The Mentors Who Help You Navigate New Cultures
The mentor who has navigated the same transition you are navigating provides guidance that no guidebook can offer. Finding these mentors — and becoming one yourself — is one of the reciprocity dynamics.
My manager in Singapore had moved from London seven years before I arrived. She had made every mistake I was about to make, and she had developed the specific wisdom that only comes from living through the experience rather than studying it. When I told her I was struggling with something she had struggled with seven years earlier, she told me about the exact conversation she had with her landlord.
The mentors who help expats navigate new cultures are not always the people with the highest status or the most impressive credentials. They are the people who have recently been where you are, who remember the specific disorientation of early arrival, and who have developed practical solutions to problems that you are only beginning to encounter.
The formal mentorship programs that some companies run for international assignees provide structure but often miss the specific practical wisdom that informal mentors provide. The mentor who will tell you which neighborhoods to avoid and which to consider, who will explain the unwritten rules of their team.
The transition from mentee to mentor happens faster abroad than at home. The new arrival who arrives eighteen months after you gives you the same role that your mentor played for you. The knowledge you accumulated — the specific solutions to specific problems, the cultural interpretations that only experience produces — has value to the next person.
The mentor from a different cultural background than yours provides different value from the mentor who shares your home culture. The local colleague who has worked with international employees for years understands the specific challenges that your cultural background presents, because they have worked with many people from your country.
The network of mentors that builds up over years of international living becomes one of the most valuable assets that an internationally mobile professional possesses. The mentor in each city who knows the local context. The mentor in your industry who has navigated the specific career challenges.