Imagine – or remember, if you have been there – having to tell a direct report (or, as it is now fashionable to say in Europe, a colleague) that they are not coping with the role.

How do you do it? Do you call them in and explain why they no longer fit the role? Or do you quietly stop inviting them to the meetings that matter?
Depending on the business culture you are used to, one of those two options has just left you puzzled at best. To some readers the first sounds needlessly harsh. To others the second sounds evasive – how is the person supposed to know?
In Dubai, where a single leadership team can bring together people from six or seven countries, both versions play out in the same building. Sometimes in the same week.

Same Competence, Different Signals
What interests me most is the person on the receiving end. Being good at reading indirect signals, or valuing directness, does not by itself mean they will make it work. A sensitive reader can still misread signals that were designed for someone else. Someone who values directness can wait months for a conversation that is never going to happen.
Now put the same person in a company of the same size, in the same industry, in a similar role – but in another region. Quite often, they do well. Their competence has not changed. What has changed is how the environment expects bad news, disagreement and decisions to travel.

Regional Fit
This is why we have recently added a fourth factor to our executive assessment and leadership search work. Alongside fit with the role, with the team and with the organisation, we now look at regional fit: how a person's working habits match the way things are done where the role sits.
The underlying idea is hardly new. Edward T. Hall wrote about high- and low-context cultures decades ago, and in The Culture Map Erin Meyer treats the way negative feedback is delivered as one of eight scales on which business cultures differ. What we have changed is where it sits in the decision: not as an afterthought for the onboarding plan, but as a factor weighed next to role, team and organisation before the appointment is made.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, executive search has traditionally left it out of formal assessment, or treated it as a skill – something that can be trained. We used to see it that way too. What changed our minds was seeing how many talented people spend years of their working lives hoping to succeed in places where their approach is simply not valued. Many of them are not ready to change their cultural habits – and that is perfectly normal. Those habits took decades to form, and they are often part of what made the person effective in the first place.
Regional fit is rarely fixed by training. In our experience, the chances of a genuine regional re-adaptation are slim, even at the very top. Seniority does not help much: the habits that took someone to the top are the ones they trust most. Some people adapt faster than others, but an appointment should not rest on that hope.
None of this means the person should not be hired. If everything else fits – role, team and organisation – a candidate with a regional mismatch can still be the right choice. What they need is support built in from the first day: a coach or a mentor for the onboarding period who knows the region from the inside and can translate the signals the person is not yet reading.
That is what the factor gives a board: a way to ask the question, and plan for the answer, before the appointment rather than after two years of mutual frustration.
So when I hear that an executive is "not coping", I now add one more question. Not only "is this the right person for the role?", but also "is this the right location for this person?"

References
Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond Culture. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. New York: PublicAffairs.

Authors:
Pavel Charny, ORTALEX, Managing Partner, Dubai