Based on research by Dan Wang
A foreign posting is considered a real resume booster – especially if you’re coming from outside the United States to work within its borders. A stint in the world’s biggest economy should yield tangible benefits: new ideas, innovative methods, an expanded lens on the global marketplace.
If only.
When that U.S. posting ends, “people go back to their home countries because they think they have something to contribute there,” says Dan Wang, a Columbia Business School assistant professor. But on their home turf, many returning expats see their expertise being dismissed as “foreign” – in other words, irrelevant and useless. In Wang’s survey of more than 4,000 skilled migrants returning to their home countries, an overwhelming majority reported that although they were hired because of their overseas experience, their home country offered little opportunity to share the skills or knowledge they had gained abroad.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Wang’s research points to steps that both expats and their managers can take to make sure time on foreign soil pays off.
For expat employees
Choose your assignment carefully. Don’t work for a startup, advises Wang. The experience you’ll gain may be specific to the company or industry, or colored by personality quirks of the owner – and thus not easily transferred across national boundaries.
Better to go with a large, established company. “Think about where the term ‘best practices’ comes from,” explains Wang. “They are practices that have been filtered over time and have been deployed by larger organizations that have had time to vet them.” If you go big then go home, you’ll get solid, time-tested ideas to take back with you.
Adapt, don’t adopt. During his research, Wang interviewed dozens of expats, including a Mexican construction manager on assignment in another company based in the United States. On that assignment, the manager used a US-based scheduling system to help complete projects on time. When she returned to Mexico and proposed using the same software there, her team responded a familiar phrase: “That’s not how we do it here.”
“That resistance comes from a very specific place,” says Wang. “It’s not that they see it as inefficient. It’s that they ascribe it to the person bringing it to them, someone from outside who left the country and came back and now, all of a sudden, thinks she’s better than us.”
The manager dug deeper. She realized that construction projects in the United States tend to be compartmentalized: one team builds the framing; another installs the floor. But in Mexico, teams overlap, which makes schedules more interdependent. She modified the software to enable all team members to see everyone else’s schedule by default. That simple step boosted communication and coordination among teams and ultimately curtailed delays.
Says Wang: “The returnees who are good at knowledge transfer are great at adapting practices from abroad to local circumstances.”
For managers of returning expats
Put them in the middle of things. Employees returning from international assignments tend to be on the periphery of the workplace, says Wang. That’s a waste. People with international experience make ideal intermediaries of global knowledge and resources. Develop a role for them (if one doesn’t exist already) that puts them in charge of cross-border communications or transactions. A pharmaceutical company, for example, might put a returning expat in a job that utilizes his or her experience with overseas regulatory agencies.
And don’ t think you have to integrate returning expats slowly and gradually. Assign them right away to products or projects that are central to a core strategic initiative of the organization. You’ll reap the benefit of their global skills and perspectives and keep them from feeling marginalized.
Group them with other expats. Wang is a fan of the research of Harvard Business School’s Boris Groysberg, who argues that knowledge is best preserved when not one person, but teams of people, cross borders. “Having a critical mass of returnees is important because it allows them to collectively develop insights based on their overseas knowledge they might not be able to develop otherwise simply because of being outnumbered,” says Wang. Such groups can serve as a support group for its members, too.
“Many managers acknowledge the importance of overseas work experience, but they think that this experience alone is what makes their employees valuable,” says Wang. “Managers must set up returned expat employees for success by establishing integrative environments that create structured opportunities for knowledge transfer.”
READ THE RESEARCH
ABOUT THE RESEARCHER
Dan Wang
Dan Wang is Associate Professor of Business and (by courtesy) Sociology at Columbia Business School, where he is also the Co-Director of the ...