Note: August is looking like a crazy and stressful month for me, with no time to blog here. To make sure no one gets bored and abandons me, I am going to re-run some of my favorite posts from the past.
This is the first thing – expats don’t stay forever. In two or three or four years, the expat will leave. If your whole program depends on her, or the staff believes that it does, things will go to pieces when she leaves. This is the second thing – it’s disempowering. You don’t want your staff, or your stakeholders, to believe change only comes from outsiders. You want people to find their own power and their own capacity to influence their lives and communities. You don’t want them to sit around waiting and starving for the Dutch to come back and rebuild the irrigation canals.
This is the third thing. You want your staff invested in the process. You want everyone involved to know your select your pilot schools because they meet the qualifications for your program. You don’t want them thinking the schools were selected because Mr. Thomas feels really bad for the villages, or worse yet, because he thought the teachers were pretty. You want people to know you’ve got a system and your apply it fairly.
This is the fourth thing. Country Directors who allow themselves to be seen as having and exerting that kind of power end up isolated. Staff members won’t be comfortable being part of a collaborative decision-making process. They won’t offer opinions on how to make things better, and they won’t go to the CD if they identify a problem.
Good programs come from good teams, not from little gods and their adoring worshippers.
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Photo credit: celinecelines
Chosen for the shiny rainbow.
Not a bad post, but this applies to program and country directors of both expat and local backgrounds. Case in point was an NGO I recently came into contact with – the local manger-run section had a far more hierarchical / removed management style than the section run by an expat. I think this is less a post about expat management than good management.
B
That’s a really good point.
Brandon, I’d have to second your sentiments/observation, based on my experience. I’ve seen situations where good expats (whether managers or simply technical advisers) have a more empowering effect on their local coworkers, and are more willing to teach and help their local counterparts grow.
That being said, I do really appreciate the spirit of this article, Alanna. Particularly your first point, which is so hard to keep in mind as an expat…you come in all full of gusto, feeling like you’ll always be there to protect, defend, lead, advise, or what-have-you. But a few years down the road, you leave, and feel this emptiness inside as you say goodbye to people that you’d fooled yourself into thinking you’d always be there for. It’s easy to feel like you’re letting your local counterparts down. Your article is a good reminder that as expats we should always keep in mind that while we are transient, the impressions that we leave are more lasting…