Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that around 40 percent of leaders fail within the first eighteen months of a new role. The cause is rarely a lack of technical skill. It is the inability to adapt to a new culture. Each failed international placement also costs an organization millions once relocation, replacement and lost momentum are counted.

In thirty years of coaching executives through international assignments at multinationals, UN agencies and NGOs, I have watched that pattern at its sharpest. Moving country changes everything about the culture a leader has to read while leaving the job description exactly as it was. The person who fails abroad is usually the person who succeeded at home, sent because they succeeded at home.

What fails is not competence. It is belonging.

What actually goes wrong

A leader arriving in a new country loses three things at once, and typically underestimates all three. She loses her network, which is where most of her real influence lived. She loses her read of the room, because the signals that told her when she had persuaded someone no longer mean the same thing. And she loses the assumption that her authority travels with her title, which in many cultures it does not.

What she does in response is the actual problem. Under that much uncertainty, most capable leaders do more of what made them capable. They move faster, decide harder, and lean on the operating style that has never failed them. In a new culture that style reads as arrogance, or as naivety, and by the time anyone tells her, the relationships that would have carried her through the first year have already been spent.

Organizations then compound it. They brief the leader on tax, housing and schools, and call that preparation. They set strategy expectations for month three, before the leader knows the business or the people. And they treat the assignment as a logistics exercise when it is a leadership transition happening under conditions of maximum ambiguity.

The skill that prevents it

Belonging is a skill, not a place. That is the single idea I would want any leader taking an international role to absorb, and it is the foundation of the Portable Roots framework I use with global executives. It rests on three principles.

Read the room. Learn to notice what is happening in a meeting before you decide what to do about it. In most cultures the important part of the conversation is not the part that is spoken, and a leader who cannot read the unspoken part will keep winning arguments and losing decisions.

Decode the cultural code. Every organization and every country has rules about how disagreement is expressed, how decisions are actually made, and how status is signalled. These rules are rarely written down and are almost never explained to an incoming leader, who is expected to absorb them and is judged when she does not.

Release rigidity. The hardest of the three, because it asks a successful leader to loosen her grip on the very style that made her successful. Not to abandon it, to hold it more lightly, so that she can adapt without feeling that she is disappearing.

What to do in the first ninety days

• Spend the first thirty days learning rather than deciding, and say publicly that this is what you are doing so that it reads as deliberate rather than as hesitation.
• Build the relationship map before the strategy. Identify who actually decides, as opposed to who formally decides, and invest there first.
• Find one person who will tell you the truth about how you are being perceived, and make it easy for them to keep doing it.
• Resist the pressure to announce a strategy before you understand the business. A strategy delivered in month two that has to be revised in month six costs more credibility than a strategy delivered in month four.

Organizations that support this properly do not lose 40 percent of their placements. The leaders stay, they succeed, and a striking number of them are promoted out of the assignment rather than recalled from it.

Frequently asked questions

Why do executives fail on international assignments?

Rarely because of technical capability. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership puts the failure rate at around 40 percent within the first eighteen months of a new role, and the cause is the inability to adapt to a new culture rather than a lack of technical skill. Leaders fail because they lose their network, their read of the room and the assumption that authority travels with title, and because they respond to that loss by doing more of what worked at home.

How long does it take a leader to adapt to a new country?

The operational adjustment takes about ninety days. The cultural adjustment, meaning the point at which a leader can read a room accurately and influence without effort, usually takes six to twelve months, and it happens considerably faster with coaching than without.

What is the cost of a failed expatriate assignment?

Millions per placement once relocation, repatriation, replacement search, vacancy and lost business momentum are counted, before any account is taken of the damage to the leader’s career and to the local team’s confidence.

Sending a leader abroad, or watching one struggle?

Dr. Katrina Burrus, PhD, MCC, was the first International Coaching Federation Master Certified Coach in Switzerland and a founding board member of ICF Switzerland. She has coached global leaders at Nestle, Novartis, CERN, UBS, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, and her TEDxMakati talk has been viewed more than 161,000 times.

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Related reading: What is Portable Authority? and the keynote Global Leadership and Portable Authority.

Source: Center for Creative Leadership research on leadership transitions, which finds that approximately 40 percent of leaders fail within their first 18 months in a new role, driven by difficulty adapting to culture rather than by technical capability.