Most leaders think working abroad is about learning a new culture.
In my experience, the deeper challenge is something else entirely.
Living abroad quietly shakes the assumptions that made you feel competent in the first place.
Sometimes, it even cracks your professional identity.
Those of us who have lived long enough between cultures, we know that the real journey is not only geographic, but deeply personal.
Japan sits at the intersection of several tectonic plates. Beneath the surface, the earth is constantly shifting. Most of the time, the movement remains invisible and life unfolds normally. But every so often the plates collide, and the ground trembles.
Years ago, when I moved to Japan, I did not yet realize that something similar was about to happen within my professional life. The tremors would not be geological. They would occur beneath the identity I had quietly built over years of education and professional experience.
At the time, I assumed my main challenge would be cultural learning. I expected to spend time understanding the codes of a different society: japanese etiquette, how meetings were conducted, how decisions were made, how communication flowed within organizations.
Yet what unfolded was something far more personal.
Cultural transition is rarely just a knowledge or adaptability problem. It is, more profoundly, a meaning-making challenge. The real difficulty is not simply misunderstanding others or what happens in the room; it is the interpretations we assign to what happens to us.
Looking back, what was really trembling for me during that first year of work in Japan was not just my cultural understanding. It was parts of my professional identity that I had always taken for granted.
When Competence Begins to Shake
Before arriving in Japan, my professional identity rested on something solid: competence.
I had trained as an engineer and later developed expertise in human resources. In the organizations where I worked, my value often came from my ability to analyze situations, understand what was happening, and propose direction. Competence meant clarity. Competence meant having answers.
In many ways, this identity had served me well.
Yet the first months in Japan unsettled that sense of certainty. Situations that would have seemed obvious to me in France suddenly became ambiguous. Meetings unfolded in unfamiliar rhythms. Responses were indirect. And silence—silence appeared in places where I expected questions, reactions, or debate. Deeply unsettling for the french me.
For the first time in my professional life, I often felt out of my depth.
Looking back, what was trembling during that first year was not only my understanding of a new culture. It was the part of my identity that assumed competence meant quickly making sense of situations, and adapting to it.
The Silent Room
One particular meeting remains vivid in my memory.
I had prepared carefully. I was presenting a new project and hoped to create enthusiasm around it. One of my slides showed a train. My photograph was positioned at the front, as the conductor, while the rest of the team appeared in the carriages. The metaphor seemed straightforward: I would drive the project forward, and together we would move ahead.
When that slide appeared, I expected engagement—perhaps questions, perhaps even a lively discussion.
Instead, the room fell silent.
Completely silent.
Inside my head, however, activity accelerated. The interpretation machine immediately began constructing a story.
Perhaps the metaphor felt naïve.
Perhaps the proposal was not convincing.
Perhaps, most troubling of all, I had already lost credibility…
More than disagreement, what I feared in that moment was that I had failed to persuade them to step onto the train with me.
Only later did I begin to understand something I had misread. In many Japanese professional contexts, silence does not signal rejection. It often indicates reflection. People take time to think carefully before responding, especially when a decision could affect the collective.
What I had interpreted as resistance was simply thoughtful consideration.
The silence that felt like failure was, in reality, the beginning of a conversation.
When Meaning-Making Falters
Experiences like that silent room reveal something subtle yet powerful about cultural transitions.
The challenge is rarely that we cannot observe what is happening. The difficulty lies in the meaning we assign to what we observe.
When familiar signals disappear, the interpretation shortcuts we have relied upon for years stop working. Our minds rush to fill the gap, often with stories shaped by our own fears or assumptions.
It is in those moments that something deeper than cultural learning takes place.
It will resonate because it captures something almost every expatriate feels but rarely articulates: the moment when competence cracks.
The real transformation of expatriation is not learning about another culture. It is discovering how much of our professional identity depends on interpretation shortcuts.
When those shortcuts stop working, something unsettling happens. The version of ourselves that once felt competent begins to wobble.
This is the dark middle phase of expatriation.
Confidence dips.
Frustration rises.
Identity questions appear.
Many expatriates quietly pass through this period. And yet it is often precisely there that real leadership development begins.
A Different Lesson: The Japan Tour
Another experience during that first year helped shift my perspective even further.
Early in my time in Japan, I was invited to visit partners in several small rural towns. I expected a series of focused meetings where we would quickly move to discuss the project and next steps.
Instead, our hosts organized something that initially looked more like a tour. We visited different places. We shared meals. We spent long stretches of time in conversation. We soaked in steaming onsen baths. The agenda seemed to wander along unexpected detours without returning to the topic at hand.
From the perspective I carried with me at the time, the experience felt puzzling.
Why were we taking such a long road to get to the work?
Gradually, however, the meaning of those moments began to shift.
The purpose of the visits was not only to discuss the project. It was to build the relationship on which the project would depend.
Many expatriate leaders arrive in a new environment with a strong results orientation. What they sometimes underestimate is that in many cultures, results are the outcome of relationships—not the starting point.
In that rural Japanese context, trust was not assumed because of roles, contracts, or expertise. Trust was cultivated through time shared together. Through informal moments. Through conversations that allowed people to understand one another beyond professional titles.
And something unexpected happened to me during that visit.
I felt thrilled—almost relieved.
In those informal moments, I realized I could connect with people who, on the surface, seemed very different from me: older men, traditional Japanese professionals who had spent most of their lives within Japan.
Yet beneath the differences, we shared something simple and deeply human: commitment to our work, a sense of integrity, and curiosity about people.
Different cultural backgrounds, yet recognizable values.
A Shift in Leadership Perspective
Those experiences gradually reshaped my understanding of leadership.
I had arrived believing that competence meant understanding situations quickly and providing direction. Japan invited me to discover something different.
In unfamiliar environments, competence often begins with curiosity rather than certainty.
It involves observing longer, listening more carefully, and resisting the temptation to fill ambiguity with immediate interpretation. It means allowing relationships to develop before expecting alignment.
This was not an easy transition.
Moving abroad can become a profound process of transformation—but it is not for the faint of heart. There are moments of discomfort, and darker moments when the familiar world—and the professional self built within it—begin to tremble.
The assumptions that once felt stable begin to shift.
And yet, if we remain curious through those tremors, something remarkable can happen.
When the Ground Moves
Japan has learned to live with earthquakes. Buildings are designed to move with the ground rather than resist it.
Looking back, I sometimes think expatriate leadership requires something similar.
Cultural transitions shift the tectonic plates beneath our professional identities. At first, the tremors can feel destabilizing. The interpretations that once guided us stop working. Competence feels uncertain.
But if we allow ourselves to remain curious rather than defensive, those tremors can reshape the landscape of our leadership.
Because ultimately, the deepest challenge of cultural transition is not mastering another culture. It is learning to question the meanings we instinctively assign to our experiences—and discovering who we can become when those meanings begin to change.
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Bénédicte / The Great Floating Tribe
