Posts Tagged ‘bucharest’

Bear with me as I work through this idea, but I thought I’d lay it out here because I’m curious to know your feedback.

Do you know people who remain in a given country despite having plenty of justifiable (mostly negative) reasons to seek greener pastures elsewhere?

Following some discussions this week in Bucharest with my colleagues, friends, and loved ones — in addition to discussions I’d held with Chinese expatriate friends in Shanghai and Beijing when I was in the PRC last week — I was shocked to learn how difficult it can be to sever oneself off from a job you get used to, yet which can also be so bad for your health and psychological well-being and perhaps even your income.

The best way to illustrate what I mean is to use the specific case of a professional Romanian female colleague of mine (name protectively changed) who remains in Bucharest despite having the skills and necessary experience to seek higher-paying gigs outside the country. The details of her case have been sufficiently altered in order to conceal her true identity, for anyone who might know who I’m referring to given our mutual networks.

The Background:

Monica is the General Manager of a 40-room boutique hotel located in the centre of Bucharest. She’s held down this position for five straight years, manages a staff of around fifteen full- and part-time staff, and maintains contacts throughout the capital’s hospitality industry which facilitate the performance of her daily duties.

Monica’s tentacles spread far and wide in Bucharest, while she remains a well-known, reputable commodity in the city and in her industry. In short, she’s the type of manager all employers just dream of hiring. She’s reputable, reliable, and moreover, her loyalty to her bosses in a very capricious Romanian crisis job market — where position-skipping is the monthly norm — runs decidely against the grain.

The Central Conflict:

Monica’s been head-hunted before and admitted to me as such. She’s been offered higher-paying positions by deep-pocketed Romanian entrepreneurs, as her reputation precedes her and most people recommend her hotel and her services highly. Such positions have included offers to manage other combination four-star hotel/restaurant facilities located in well-trafficked wealthy areas of Bucharest where her responsibilties wouldn’t considerably different from what she presently performs. Monica’s been offered positions outside of Romania for several years now, though she’s never followed up on these for a handful of reasons which I’ll get into momentarily.

The Obstacles:

As I sit with Monica occasionally over coffee, we often get a chance to revisit our past conversations we’ve held about her fallen-through opportunities and following our most recent get-together I made a mental note to hammer out this post that might be of benefit to others and my international friends who find themselves in a similar position elsewhere.

Monica basically cites the following reasons why she’s chosen to remain where she is instead of taking that one giant leap into the unknown beyond:

1) Her Boss: Monica apparently has a superb relationship with her superior, a foreign investor and absentee owner from Istanbul, Turkey. Monica’s (female) boss is in Bucharest every other week and usually conveys her requests to Monica through emailed or written to-do’s, a system which has been working swimmingly for them for the past several years.

Also, their relationship is hardly conventional.

Her boss invites Monica on trips all across Europe and outside the office, giving Monica the opportunity (humourously in her own words) “to see the sun now and again” which she might not otherwise have a chance to do were she to be in someone else’s employ, someone stricter and more formal. Having stepped over the line separating the personal and the professional, their relationship has morphed into something largely impossible to replicate anywhere else, if at all. Monica hsa told me that they also share intimate secrets as well, which is an interesting twist on the above theme. You can likely guess that her boss is one of the main reasons Monica sticks around well beyond her “due date.”

2) Her Staff: I’ve been a guest at Monica’s hotel plenty of times in the past, and will continue to do so as the need arises on subsequent trips to Bucharest. I’ve closely observed how she cleverly manages her staff, witnessing the respect she engenders among her mostly male direct reports (surprising given that she’s a female manager in a very macho Romanian business culture). Monica’s employees love and respect her at the same time.

She succeeds in doing this by utilizing her own sort of management style a mother/friend/disciplinarian combo which keeps everyone on their toes, yet ensuring the work gets done while the respect and genuine care is always there. Monica’s low staff turnover over the years attests to the fact that her model plainly works, despite the better opportunities being offered elsewhere (read: across the EU) for her and her staff members.

