Nicki Baty moved from leading in the UK to a broader European role and discovered her management style didn't work everywhere. She learned to set direction but let teams find their own solutions, and to simplify her language so non-native English speakers could actually understand her.
Chapters
Probably one of the most humbling experiences for me was when I came out of the UK. You're doing really well in like a market you know with a culture that you know really well how to navigate, and then you move to— it was my first European role based in Switzerland, and I spent a lot of time traveling to different markets. You have this view that everything is done a certain way, and it's really humbling when the same approach and style that you use doesn't get you the same results, I think very quickly realized that there's more than one way to get there. And you start to, I think, really embrace sort of where you can have impact, which is potentially a little bit more setting context, giving clarity of direction, but you can give a lot more freedom to people to find their own way there. So I think my international experiences were really good at helping me provide a lot more clarity, especially where English wasn't the first language, so really simplifying the words that I used, much more powerful, and then also giving a lot more license to people to, to find their own ways to get there.