Should you take that job overseas?

By on August 21st, 2009 In Advice, Professional Development

According to a paper presented at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting this month, taking a job overseas with your company might make make it more difficult for you to get to the top.  Really??

The study looked at the relationship between the international assignment experiences of executives and how quickly they advanced in their careers. The paper examined over 1,000 chief executives based in 23 countries and affiliated with the 500 largest corporations in Europe and the 500 largest in the United States. 

They concluded that people who went on foreign assignments and spent time away from headquarters actually took longer to get to the top.  Apparently this was especially dangerous if the assignment took place later in an executive’s career. It’s the “out of sight, out of mind”  effect.  They recommended that business people take the overseas assignment early on in their career and only for a year or two at most.  You can find a summary of the report in the latest issue of Businessweek. 

Thanks to Brian Camen at our very own Thunderbird School of Global Management, I was able to get insights from Mary Teagarden, Ph.D., who is Professor of Global Strategy.  She was at the presentation about research on jobs abroad.  Some of her points:

  • Unless a company has a well-designed career management program, overseas assignments by themselves might not lead to career advancement. Their contribution to a leader’s development would be haphazard.
  • What these assignments have been shown to do include increasing the leader’s ability to deal with ambiguity and change — capabilities that are very important in the contemporary workplace.
  • They enable the leader to frame problems and solutions from multiple perspectives, which leads to increased creativity and enhances the ability to work in multicultural and often virtual teams.
  • It provides a deeper understanding of other markets, customers and potential markets than is possible without overseas exposure.
  • Overseas career assignments do not create long-term value for the employer unless the employee is strategically managing those assignments in the career of the leaders they sent abroad. They do not create value for the leader unless the leader is willing to embrace the opportunity and learn while abroad.

 

    So should you take that overseas assignment?   Good grief, yes, I say.   It’s such a valuable perspective that I think every business person should spend time overseas. In fact, I’ve often thought it should be a requirement for any president of the United States to have spent some time abroad.  I studied at Durham University in northern England for my junior year of college.  The naïve, ethnocentric 18-year-old who went over there came back a much more enlightened 19-year-old.  Taking a job overseas will only make you a better, more empathetic public relations professional.
    As my favorite T.S. Eliot quote says:

    “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

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