How I learned to stop worrying and embrace being wrong.

There are times in life when you have to put your hands up to being in the minority, especially when you’re in the business of putting your opinions out there in the market for all to see. As a lifelong holder of minority opinions, this is not new to me.

So effusive was the disagreement with my first blog in this series, that arrived from all corners of our growing community here, that I feel compelled to present the opposite view. I will wipe the spit and fumes from my face and in all probability convince myself that I was actually wrong in the first place. The source of our disagreement all comes down to this question:

How long should you take making decisions about people?

Last time round, I advocated taking an approach to interviewing that actively sought to avoid a hasty judgment. Bide your time I said. Make sure your first impression doesn’t reinforce itself in an unhelpful way, asking easy questions of the person you like, or tough questions of the person you’re not so sure about, I said. Give them the whole time you’ve allotted to present an overall impression, I said.

Balls. You said.

Almost all the feedback I received, including one rather irate phone call, told me I was talking out of my hat. (And they didn’t say hat either.)

Prevailing wisdom it seems tends massively toward the opposite view, which in the spirit of seasonal democracy, I present to you now. Had this been one of my original blogs on interviewing mistakes I should probably have called it: ‘Trust your primary response, you will make the same decision eventually anyway.’

Some of my many dissenters on the subject refer to rapid cognition, often in reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s hugely successful book ‘Blink’, which explores what happens in our brains in the first two seconds that we encounter a given situation – a job interview being a perfectly good example.

Most of the feedback was less scientific, it just argued the case for calling it early and not wasting time over analyzing something if you know you’re going to do it anyway. The point that stuck in my mind was the Managing Director of a well known oil field services company who told me that while you can change decisions, or walk back mistakes, you can never have back the time it took you to make the decision in the first place. His point was simply that mistakes are so common place in all areas of life, human interaction being based almost exclusively on the actual experience that comes after the fact, that you are as well to make a very quick decision and then be prepared to be equally quick to reverse or adapt it if it turns out to be the wrong one.

To use the example he used, you can navel-gaze over what vacation destination is right for you, you can research it all day long, but you simply aren’t going to know if it’s right for you until you get there. Rather than endlessly debating whether or not you’re making the right decision, you’d be better served ensuring you’re in a position to act quickly if you find you’ve made the wrong decision and correct it. Over time, he argued, you’ll find that you enjoyed 95% of your vacations and not 5%, and that the time you spent second guessing your original thought ‘I feel like skiing, let’s go to Colorado’, was entirely wasted. If Colorado turns out to be too ‘this’ or too ‘that’, it was always going to be anyway. Have an escape plan to the place you’ve always liked in Napa Valley, and don’t ever go back.

A surprising number of people wanted to talk about intuition. This honestly alarms me; sufficed to say that I believe that what people describe as their ability to intrinsically know things with no basis is simply a combination of subconscious sound judgment based on experience, combined with mathematical probabilities and our wonderful human ability to ignore all the facts that don’t suit our narrative. I always trust my intuition. I’ve always been able to know what’s right for me. Really? You’ve been divorced twice, so you might want to put your skills to better use.

Overall, I might even be convinced. There is so much to be said for being decisive, but accepting fallibility. We have a huge amount of experience that we can call upon, whether we realize it or not. Our brains do this for us at speeds we cannot comprehend.

I have heard it suggested that the phenomenon of our lives flashing before our lives as we drown is nothing more than our brains scanning for anything useful it can find from previous experience that might help it escape the danger it is in.

Ultimately, the world is faster than the mind and we will see ourselves pushed and pulled by the decisions we make no matter how smart we are and how convinced we are that we are right. Perhaps it’s time to realize that we may need to jump quickly, and then be ready to jump again.

So in the spirit of quick resolutions, here’s the final Top 5 mistakes made in the interview process from all sides – you can believe me or not, argue or not (I hope you do) and offer, as always – any other ideas:

1.       The first impression trap

2.       Getting the talking / listening balance wrong

3.       Not trusting your first response

4.       Allowing decisions to slide

5.       Accepting uninformed outside advice

Next week, a new topic, new arguments to start and yet more opportunities for you to tell me how wrong I am.



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The 5 most obvious mistakes made in job interviews - Part 2

Mistake #2- Getting the Talking / Listening Balance Wrong

When all is said and done you’ll either win or lose in a job interview. Everyone involved in the process – on both sides of the table - should be attempting to win. If it’s a mutual win, great. If it’s just you who wins, that will do.

In most cases, the winner will be the person who listens most.

