In need of therapy

Remote management is something I'll never miss. Aside from the obvious frustrations of being detached from the reality of the beneficiaries and the projects, remotely managing a team is challenging to say the least.



The local team and I have just spent two days barely touching the surface of a whole host of concerns. Everything from toilets not being clean enough and drivers not turning on the air-conditioning for certain members to staff, to personality clashes and issues of non-compliance.

Working through such concerns is challenging in a normal context. But this is magnified when you add a cultural and linguistic divide and you take into account that pretty much all I have to go on are individuals' testimonies and my instinct. It's painstakingly protracted and riddled with potential for misunderstanding.

Today's cultural blunders included:

• Using a hand gesture to encourage an animated speaker to lower the volume of his voice, which was likened to gesturing an animal and therefore very disrespectful.
• Inadvertently sitting ahead of someone who was at the flip chart while I'd pulled my chair up to the conference table, which indicated that I did not respect him.

And those are just the ones someone's pointed out; There were probably more. Were I living in Iraq I'd be making such cultural blunders day in day out I'm sure so I guess I should be grateful that remote management means these are confined to once or twice a month.

It leaves you feeling woefully inept and powerless. Anyway, we stumble on...