From Expert to Learner (Again)

Stepping into an international role often means letting go of something we don’t always recognize: our identity as the expert. In this post, I reflect on what it takes to become a learner again, and why that shift is central to navigating cross-cultural transitions.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

In my previous post, I talked about the polychallenge of adapting to an international role and the many cultural adjustments I failed to take into consideration when I moved to the Netherlands. Those oversights impacted my work performance as much as my personal sense of happiness and satisfaction. Things didn’t improve until I recognized the missing context and made an effort to understand the cultural waters I was swimming in. I had to become a beginner again. That shift - from expert to learner - is at the heart of many international career transitions.

When Expertise Becomes Identity

It is all too easy to allow our work to become our identity - to believe we are what we know. In the United States, your profession is probably one of the top three things you share when meeting new people, just after your name and where you live. Your role, title, and accomplishments can begin to define who you are. What’s more, they likely helped you secure the international opportunity you have! So it can be a shock to arrive abroad and realize you have a different identity.

In the eyes of your colleagues, you’re the new guy, the new girl. You’re no longer the supply chain expert or the mergers and acquisitions guru. You’re The Foreigner. The Expat. You’re showing up with your background, assumptions, and ways of working. It’s important to remember that your new colleagues are doing the same. Your content expertise got you to this role, but it won’t be enough to help you navigate the cultural complexities ahead. As Erin Meyer notes in her excellent and informative book The Culture Map, “If you go into every interaction assuming that culture doesn’t matter, your default mechanism will be to view others through your own cultural lens and to judge or misjudge them accordingly.” Letting go of expertise as identity creates space for something else: learning.

Making Space to Learn Again

Expanding our cultural lens requires that we set aside content expertise and re-enter the mindset of the learner. This can be challenging, especially for highly effective leaders who are used to being the expert. It can help to think back to a time when you successfully learned something new as an adult: a foreign language, golf, salsa dancing, or pottery. What energy did you bring to that experience? What emotions did it produce in you? Excitement, anxiety, frustration, joy?  

Any new activity requires an open mind and a sense of curiosity. It also requires acceptance of failure, at least initially. It is humbling and destabilizing to admit that we are beginners, again. Learning, in this context, is a leadership behavior. Continuous learning makes leaders more self-aware and more receptive to new ideas and new ways of being.

What Learning Looks Like in Practice

I’d encourage you to bring the same energy to your cross-cultural learning as you did to the activity you recalled early. As with learning a language or a sport, gaining cultural competence starts with rules and foundational skills: 

• Understanding non-verbal cues

• Clarifying expectations

• Learning communication norms 

• Noticing how feedback is given

As with any new skill, it helps to have guidance. Even before your assignment is confirmed, you can get started on your learning.

• Talk to returned expats in your organization

• Find an advisor who can help you interpret cultural norms

• Connect with expat communities, including online spaces

Finally, set some goals and milestones for your learning so that you can see your progress. Have fun with these! Maybe you want to learn to cook a traditional dish from your new country, or attend a cultural festival or museum exhibit. Yes, your goal is to be more culturally fluent in  your new workplace, but a culture’s food, music, and art will give you a window into a place and its people.

The Feeling of Getting Better

Reflecting on his experience learning French, author Ta-Nehisi Coates noted, “There is absolutely nothing in this world like the feeling of sucking at something and then improving at it. Everyone should do it every ten years or so.” Your international move may have placed you on an unexpected learning curve, but there is still much to be gained from it. 

What is something you can work towards improving in terms of your cultural competence?