How do you ‘win’ at interviewing? Simple. You put yourself in the position where you have the decision making power as to what happens next.

If you’re the candidate, that means that the interviewer wants to hire you and you understand enough about the role to know whether or not you should take it. As an interviewer, that means that the candidate wants the job for sure, and you've learned enough about them to know whether you want to pull the trigger.

There are two mutual wins in interviewing. First, the right candidate is offered the job and they accept. Second, the wrong candidate is not offered the job and moves on to other things. 

To get to one of these mutual wins, you’re going to have to get the balance of talking and listening right. Interviews are a collaborative exercise - you can't drive a successful meeting entirely by yourself. You have to meet each other half way and share the burden of making the meeting flow. A meeting that's awkward and disjointed is highly unlikely to result in a mutual win.

Within this context, you will have a choice of listening and encouraging the other person to talk, or talking yourself. Try to come down on the side of listening.

Most people don’t listen with intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. says Stephen Covey, the late great business writer. Job interviews are especially prone to this behavior. From the candidate’s perspective, this is pretty reasonable. After all you’re there to be judged on your answers, it’s not surprising that you might spend the time when you’re not talking, thinking what to say next. Then you have your internal monologue to contend with – am I presenting myself well? Does she like me? How is this going? Will this help me find a job? With all of this going on, it’s not surprising that you might struggle to listen effectively. And listening is critical to the process you’re engaged in.

I’ve had countless candidates come back from interviews and say that they didn’t really talk much themselves – that the interviewer did most of the talking. He or she gave an extensive history of the company, talked about the team and their objectives. The candidate is usually worried at this point, because they tend to feel like they haven’t been given the chance to adequately impress the interviewer. They seem surprised when I tell them that this is a good thing. They are skeptical, but I know that the vast majority of people who find themselves in this position end up getting through to the next stage in the process.

Human beings are never happier than when someone is listening. Whether we are ego maniacs who want to inflict our opinions on people by making speeches to rooms full of people (or by writing blogs that amount to the same thing) or if we take pleasure in quietly telling our husbands and wives about the day we’ve had. The words you listen to me too much were never spoken by anybody ever. We want to be listened to; it is us being told that we matter, that what we have to say is important.

If we feel like someone is listening to us we tend to like them. We reflect their respect. All the more if we’re talking about something we’re passionate about. I swear I’ve been at dinner parties where some guy is rambling on for an hour about their latest project or interest. Whatever is exciting them. They talk and talk, and out of sheer politeness beyond all reasonable expectation – the curse of the British – I sit there and listen, nodding with interest at the right moments and occasionally intimating surprise or agreement wherever I feel like they need it. Later, the host will say to me –‘Oh Jerry said you and he were getting on very well, he really enjoyed your conversation.’ I chuckle. I barely said a word, but Jerry was so pleased to talk about his kid’s advanced placement program and so bursting with good feeling that he’d projected those feelings on to me. For all he knew I wanted to talk to him about applying Scientology principles to a new interpretation of Mein Kampf. But in his mind – I was someone he liked. And he had no basis for this. He was talking into a mirror. 

So as candidates for jobs if we prove ourselves good listeners, we’re likely to see the interviewer leave with a positive impression. Any sales person worth their salt will tell you that a good sales meeting is one where the prospect does most of the talking.

In a job interview situation, whichever side of the table you’re sat on, you need to make sure that you are listening enough to make it productive. (As always, we’re not talking about basics here – long protracted silences are bad, so are short answers and introverted refusal to let conversation flow – we will take some things as read.)

The point is that in a healthy conversational interview, you should always lean toward listening if you’re allowed to. Asking questions, showing genuine interest – these things will help to keep your interviewer talking, and if they’re enjoying talking to you, the chances are they’re liking you.

Good listeners win friends easily, they attract people to them and they take part in successful job interviews.

Nobody ever listened their way out of a job. 

Next Week - Part Three  – More Interview Mistakes

Look for live engineering and construction jobs on Talascend.com 

Some questions for comments: What are the most common mistakes you’ve seen? How do you think people can make interviews easier on themselves and others?

Richard Spragg writes about engineering and construction jobs, and business advice in staffing and recruitment

Cracking the myth of effective multitasking

It was only fairly recently that I cracked the myth of multitasking, and found an attitude toward it that I am comfortable with. 