3) Her Contacts: We all know how arduous and time-consuming it is to build a solid network. It’s taken Monica years to assemble hers, and while the money might be greener “on the other side,” her ability to take command of the situation and to fix things might be drastically curtailed in another milieu, depending on how portable some of her contacts might be (and even then, her name-drop potential tails off precipitously when shifting between markets). Since good business doesn’t happen from today to tomorrow, can you place a dollar- or euro-value on how much your contacts are worth? Really?

When I asked Monica to do so — like most of us, she couldn’t come up with a number.

4) Her Culture: Were Monica to accept a better-paying position in another country, there would be an initial steep learning curve to master the new business culture. New norms, new faux-pas, and new ways of associating with colleagues — not to mention getting used to life outside the office, at large — which might cause her to hestitate about making any sort of switch.

In Monica’s specific case, Romanians have a specific way of interacting with each other. I’d characterize it (though there are those who might disagree) as less formal, more interpersonally open, and occasionally caustic, yet in a manner which locally is quite acceptable.

5) Her Overall Conditions: Throw all the above into a stew, and Monica ends up with a series of conditions pretty much hard to beat competitively.

The way she’s described them range from:

“I wouldn’t last in this position for six months if I had a boss breathing down my neck every day.”

“I don’t know if I could work for a typical Romanian male boss.”

“Where else am I going to get this sort of opportunity, being the queen of the castle at this stage in my career?”

“I have the respect and admiration of my peers at this hotel. If I go elsewhere, would it be the same?”

I know exactly what she means…I’ve been there.

So, In Summary:

Earning a higher salary elsewhere isn’t always what it seems. There isn’t necessarily better than here.

Remember the variety of other factors you’ve got to take into consideration — several key ones which are often a challenge to quantify and hard to replicate in any kind of new posting — ones which often keep otherwise overqualified managers and staff firmly anchored to jobs that are well below their station and/or not as financially viable.

So what’s been your experience? Do you have any personal stories you can share or know of anyone in a similar position to Monica’s? I’d be interested in hearing your take on this issue.

Bear with me as I get this out of my system…

As I travel often throughout the former Communist world, I have a lot of opportunities to compare the various bureaucratic procedures in the several countries I moonlight in, monitoring — as I do — how they’ve been improving since ‘89.

A little anecdote would suffice…

My company’s Creative Director and I have recently paid visits to our respective People’s Republic of China Embassies (I in my adoptive Czech “Republic,” she in her native Romania) to obtain our obligatory Middle Kingdom entry passes. Allowing me just a few beats of your time, I thought I’d contrast our two different embassy experiences in highlighting how far (or behind) these two countries have come since Wall Fall.

Notes on ADM’s Visa Odyssey at the PRC Embassy in the Czech Republic:

• the Consular Section was clearly marked at street-level and the complex was easy to find.
• when submitting my application, the entire procedure — queueing up,  organizing the list of required documents, handing them over to the clerk, deciding on a date for a return trip back to the Embassy for pick-up — took no more than twenty minutes. I’ve been told this was an anomaly — with the standard situation involving a serpentine snake of a thing which trails all the way out the compound onto nearby Pelleova street — something I’d noticed myself when I returned to retrieve my passport. Still, it’s those first impressions which count and — fakjo — this was a good one.
• the queue moved fluidly. Czech people are typically extremely well-behaved when it comes to this sort of thing. There was zero need for the famous Chinese “sharp elbows” or raised voices. I was startled by how mellow the whole scene was, compared to the sordid tale I’m about to recount shortly.
• the Czech clerk doing application intake was a gem. She chose to converse with me in the Queen’s English and her high British accent — a speech affect I normally find cloyingly sickening amongst younger Czechs (why fight it? America is our chief sponsor, quit the pose) — her overall diction, and her vocabulary were sensational. This, in my opinion, is the new breed of Czech citizen: confidently multilingual, possessing an ability to smile freely, and, moreover, completely professional in the performance of her/his duties. Bravo to this woman for putting on the good show.
• the reception area was immaculate. The johns were spotless. There’s even a for-pay coin Xerox machine in the waiting area for those who need to do last-minute copying. They were even serving fresh coffee and sticky buns, which I thought was a very nice touch. Okay, so I’m kidding about the coffee deal, but otherwise everything came up roses.

