Trust Me, I’m an Expat!

For most of us who are working abroad there’s a reason we’ve been put where we are. It may be that we have a particular skill that is needed in this place at this time, or perhaps we’ve been sent to train or mentor some colleagues, or we’ve seen an opportunity no one else has and we’ve grabbed it with both hands.

Whatever the case, coming from a different background and, depending on the country where you find yourself, having perhaps had greater access to education and training, and perhaps even a broader experience of life, there’s always a temptation to think that we know better. Sometimes of course this is true, we’ve ended up wherever we are precisely because we have the right knowledge or skills that happened to be missing before we got there.

Sadly though, for many reasons, expats can get lulled into a sense of believing that they are indispensable and the only ones who know how things should really be run in the place they find themselves. History is littered with examples of foreigners trying and failing to impose their way of doing things on the “uncivilised natives” – look at the Raj, and the Roman Empire! The reality though is that, while expats often have much to contribute to the country they are in, some things are better done the local way.

I sometimes find this very frustrating. I live in a place where I can see so many things that, with small changes, could work better. On closer investigation though quite often there’s a reason why things are done the way they are, perhaps based on experience or on some obscure cultural norm which confuses me, but which makes perfect sense to my colleagues.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve been watching a recent arrival struggling with a local sports club. The new guy is sports mad and has played various sports semi-professionally. Locally there’s a gang of guys who play one of his favourite sports every weekend on the beach so he’s joined them, and he’s determined to teach them how to play the game “properly.” It’s been his new mission and he’s been very fired up about what he’s going to achieve, and how grateful everyone will be when he’s finished teaching them!

The problem is, the local guys have been playing for years according to their own set of rules which they’ve developed over time. The new guy says what they play bears little resemblance to the game he loves and it bothers him – after all, things should be done “properly.” The whole thing has turned into a huge argument and he’s been asked, very politely to stay away. He can’t understand it because as he says, he knows how it should be done, he’s qualified and has plenty of experience of doing it “right.”

The conclusion I’ve come to is that perhaps he’s looking at it from the wrong angle. Perhaps the game that’s developed here over the past few years, based on the challenges of not having the right equipment, playing it on a sloping beach, sometimes playing partly in the sea depending on the tide and so on, is an evolved version of the “proper” game that’s adapted to the local reality. Of course the guys playing here could never go and compete against a team playing the “proper” game, but that is so far outside their aspirations as to be completely irrelevant, they just want a practical set of rules that allows them to have fun at the weekends.

Another thought I had was that perhaps if the new guy had come along and played for a year or so and then started trying to introduce some changes he might have been a bit more successful.

So what I have concluded is this. Yes, as expats we often have a lot to contribute, and yes, sometimes we really can see how to improve things. But sometimes people don’t want things “improved,” after all our home societies are rarely shining examples of the perfect way to do things either, (try talking to anyone in a developing economy about Western economic management at the moment and you’ll see what I mean – ironic smiles all round!) But if we genuinely can see a way to do something differently for an improved result it’s usually better to first try and understand why the thing is done as it is at the moment, and second to build trust and understanding before trying to make the change. It may be stating the obvious, it’s ‘Change Management 101’ after all, but how come we all (myself very much included) seem to forget it so often!

By MozMouse

Image courtesy of Zimbio

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