These days, I see it this way. A housewife (if you’ll forgive the 1950s stereotype that follows – but the idea of the multitasking superwoman is perfect for this purpose) needs to cook dinner, tidy up the lounge of toys and change a nappy. She leaves some sauce simmering on the stove, picks up a couple of soft toys and throws them in the toy chest, then takes care of the baby’s nappy. She returns child to crib, washes her hands, picks up the books that were on the floor and slides them back into the bookshelf. She returns to the stove, adds some basil, reduces the heat and goes to answer the doorbell. This is the classic stereotype of multitasking. That skill, much maligned by the stereotype useless male – unable to sit upright and breath in and out at the same time – that results in incredible productivity.

But this is not really multitasking.

At no stage was the housewife engaged in two tasks at once, nor should she have been. True multitasking would have involved changing the nappy, while using the baby’s legs to stir the sauce and kicking the toys and books one by one toward the place they were supposed to go. The result? Burned feet, nappies on the stove, books nowhere near the bookshelf and a lot of mess to clean up.

Thus stands the multitasking myth. Because what you’re really talking about is not the ability to complete multiple tasks at once, but the ability to switch between tasks effectively, without hindering the effectiveness of your contribution to any of them. This is what you should focus on improving if you want to be a multitasker. How can you flip between jobs productively? Your working routine is bound to require it; nobody's working day ever allows them to focus on one thing only, but they are seldom required to actually do two things at once.

So multitasking remains one of the biggest myths in the modern workplace, whether that work place is an office, a construction site or a household.

That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, or that it can’t be done. There are number of ways that you can multitask effectively, and putting some thought into structuring your day to allow for these real examples of multitasking is what will help to make you more efficient.

Here are a few things you can do that constitute real multitasking.

Schedule phone conversations when you’re driving (hands free please.)

My car has some clever green tooth or blue eye thing that means I receive calls from a button on my steering wheel. But a $10 earpiece has much the same effect.If you have an hour long commute involving traffic (and if you’re working on engineering jobs in Houston for example, I know you do) you can make it work for you. It doesn’t have to be business; it can be anything that will save you time earlier or later in the day. Sit on hold with whichever bank is currently abusing your custom. Call Mom. If it’s something you would have to find other time to do otherwise, it’s saving you time.  (Make sure you are complying with all legal responsibilities for safety reasons.)

Combine Audiobooks with basic physical tasks

Again, the car is good. But so is the bath, the kitchen while you’re cooking dinner (one of my responsibilities at our place – who’s 1950’s now?) or the treadmill at the gym. You don’t have to read, to get that book read. It was a big day for me when I realized that iPods weren’t just for music. Audiobooks (that you pay for) or podcasts (that you don’t) offer a vast range of opportunities to learn and develop during dead time, like when you’re on the stationary bike, or boiling the water for the pasta. 

Combine Conference Calls with almost anything

Be honest. A good number of conference calls require less than active participation. If I find myself on one of those calls, I look for the mute button and for something else to do. If I’m in my office at home, I’ll do a wash load or clean the kitchen. The combination of mindless physical task and passive mental task is a good one. You should be careful not to try anything too engaging. It’s difficult to build a PowerPoint presentation or write a detailed e-mail and stay on top of the subject matter of a conference call, even if you’re not talking very often. You need to pay attention, but a physical task that requires no thought should allow that.

Multitasking can only be effectively achieved with the right balance of mindless physical tasks and stationary mental ones. As soon as anything blurs the lines on that distinction, you’re in trouble. Beware overreaching. I suggest you take my word for the fact that stationary bikes and food preparation are not a good match. Weddings and audiobooks can also result in injuries of a different kind. Throughout this process, one must pay attention to what is potentially dangerous, or just plain inappropriate. It’s easy to offend people if they should get the impression they don’t have your full attention.

At the end of the day, which task you are neglecting, and which you are diligently carrying out is all a matter of perception. As my school chaplain once told me – “You can’t smoke while you pray. But you can pray, while you smoke.”

Multitasking suggestions and party fouls welcome in your comments…




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including business practice,  global engineering jobs, global engineering staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

Your career is an accident. Don't make a plan, get a helmet.

We are driving our careers. That’s what we are told. We are sitting behind the wheel, looking at the road ahead, changing gear when we want to, making decisions about how fast we want to go and ultimately which direction we take. Mirror. Signal. Maneuver.

It’s a comforting metaphor. It’s a pity it’s bull.

So often, the mistake we make as professionals is to look back on our career path and see a logical progression. It’s easy to do this when you look back on things in retrospect. It’s easy to believe that this led to that, which led to the other and so on.

