3 Strategies for Onboarding Yourself Effectively in Your New Culture

You've done everything you can do to prepare for your new international assignment. Visas, travel, housing, kid's schooling. It's all smooth sailing from here right? All ready to be welcomed with open arms by your new colleagues and excited for the opportunities ahead.

The icing on the cake was that wonderfully insightful cultural training you received. You are grateful for the opportunity to have learned more about your hosts. Their work styles, their potential motivations, how to establish credibility and manage effectively. How could anything possibly go wrong?

What is missing many times in this scenario is the opportunity for that same knowledge to be gained by the very people you will be working with. They are in the comfort of their fishbowl, blissfully engaged in their day-to-day work interacting with colleagues whose style matches theirs. They seamlessly mesh as a cohesive unit. Upon your arrival however, they will no doubt observe that things are slightly different. It may feel like they are doing the tango, and you've turned up ready to disco.

We are familiar with onboarding processes for new hires. There is no reason that a newly arrived ex-pat does not deserve the same consideration in a new country. The name on the building and the core business operations may be the same, but this is a totally new environment. Below are some considerations for setting yourself up for success.

Groundwork: While the time leading up to your move is filled with logistics and handing off of responsibilities to make way for the new, it is also a good time to look ahead and scope out the people you will be interacting with in your new country. In some cultures, this is imperative to help establish trust and credibility. Depending on the cultural style preference in your new location, you may need to find one key person that you might have worked with before or at least have had some experience interacting with. If that person already has the respect of local teams and individuals, they can be a powerful ally for influencing expectations ahead of time among those that are receiving you as a new colleague or leader.

Share the Love: As mentioned before, hopefully you have made the investment of cultural training for you and your family as part of your preparation. Ultimately that should have included some sort of assessment and access to insightful cultural profiles related to any countries you may find yourself working with. It's time to put that knowledge to work for you, and there is no better way than to help prepare your new hosts for your arrival than sharing resources with them. It can be especially powerful for allowing them to understand more about you as it pertains to communications, comfort with risk, relationship building and leadership style. A great example of such a tool is GlobeSmart , where each person gets to discover their own personal cultural profile and can compare it with that of over 100 countries, as well as directly with colleagues. This can open up rich and rewarding conversations that really help you establish connection and trust.

Be Curious (Every Day) If there is one thing I have witnessed in working with high level global leaders is that they all have one trait in common; Unquenchable Curiosity! It's like a daily exercise routine, and in the same way as the physical version builds muscle and trims fat, the same is true in crossing cultures. You are going to be confronted with difference at each turn, both professionally and personally. It's going to take more of your brainpower than you realize, so building strength and resilience for that most vital of organs is critical. When under stress we often revert to our basic instincts. This is intrinsically human, and can open us up to negative reactions driven through the lens of natural biases. Curiosity allows our brain to pause, assess situations, and give us time to move our thought processes away from our amygdala (lizard brain) and into the executive thinking part of our brain. New information learned through questioning assumptions is a super power that is accessible to all of us. It also shows our new hosts that you are deeply invested in understanding what makes them tick, and in turn can motivate them to do the same with you.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. There are so many moving parts to the planning, preparation, and successful process of an international assignment. What strategies have worked for you? If you are yet to take on your own assignment, who in your network has experience working in another country and can they give you tips on things that worked or didn't work for them? You will find any investment you make in this area will pay big dividends down the road.

Globally yours,

Brett