The Chinese appear to be very serious about making an impression on the Czechs with their local diplomatic presence, and I’ve been doing some thinking as to why (I note, these are strictly my personal views, not sanctioned in way by the Chinese authorities, nor have I been told such things by local Chinese contacts). Given how Czechs traditionally support global underdog movements of any kind — note the mass demonstrations against the Janjaweed in Sudan’s Darfur region, Grassroots Missile Defence Protests,  their unswerving support of the Tibetans, and countless other causes with the notable exception of scant support for the Palestinians — I can see how the Chinese are keen to employ “soft diplomacy” in Prague with an aim to gently persuading the Czechs to see their side of things. Given the large numbers of locals who were waiting to be served on my pick-up day, I think the strategy’s working.

Now, let’s compare how things went down for “the Double E” (aka 2xE) in Boo-Koo (at the PRC Embassy in Bucharest, Ceauşescu’s Former Playground here — by the way, I think The Conducător looks stellar in his wiki page profile shot):

• during her second visit to the Embassy, there was a near-fatal collision across the street as a wayward car went careening into a nearby dealership.
• crusty former Communist loyalist women have managed to keep their Embassy positions despite there being younger, better-looking, and more linguistically-talented, university educated replacements on offer. The former had no idea what the correct sequence of required documents were and did no better than to merely badger around applicants like The Double E by throwing their ample weight around and/or engaging in intimidation tactics with virtually zero customer service orientation. To wit, Andreea told me she was hustled back and forth from the Embassy like cattle at least thrice in order to fetch some allegedly “missing hotel vouchers” and all manner of other assorted bureaucratic dreck. There were no clear instructions (in the national language, mind you!) off the main PRC Embassy in RO page. Andreea had to use her personal guanxi networks in order to source the remaining required forms and this despite the fact she will be travelling with a so-called “Western” colleague who himself carries a bona fide Canadian passport…Chinese spun gold by any other name.
• the Embassy’s signage is terrible. Instructions are poorly given. Chaos reigns everywhere in the reception area.
• her single-entry visa, at $75, cost more than my double-entry pass at 45 EUR. She couldn’t even obtain a double-entry pass unless she had proof of a future subsequent entry.
• there are no metro lines which run anywhere close to the Embassy grounds. The historically close ties between The Chairman and Ceauşescu ensured that the Chinese would have an enclosed diplomatic compound far from the Romanian factory-toiling bun-in-the-oven-baking hoi-polloi.

Call me a conspiracy seeker, but my take-away from The Double E’s Embassy debacle is that the Romanian state aims to do everything in its power (even on the grounds of foreign consulates) to keep its people hogtied to Romania, stymieing their well-intentioned travel plans by erecting all manner of artificial — even egotistical — roadblocks. As if Romania is signalling to its own people: “If I can’t (afford to) go, then you can’t either! Take that! I’ll destroy it for all of us.”

Therefore, what is the Czech take-away from all of this?

Personally, I think we do far too much complaining in this statelet and undervalue how truly progressive we are in comparison to our post-eighty-nine neighbours — despite being one of the more corrupt nations in both Europe and the world. When we grouse, we ignore the obvious successes of how eagerly we’ve adopted new techologies (egs. metro tickets and taxi requests by SMS), new methods of doing things, not to mention beautifying our capital city to the extent that she remains the ultimate dreamcatcher for all and sundy the world over.

Think about it…

So the next time you feel a bitch session coming on. Be grateful for what you have…because things could always be like in Romania. Woof-woof!

More wild dog snaps on offer here… (all images courtesy of Jiggle — sorry, but I don’t say the G-word).