But this is all post hoc ergo procter hoc. Seeing a thing as the result of something else, simply because one followed the other.

Let’s call me John Q. I was working as an assistant manager at Circuit City from 2005-2007. I was made the manager in 2007 and held the position for two years before moving to join Best Buy as the regional sales manager. Obviously I’ve done well for myself; my career shows a clear progression. A consistent, linear progression from junior to senior, from low wage to middle management.

Well done me.

I’m leaving some things out of the story though, things that have been edited out of my career history. These were random catalytic events that shaped the whole thing. Because they’re not on my resume, they’re not part of the accepted narrative of my career – but they change everything.

Firstly, I became assistant manager at Circuit City almost against my will. I was young and ideological. I’d only taken the gig so I could get the rent paid while I was trying to get a job in music. I reluctantly accepted the extra responsibility for an extra five bucks an hour. It wasn’t a career decision. Nor was it a career decision a couple of years later, when the manager I worked for suffered a heart attack and retired early, effectively disappearing in a puff of smoke on a Tuesday morning leaving me to take over. I took the job and I did it well, I expected to retain the management job for a few more years. But then, as we all know only too well, Circuit City went to the wall. Suddenly facing the prospect of redundancy, I was forced to put myself out there again, talk to a recruitment company and put my resume online. The result was a great offer from rival Best Buy, to effectively take the level above the one I was working in. I wound up with 20% more money and some stock. It turned out to be a great thing for me. ‘Turned out.’

Now my sensible linear career progression looks like what it really was – a series of random and uncontrollable events that bounced me around with no care for my plans.

Because the truth is that there is no such thing as career management. There is no such thing as ‘planning your career.’ From the time you first walked into the career councilor’s office at school and were told you should be a chef because you admitted to being slightly hungry, through to this morning when you surfed the internet for jobs for ten minutes because one of your colleagues annoyed you. Your vague intent to push your career in the right direction combined with your occasional decision to act when you were unhappy or undervalued, do not constitute a career plan.

Your list of companies you would most like to work for and your sense of what job title you probably ought to have, and in what time frame, are worth nothing to you.

We spend too much time trying to shape our careers and not enough time trying to create the rounded professional identity that will increase our chances of making progress when the inevitable random catalyst presents itself.

Instead of sucking up to your boss, make an effort to be respected by everyone around you. When her kayaking vacation down the Nile ends in tragedy, it will be your peers and reports who are asked what they think of you as a manager, not her.

Instead of surfing for jobs and blasting out your resume, build a strong relationship with a good recruiter. They can be your eyes and ears while you focus on your job.

Instead of chasing the money, chase responsibility. The more you take on, the more qualified you become for more advanced jobs and ultimately more money. Especially if nobody sees the vacancy coming.

You can’t know what will happen, and you can’t control when or where fate will strike. But you can create a solid foundation that will see you right no matter what happens.

Strategy is not about predicting the future, it’s about having a sensible framework around you so that you can respond to anything. Experiences, references, training, qualifications – there’s a reason these things tend to be headings on the resume – it’s because they’re things you actually need. Take these things off the resume, and think of them as real things that you arm yourself with to create a promotable, hirable human being, it won’t be long before you’re adding another level of advancement – whatever it is you want.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

A very tough question for the future of 'work'.

Picture the scene. It’s Monday morning, about 8.20am and I’m sitting having a latte in Starbucks.  iPad in hand, I’m surfing for news that might make a good blog topic. I’ve got LinkedIn open as usual, and I’m looking to see what messages I have back about last week’s blog;  I reply to a couple of people with suggestions.

An old friend contacts me with a LinkedIn e-mail to ask if I’ve got any work for him at the moment. I tell him maybe, and  I’ll keep in touch. We swap another message asking about wives, children and football season. I start thinking about how I might be able to use him – good guy and we’re very busy. I make a note to fire an e-mail to the COO later.

10.00pm at the hotel desk. Working? Relaxing? Who knows any more?

I answer an incoming Outlook invitation for a meeting tomorrow lunchtime, and I approve an expense claim for one of my staff.

Then I’m back to reading the news on Google. Opportunities for Automotive jobs in Michigan are on the rise; salaries are also rising. We have significant interests in the Detroit engineering jobs market, so I’m thinking we might see some growth out there soon. Could be a blog topic, but maybe a bit dry. Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) is calling people who work at home ‘skivers’, the British slang for slacking off. That’s interesting, but reading the whole article I’m amused to find that my friend Dave who runs a part time recruiting firm in London has beaten me to it. He’s quoted in the article. Good for him I think, and I open up Facebook to send him a message saying well done. While I’m there I look at some wall posts and like a picture of my friend at the Zoo.

