A Member of Two Teams

About four years ago the brief from headquarters changed, and I do not think anybody announced it.

Regional and global leadership started expecting the countries to originate. Not to execute a plan built somewhere else, but to produce their own strategy, their own initiatives and their own projects, and then to drive them. I saw it first in the largest organisations in this market, and over the years since I have watched it move down through the next tier.

Vietnam had spent a long time as an execution and implementation market, and it was excellent at it. But an implementation market waits to be directed. That is not a criticism and it is not a weakness. It is the design working. If your job is to implement well, then waiting for the instruction is correct behaviour and getting ahead of it is the error.

What changed is easy to describe in the language of operating models and much harder to describe honestly. A market that implements is a supplier to the regional business. A market that originates is a member of it. Suppliers are told what to produce. Members are expected to have a view about what should be produced, including about things that are not theirs.

Nobody sent a note explaining that. What arrived was a delegation of authority.

The middle is the wrong picture

Almost everybody in this position describes themselves as being in the middle. Caught between headquarters and the local team. Squeezed. Pulled in two directions.

I understand why the picture is attractive, and I think it is the single most damaging idea a country leader can hold about their own job.

The middle is a position on a line. It implies that things pass through you, that your work is to absorb pressure from both ends, and that your value is your tolerance for discomfort. It also implies that you do not really belong to either end. The middle is a place you are stuck rather than a place you hold.

You are not in the middle. You are a member of two teams.

You are a full member of the regional or global leadership team, with an obligation to the whole business including the parts that are not yours. You are also a full member of the local leadership team, with an obligation to the people in this building. Both memberships are real, both have to be earned, and neither is granted by an org chart.

The difference is not semantic. Somebody in the middle relays. A member decides, argues, commits and carries. Everything difficult about this job comes from holding two memberships at once, and almost nothing about it comes from being squeezed.

Membership is not the same as attendance

The test of membership is not whether you are on the invitation list.

In a regional leadership meeting there is always somebody who speaks only when their own market appears on the agenda, and who says nothing of substance about anyone else's. Everybody in that room knows what that person is. They are not a member of the team. They are a delegate from a territory, and delegates get listened to the way lobbyists get listened to, which is politely and with a discount applied.

That discount is the most expensive thing in this essay, because it is applied silently and it is applied to everything you say afterwards, including the things that are true and urgent.

The same test runs locally. A country leader whose only contribution to the local team is passing on what the region has decided is not a member of that team either. They are a channel, and people stop bringing things to a channel.

You also lose either membership without being told. Nobody announces it. You find out from the calendar, because the conversation that shapes a decision now happens before you are in the room and you are brought in afterwards to be informed.

Authority can be granted. Autonomy has to be built

The clearest evidence that headquarters does not understand membership is what happened when it tried to confer it.

In the organisations I worked with, the autonomy was handed over properly. Decision-making powers moved. Resources were allocated. The thing was real, and I want to be clear about that because the usual story is the opposite one, where accountability moves and authority stays exactly where it was.

It was not picked up.

Authority is a permission. It can be issued, and headquarters can issue it in an afternoon. It appears in an approval matrix, a revised signature limit, a line in an operating model. Once it has been issued, headquarters has done everything it knows how to do, and from where headquarters sits the change is complete.

Autonomy is a capability. It is the ability to form a view when nobody has told you what the view should be, to back it in front of people more senior than you, and to carry the consequence when it turns out wrong. That cannot be issued. It is built slowly, and usually by somebody standing next to a person while they do it badly a few times.

The capability was not there. I spent a lot of time coaching director-level people and whole leadership teams to pick this up, and often they would not. Not could not, in the sense of lacking intelligence or commitment, both of which were usually abundant. The change was simply too large for some people to grasp. When you have spent your whole working life being told what to do, being handed the pen is not an upgrade to your existing job.

From headquarters this reads as reluctance, and that reading does damage. Reluctance implies somebody weighing a thing they understand and declining it. What was actually happening was closer to somebody being handed an instrument they had never been taught to play and being congratulated on the promotion.

Membership works the same way. Headquarters granted authority and believed it had admitted the country to the team. Membership is not granted either. It is the same error one level up.

Translating upward

Both translations are the country leader's job, and neither can be done by anybody else. Headquarters cannot do them because it does not have the context. The local team cannot do them because they are the people who need it done.

Upward, the first thing to understand is that headquarters is not badly informed. It has your numbers, usually in more detail than you would like. What distance removes is not information. It is context. They know what happened and they do not know why it happened, and no amount of additional reporting closes that gap, because reporting is built to travel and context is not.

