The Second Arrival
LandingPad · Field notes on executive transitions · №2
Every international leader arrives twice. The first arrival is easy to find, because it has a date. It is in the relocation plan, on the lease, on the school enrolment form, and in the HR system as a start date. The second arrival has no date at all. It is the moment the person becomes fully effective in the role, when they can read the room as well as they read the balance sheet, and the room has started to read them back.
I call the months in between the volatility window. Hardly anyone plans for them, because they don’t appear on any calendar.
How long is it? This autumn two people gave me two answers. A German executive told me it took him about six months to become, in his words, “fully operational”. He added that he had a great deal of support from his wife and family, and that not everyone has that. A senior HR partner at a large manufacturer told me their working assumption is a full business year before a new leader adds real value. They are not contradicting each other. They are describing the same window from opposite ends.
Earlier this month I sat around a breakfast table in Budapest with leaders from HR, mobility and finance. Of everything said that morning, one question has stayed with me. It came from the finance side of the table, and it was simple: what is that window actually worth?
The loss nobody measures
For years the conversation about international assignments was a conversation about failure: how many come home early, and what it costs when they do. The research is more reassuring than the folklore. In European firms, only around one assignment in twenty ends early. The mobility bet mostly works.
So most of the money is not lost on the assignments that fail. It is lost on the ones that succeed slowly.
An international move is one of the largest investments a company makes in a single person. KPMG’s model puts the total investment in one long-term assignee at up to $1.25 million. Every month of that investment is paid for in full, whether the person is running at full capacity or not. Nobody sends an invoice for the difference, so nobody sees it. It appears in no report. There is no line for it in any budget. It shows up, if at all, as a slightly disappointing first year.
By the time the system notices
Because nobody measures the loss, the first signal arrives late. Usually it comes around month six, as a missed target, a cautious remark in a review, or a phrase in the HR office: he isn’t quite landing, she hasn’t really settled in.
By then, something else has already happened. In the first weeks everyone is watching. The team is forming a view of the new leader, the leader is forming a view of the team, and headquarters is forming a view of both. Those first impressions are still soft. A few months later they have set into judgements, and the judgements have become stories. He doesn’t listen. They don’t take ownership. That’s just how things are done here. Once a story exists, every new event is read as proof of it.
That is why a late correction is so expensive. It is no longer an adjustment. It means changing minds that have already been made up, and it means that someone has to have been wrong. People find it much harder to change, and much harder to let others change, once they have taken a position. So the conversation turns to blame. The leader blames the team, the team blames the leader, headquarters questions the selection, and the family quietly blames the company that brought them here.
In the first weeks the same conversation costs very little. Nobody has been wrong yet. A question is just a question, and a course correction is simply part of arriving. The window in which change is still cheap closes long before the system raises its first flag. This is the real argument for paying attention early. It is not about rescuing anyone. It is about acting while it is still easy to act.
So when someone asks me what the volatility window is worth, my answer has two parts. The first is the months themselves, paid for in full and delivered in part. The second is harder to put in a spreadsheet: the early weeks, when a new leader, a team and a family are still open to one another, and a small adjustment still feels like part of arriving rather than an admission that something has gone wrong.
The second arrival will come either way. What we can influence is how long it takes, and what it costs everyone to get there.
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If you are moving someone into Hungary this year, or out of it, I’d be glad to hear how the second arrival is going. Reply and tell me. And if you need the numbers for your own CFO conversation, The Volatility Window, a short research brief on these months, is free at expatlandingpad.com.
— Márta Farkas · LandingPad, executive integration
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