After 38 years in the corporate world including 11 successful years in Thailand, Frederic Borgoltz decided to change careers, from retail business executive to executive coach. For the past six months, I have been coaching him to help him take on his new role. One day during lunch, we discussed his experience during his first 90 days in Thailand.
"Frederic, I just met a new expat country manager who has been here for just three months," I began. "He told me that the first 90 days in Thailand was the most challenging time for him. He suggested that I write about this topic. What do you think?"
"Kriengsak, I think it's true. I also met a couple of newly arrived expats recently. They've been struggling with similar experiences to the ones I had 11 years ago."
"What did you do in your first three months?"
"First of all, as it was my first expat posting, I wanted to implement the management best practices that I'd learned during 25 years in France. One of the first things I wanted to do was to learn more about each of my direct reports. I invited them to meet me the following week."
"How did you inform them?"
"I invited them into my office and told them that I wanted to get to know them better. I invited each person to a one-on-one meeting for two hours. I was curious to learn all about their performance, how they viewed the organisation, strengths and problems."
"How did it go?"
"Very well. They were positively surprised that I was paying full attention to them. And I learned a lot from each individual. Those meetings helped me significantly to prepare for the next actions I needed to take."
"Frederic, could you elaborate more?"
"Five minutes before the meeting, I opened my office door and displayed water on the table. When they arrived, I started out by briefly explaining to them who I was, where I came from and what I had done successfully in France over the past 25 years. Then, I said to them that my door would always be open; they could enter whenever the door was open. If it was closed, that meant I was busy.
"To my great pleasure, they had prepared for this meeting very professionally. They were ready with a lot of documents, files, action plans and other details that helped me to get a really complete picture about their history, the company's history and their performance".
"What was interesting was that my direct reports all presented themselves in terms of their job description, not in terms of personal and family identity. I was already beginning to understand that Thais are much more 'private' than French people."
"Sounds like you made a good start, Frederic. But nobody's perfect — looking back, are there any things that you have done differently?"
"I should have asked each individual about their preferred communication style."
"Why?"
"I was too focused on communicating the management best practices I wanted us to follow. So, I organised a weekly group meeting, with a core agenda that I set personally, and I requested that they add optional topics. These topics had to be presented by each of my direct reports accordingly. My personal assistant kept minutes of the meetings. What surprised me, however, was that no one seemed really engaged during the meeting except one young lady."
"Frederic, What do you think went wrong?"
"Well, at the time I was not fully aware about Thai culture and especially the concept of kreng-jai (consideration for others). What I could have done differently would have been to ask their opinions about the way we should communicate among ourselves first — one on one, weekly meetings, monthly performance meetings, and so on — instead of assuming that they would engage and participate like the French."
"Frederic, let's say that you've just met a new expat in Thailand and you have only few minutes to offer some tips. What would they be?"
"Here's what I'd suggest:
One-on-one meetings are very powerful here.
Listen carefully to what people say, and try hard to read between the lines.
Be patient.
Don't talk loudly or you will scare people.
Congratulate them for the things they've done well.
Learn about the varieties of smiling.
Learn about Buddhism and His Majesty the King."
"Frederic, your last suggestion touched on a very crucial point, because Buddhism has a lot of implications for Thai values such as kreng-jai, respect, seniority and saving face.
"In addition, the King has done so many things for Thai people. There is lot of wisdom that you can learn from His Majesty in terms of management practices, leadership and most importantly his compassion and caring for Thais.
"I'm really glad we had a chance to go back to some of the basics for expats, Frederic. Thank you very much for the useful tips. Let's continue this again next time."
"Kriengsak, if there are any more questions from the readers, I'm happy to share my experiences. They can e-mail me at frederic.borgoltz@gmail.com."
Kriengsak Niratpattanasai provides executive coaching in leadership and diversity management under the brand TheCoach. He can be reached at coachkriengsak@yahoo.com. Daily inspirational quotations can be found on his Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/TheCoachinth. Previous articles are archived at http://thecoach.in.th