small companies and start-ups and highly recommend working as a manager abroad,” Perry said. “I think the international management experience gives you far more upward mobility within your field. It is especially good to have international experience early in your career.”
Perry thinks, though, that managing abroad is not for everyone. “This work is for people who are overachievers,” Perry said. “These are people who are going to spend their full day at work and then go looking for other things to do. Managing abroad requires a lot of hours and hard work.”
Perry explained that there are many challenges and obstacles international managers need to be aware of when working abroad in high risk and high reward environments. “There are more pitfalls in following a global career than there are following a national one,” Perry said. “
These pitfalls and challenges come in all shapes and sizes when working as an expatriate manager. Understanding the culture of the country and its business culture, learning the local language and understanding how to motivate different types of people are the first steps to learn if you want to avoid the pitfalls and improve your chance of success.
“When we moved a Brit to run the office in Italy, the locals looked at him and were frankly disgusted,” Perry said. “They bought him a Mont Blanc pen because he was signing contracts with a BIC pen. They took him to buy suits because he dressed poorly. They were being polite but the message was clear: In Italy, fashion is important and you need to understand that to be successful in your job.”
Learning the local language also pays big dividends. Although English has become the world’s business language, being able to communicate in the same language as your colleagues and employees increases your effectiveness and improves your chances of success. “If you can communicate with them in their native tongue, you will be able to understand more of the subtleties of what they are saying,” Perry said. “I’ve gotten away without it, but it certainly is a huge advantage.”
As an international business professor and global chief executive officer, Perry thinks one of the greatest tools available to help an expatriate manager overcome challenges abroad is Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, which is a framework for cross-cultural communication. It describes the effects of a society’s culture on the values of its members and how these values relate to behavior. It examines five different dimensions of national culture: power distance index, individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty avoidance index, masculinity versus femininity and indulgence versus restraint.
“Dimensions like power distance, which is how much you expect and respect the distance between you and your manager, are very important to understanding how to operate in your new business environment,” Perry said. “Masculinity versus femininity, for example, can sensitize you to the challenges of being a female and working in Japan, or even presenting in Japan. Asia probably presents the biggest challenge for international managers because of its broadly different cultures and languages.”
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