That’s when I decide what this week’s blog topic will be. It’s 8.45am now and I usually head into the office about this time. I drain my coffee, exchange pleasantries for a couple of minutes with Chris behind the counter (he has a new daughter and looks exhausted), I tell him he should try coffee, and I head out the door.

My question to you is simply this… from 8.20am to 8.50am this morning… was I working?

The traditional view prevalent in everyone from the baby boomers to the upper end of Generation X would be absolutely not. I’m not in the office; I’m not focusing; I’ve chatted to two of my friends online and one more in person about wholly unrelated things. I’m in a coffee shop for heaven’s sake. I simply am not at my desk, at my computer ‘working’. No deadlines have been met. No money has been made.

Not so, cry Generation Y. Many of them would argue the opposite. An important part of my job is to coordinate our social media activities, to engage the tens of thousands of people who read our blogs and to have interesting things to say. I have that covered now.  It’s also my job to staff the department here and I’ve uncovered an opportunity to maybe bring someone on board who can help. I’ve networked with a friend in the industry – and that has certainly yielded a return on investment before. I’ve been immediately accessible to my colleagues in accepting the Outlook invitation and I’ve actioned the expense approval with no delays. How could you possibly describe this as anything other than working. When I was at the bar yesterday afternoon watching the ballgame with a cold beer and my phone off – then I wasn’t working. This morning I was working. Clear as day.

Was I working but allowing myself to be distracted? Maybe, but even the social distractions had professional aspects.

Even now, in describing it, I’m personally not sure. I don’t usually start work until about 9.00am, so I could argue that all of this was done while I technically wasn’t being paid. But I have the standard working hours of a senior level person in any business, i.e. comfortably over the 40 hour week I get paid for, with weekends and late sessions a weekly occurrence, but without the daily oversight that cares where I am hour to hour. 

I may not be working when I ‘like’ my friend’s holiday snaps. But I wasn’t ‘not working’ on Sunday when I left dinner, under icy glares from my wife, to reply to a colleague’s urgent e-mail.

The modern workplace has no edges. Technology, social conventions, international time zones and professional diligence have taken the idea of a quantifiable working week and thrown it out the window. Generation Y are highly aware of this. How will anybody manage expectation in this environment?

With no means to measure (or even really understand) ‘input’ any more (working hours, time in the office etc..) we have to shift to judging performance on the achievement of measurable goals.

What we deliver matters far more than the manner in which we choose to deliver it. That’s why entrepreneurs don’t have working hours. Nobody asks a spin doctor how many hours they put into their candidate’s campaign. Nobody asks the head coach of the Houston Texans how many hours he works every week. Did the candidate win? Did the team make the playoffs?

It’s time to finally usher in the output era. It will be tough for a lot of business leaders to let go of the old fashioned management devices. But let go they must. The world belongs increasingly to Generation Y. Those of us who are longer of tooth need to have the humility to realize what this will mean to the way we work and the wisdom to see what the benefits for us could be.


Views expressed are those of the individual and not Talascend LLC. 

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Are you killing Linkedin?

For me, LinkedIn is becoming less effective as a networking tool every day.

I've loved LinkedIn for years. I was a ground floor user and a big exponent of the idea. But now I have a major issue. Stop me if you’ve experienced this hypothetical situation before.  I see a contact to whom I’d really like an introduction, and I notice that one of my connections – someone I used to work with – is connected to them. Great I think. I can get an introduction, I think. So I contact my friend and I say ‘Hey, can you introduce me to Jane Smith at ABC Ltd? I’d really like to pitch something to her.’

My friend sounds blank at the end of the phone and says ‘Who’s that?’

LinkedIn is a networking tool. That’s the central idea. So I’m forced to ask – what use is a network where nobody knows anyone?

The race to 500+ connections, seen by some people as important to their LinkedIn status has created a culture of accepting people we barely know, met briefly or don’t know at all.

If you’re not able to sustain a functional acquaintance with someone – and acquaintance is fine, they don’t need to have walked you down the aisle, or sold a start-up with you – then you should expunge them from your network.

It’s time to see LinkedIn the same way that most of us see Facebook. Who really wants the latest update from that person you met at that party two years ago who you never spoke to afterwards? Remove Friend; because only a fool would sacrifice the functionality of Facebook because they wanted to be seen to have more friends. So why do we not take the same approach on LinkedIn? Are we really so desperate to seem well connected in theory that we’re prepared to compromise the usefulness of a tool that could lead to us being well connected in practice?