So the work upward is almost never the provision of more data. It is the provision of causation, and causation is the one thing that cannot be automated into a dashboard.

The second thing is harder and it took me a long time to see clearly.

Everything you say upward that would benefit you is discounted before it is heard. Ask for more time, a lower target, more headcount, a longer runway, and the request is indistinguishable from lobbying, no matter how true it is. This is not headquarters being cynical. It is headquarters correctly noticing that every country asks for the same four things.

Which means the credibility you need for the one conversation that matters is not built in that conversation. It is also not built by making sacrifices that help other markets, which is the version of this I once would have offered and do not believe.

It comes from consistently demonstrating sound judgement. Having delivered what you said you would deliver. Having surfaced problems early, while they were still small enough to be inconvenient rather than serious. Having been balanced rather than self-serving for long enough that balance is what people expect from you.

Then, when you tell headquarters something that also happens to benefit your market, they are much more likely to believe you are calling it as you genuinely see it rather than negotiating for your own position. That is the whole return, and there is no faster way to earn it.

This is also why "we are not ready" fails so reliably. It is a delegate's sentence. It describes your market's condition, it asks for relief, and it invites the conclusion that the market, or its leader, is the problem. A member says a different thing. The authority landed in November, here is what has to sit alongside it, here is what I am doing about it, and here is when I expect it to be in use. Headquarters can act on the second version. There is nothing to be done with the first.

The last piece is timing, and the rule I would give is to escalate early on direction and late on execution. A disagreement about where the business is going has to be raised while it can still change something, which means before you are certain and before you have the full picture, at the point where you feel least entitled to speak. A problem with how something is being delivered should be brought once you have a view about the fix. Reverse those two, which is the natural instinct, and you will be experienced as somebody who accepts direction and then complains about it.

Translating downward

Downward, the announcement has to become something a person can act on.

Being told you are empowered is not information. It does not tell anybody what to do differently on Monday, and for people who have been rewarded for twenty years for waiting, it is a statement that the ground has moved without saying where to stand.

The gap is wider here than headquarters imagines, and part of the reason is structural rather than personal. Compare a mid-level manager in this market with a mid-level manager in the United States and there is a large gap in age. Businesses grew fast here, and growing fast means promoting people quickly. Headquarters reads a title and assumes the years of watching somebody more experienced make a difficult call that would sit behind that title in a mature market. It is a reasonable assumption everywhere it has worked before and it is wrong here. So what you carry downward has to be far more specific than the version you received.

But the real difficulty downward is not specificity.

When you bring a decision to your local team that will cost them something, they want to know whether you fought. Not whether you won. They are assessing whether you are a member of their team or an instrument of somebody else's. The regional team is assessing something different: once a decision is made, a member owns it.

It is tempting to treat those as competing demands. They are not. There is a sentence that satisfies both and it is the right sentence. I argued this. I lost. We are doing it, and I am behind it.

What you cannot do is control how it lands. Headquarters hears ownership. Some of your own people hear self-protection, a man covering himself, and no amount of care in the delivery will move all of them. That is the reality of the role rather than a failure of communication. Part of leading from this position is accepting that you will not always control how your intentions are interpreted, and saying the true thing anyway.

The cheap way out is available and it works immediately, which is why so many people take it. You deliver the decision with a small distancing gesture. A shrug, a tone, a phrase about head office. The room warms to you within seconds and you have bought local credibility at a price you will not see on the invoice. You have told your own people that you are not a member of the team that made the decision, which means the next thing you bring them arrives pre-discounted. And you have told the decision itself that it does not have to be implemented properly.

What is left is narrower and much less comfortable. You give people the reasoning in full, including the parts that are not flattering to the business, and you tell them what you were not able to change and what you are still working on. What you cannot do is stand outside a decision you are accountable for and survive as a member of either team.

Both, at once, without relief

That is the job. Not being caught between two organisations, which is the description people reach for, but holding full membership of two teams, saying the same true thing to both, and accepting that they will not always hear it the same way.

The leaders I watch struggle most are not the ones under the most pressure. They are the ones who have quietly picked a side. Some become the regional team's representative in the market and lose the building. Others become the market's advocate at the regional table and get the discount applied to everything they say. Both are more comfortable than the alternative and both end the same way.

Headquarters believes it made this change when it signed the delegation. The local organisation believes it received a compliment. Between those two beliefs sits one person who has to be a full and trusted member of both, and there is no version of this where that gets easier.

If you lead a market inside a multinational, that is your job now, and it is not what your objectives say you do.