Posts Tagged ‘management’

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.