Whether you’re an independent training consultant or a corporate training professional, international work can be tough. Language can prove a barrier, and simple gestures and differing world views create confusion and misunderstanding. Something as mundane to us as a thumbs-up sign is an insult in Bangladesh. Something as habitual as using your left hand during lunch- even if you’re left-handed- is a terrible faux pas in a Muslim country. Little things like this can add up and derail the finest of training missions.



But there are solutions, and a few suggestions can help you make your global training efforts a success:

Overcome your cultural insensitivity. Find out what’s OK and what isn’t in the host country, or you’ll be more tourist than consultant. In Thailand, for instance, it’s a definite no-no to pat a child affectionately on the head. Talk to fellow professionals who have been to your destination to get a feeling for the cultural big picture. Contact the local Canadian embassy or high commission for information on the country.

The widespread and growing use of English in developing countries is a boon to the burgeoning international market for training and consulting. But you still must adapt your words to take into account the worldview of your counterparts. You’ll be far more successful if you appear to be trying diligently to adapt to the culture, even if you make some mistakes. Stephen Covey sums up this point when he says that one of the habits of highly effective people is to seek first to understand, and then be understood.

Deal with bureaucracy. Organizational bureaucracies anywhere can be at loggerheads with project goals and initiatives: that’s particularly so in developing countries. Find out how things work, how information is processed in the organization. One of the mantras of international consulting is sustainability. Unless you take bureaucratic structures into account, your work will not achieve this, and it will be doomed to a short-lived, tenuous existence.

Fortunately, there are signs this is changing. Traditional bureaucratic structures in developing countries are beginning to respond to Western-pushed drives to privatization, governance and public sector reform, democratization and decentralization.

Anticipate technical glitches. Power outages, for example, render most audio-visual aids useless, so bring low-tech backups for your presentations or meetings. And carry paper copies of your materials that you can distribute to participants.

To be sure, there are challenges unique to international consulting. But far more importantly, there are also the satisfactions that arise from meeting professional challenges on foreign turf. I think there is no high, no exhilaration sweeter than proving yourself in a country not your own.