Being an Expatriate

By Adrian Gepel

During my semester abroad at the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona I had the chance to
attend a class called Managerial Skills for International Business taught by Maydo Arderiu.
At the 26th of October, she invited her former colleague and friend Juan Carlos Moragues as a
guest speaker to share his knowledge and experiences of working and leading in international
environments and teams from all over the world.

Juan Carlos Moragues has been working in differnet countries and cultures for almost 30
years, starting his international career 1989 at TOPCOM (Toshiba Group) in Japan. He found
joy in working abroad and accepted and applied for other jobs in the United Kingdom, France
and the United States. Today, hes Principal Business Operations Engineer at a British
company called GE Renewables, which allows him to work most time of the year at home in
Catalunya close to his family.

After Moragues introduced himself and his professional career, his lecture turned into an open
talk with questions and answers with emphasis on challenges and rewards of working in
international teams around the world.

To Moragues, working in different cultures is a challenge itself, since every gesture and word
your saying could be understood as something different. Messages could deliver far more,
less or different meanings in the worst case, than one was trying to tell. Therefore, you either
learns from his mistakes or, before starting business with different cultures, study habits,
traditions, style of doing business and communication.
Far more complicated than working in international teams is leading them: In this case, your
not just part of the team but the head of it and responsible for the project and every action
taken. Keeping together a team of different nationalities and backgrounds is only possible, if
the team trusts its leader and the leader trusts its team. To achieve this state, the leader has to
stay in touch with every member, individually using different forms of communication.

Another challenge Moragues mentioned is the frequent change of life itself. Once a project
ends , your environment, either private or professional, changes completely and starts again
wherever the next position is located at. This leaves behind friends, home and much more.
The hardest part about being an expatriate and the reason Moragues decided to come back to
Spain is the absence of his family. He told us about his two daughters he missed growing up,
milestones like her first steps walking or graduating from school, because he was working
abroad for yet another period of time.

When asked after the reasons why hes been an expatriate for the last three decades, he told
the class of the joys working abroad has to offer: you can live at many parts of the world you
might never see, learn about cultures, expand your vision and knowledge, learn new and
different approaches, get to know friends from all around the globe and last but not least grow
as a person.