Confusing technical expertise with managerial aptitude is a universal mistake. Internationally, it becomes systemic and costly.
There is a confusion that organizations have been committing for decades, and that intercultural management makes brutally visible.
The person with the most seniority is appointed manager. The one who has the best technical results. The one whose turn it is. We consider the transition to management as a natural evolution of careera logical reward for a well-conducted journey.
This is a mistake. And internationally, this error costs much more than we think.
Manager is not a rank. It’s a job.
Management is a skill in its own right. It has to be learned, it has to be worked on, it can be lacking in brilliant experts and reveal itself in profiles that one would not have imagined for this position.
Confusing technical expertise with managerial aptitude is a universal mistake. But in an intercultural context, it becomes systemic. We send an excellent professional, recognized in his field, abroad without ever having asked him if he knows how to read a room, defuse a silent conflict, or understand why a logical decision does not go through.
A survey conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs among 3,357 French expatriates and published in 2011 indicates that cultural adaptation constitutes the main difficulty encountered on the ground, cited by almost half of the respondents. Academic research involving 224 expatriate executives in India also confirms that technical skills are not enough, and that too few companies use intercultural training before departure. These two pieces of data say the same thing: the majority of managers sent internationally arrive with a toolbox that does not work.
It’s not a question of goodwill. It’s a question of training, preparation, and lucidity about what management really means depending on the context.
What cultural codes do to management
Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher in social psychology, has spent much of his career mapping the cultural dimensions that influence work. Among them, distance from power: the acceptance, which varies depending on the society, of an unequal distribution of authority. Malaysia has an index of 104. Denmark, 18. The United States, 40. This indicator alone radically transforms what is expected of a manager.
Erin Meyer, in The Culture Map, goes further. It shows that the same managerial behaviors are interpreted in radically opposite ways depending on the culture. A Dutch manager who offers direct criticism will be perceived as honest and respectful by his German colleagues. The same behavior, applied in Japan, will be experienced as an aggression and a public indictment of the face of the interlocutor.
Silence, precisely, is a fundamental example. In a Japanese meeting, silence does not mean approval. It often means disagreement, expressed according to the rules of a high-context culture, where what is not said counts as much as what is said. A Western manager who interprets this silence as a consensus and moves forward with his decision has just made an error of which he will only become aware several weeks later.
On the other hand, in Germany, a junior employee who publicly contradicts a senior in a meeting is not committing a lack of respect: he is providing expertise. The legitimate hierarchy is based on competence, not on seniority. This same behavior, in many African contexts, would be seen as a serious offense to the authority of the elder.
In Yemen, the decision is not made in a meeting. It is prepared in the informal conversations that precede, in the shared tea, in the relationships built over the long term. The meeting is a ratification, not a deliberation. A manager who arrives with a structured agenda and an hour slot does not understand what space he is in.
In Italy, arte di arrangiarsi, this ability to find creative solutions in improvisation, is a valued managerial quality. A process that is too rigid, too German in its form, will be circumvented, not out of ill will, but because it conflicts with a culture where flexibility is a form of intelligence.
What humanitarians have understood that businesses have not yet integrated
Médecins Sans Frontières works simultaneously with around forty nationalities, in contexts where cultural codes are not only different but sometimes opposed. The response developed by seasoned humanitarian organizations is not a universal manual of good management. It is a posture: observation before action, reading the context before applying the method.
L’Oreal has developed a similar approach in the private sector, with co-development programs bringing together managers fromAsiafrom Europe and Africa. Each presents a concrete case. Peers co-develop solutions. The result is not a soft consensus: it is a collective intelligence anchored in plural realities.
What these two examples have in common is the same conviction: there is no universal exportable managerial style. There are skills of observation, adaptation and cultural reading. They are learned. They require time, humility, and an explicit desire to develop them.
What this requires of organizations
The first decision to make is structural: separate technical and managerial career paths. No longer make management a mandatory step in an expert career. Create paths of technical excellence that allow you to evolve without going through the management box.
The second decision is to treat intercultural preparation as a professional skill in its own right, not as a half-day pre-departure awareness module.
Edward Hall, American anthropologist, distinguished high-context cultures, where communication is implicit, relational, loaded with innuendo, from low-context cultures, where information is explicit, direct, formalized. Navigating between these two worlds cannot be improvised. It can be taught, it can be practiced, and it starts with recognizing that our own codes are not the norm.
An effective international manager is not one who adapts to everything. He is the one who knows what he does not yet understand.