There’s a guy called Adrian Dunbar who’s a professor of Anthropology at Oxford University - which probably makes him smarter than me - who says that the human brain can only constructively sustain 150 relationships, whether it’s online or offline. Just 150. Personally I don’t know how anyone can handle even that many, but when I think about it, I guess it’s feasible. If I add up all my family and the people I still talk to and keep up with, even if infrequently, I can get to that number.

I cannot get to 965.

Nor can you. If you have 965 LinkedIn connections you are surely wasting your time. And if I contact you to try to network with you, you’ll be wasting my time too, because there’s now a one in eight chance that you’re going to know the person I’m calling you about. How does that make us all look? Smart? Well connected? Or, as my friends working engineering jobs in Houston say, dumber than a bag of wet mice?

Clear out your LinkedIn profile. Get down below that 500 number to something you can realistically use. Imagine a LinkedIn timeline that wasn’t full to the brim of trash you didn’t care about. Imagine if it was only updates from people whose business interests interested you. Think of the interesting calls you could make. Think of the networking you could do and the introductions you could affect. That’s not social networking, that’s networking and the more of that you do, the better you'll be at your job and the more money you’ll make.



Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and skilled labor jobs. For more details about Talascend and engineering staffing, visit our website. 

Going abroad for work? Take a lesson from the Governor...

Former Governor and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, 

Image: Chris Devers (Wikipedia Commons)

If you think you’re having a bad week, just imagine how Mitt Romney feels. We don’t do politics here (see many earlier blogs, about politics at work) but I know a guy having a bad week at work when I see one, and there are lessons to be learned from the Governor by anyone planning to spend time travelling abroad on business.

Engineers are as likely as anyone to find themselves flying somewhere for work. Almost all of us, whatever our role in the industry, are to some degree working global engineering jobs. Whether the global element is regular and demanding, or relatively infrequent, chances are you’re going to spend some time abroad at some point. Here are my Top 5 tips for making friends not enemies when you're on the road.

1.       Prepare.

Do your homework. There’s nothing worse than meeting someone who has made no effort to learn anything about you, despite having known in advance exactly where they were going and who they were seeing. Forgetting people’s names will not help you get on their good side.

2.       Speak the language. (Two words will do.)

The vast majority of international business is conducted in English. While this is widely understood, you would be well advised to treat this as a luxury rather than an entitlement. A sincere ‘Bonjour’ or ‘merci’ will reset the expectation in any room. Conversely, forgetting that the country you’re visiting speaks the same language as your country and bashing them for, let’s say, inadequately preparing for the Olympic games, will also change the atmosphere in any room.

3.       Know your stereotype and push gently the other way.

We all know very well that international stereotypes are mostly unfounded and often just plain xenophobic. But they do exist. It does you no harm to be aware of what prejudices await you and to make sure you’re gently combating them out of the gate. If you represent a culture where others will expect you to be late for everything, arrive ten minutes early. I’m British, I’ve lived in America for years. Believe me I have a dentist on speed dial, I’m very outgoing and I drink my beer very, very cold.

4.       Say ‘Yes’.

I know you might be tired when you’re travelling. You may have started fantasizing about watching the game while you eat room service in your boxer shorts. You may be looking forward to your gym work out, but if you’re asked to go to the karaoke bar with your new acquaintances, you need to go. An offer of inclusion may not simply be a casual invitation because you’re there. It means something to people when they invite you to spend time with them. You’re not just turning down the happy hour beer, you’re saying no to them. Say yes. See the game on Sports Centre later.

5.       Follow Up personally.

If you spend personal time with someone, follow up personally. The business reason that you went will always be there, but if you made some personal progress, don’t forget to actively follow that up too. Thanking people is a great way to be liked. When you come back from your trip, make a point of thanking people, even for small things. Nobody ever objected to being thanked, especially publicly. (Unless your meeting was, for sake of argument, a secret meeting with the head of a country’s covert intelligent services.)

Business travel can be exciting, interesting, challenging, tiring, disappointing, boring and fascinating in every way. It can vary day to day and person to person, especially with the variety you find on most global engineering jobs. But if you take time to understand the place you’re visiting and make a real effort to create a good impression, it’s highly likely that you will create that impression and that the benefits will stay with you.

The negative effects of ignoring these rules will stay with you too. That’s a lesson I suggest you leave the Governor to learn on his own.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.