Service Across Borders and Cultures
On the quiet courage required to enter another country's household, the disciplines that allow a member of staff to flourish far from home, and the rewards which extend well beyond the salary.
A great deal of what is most interesting in private service today happens at a distance from the country in which the member of staff was raised. A butler trained in the English tradition takes up a senior position in a household on the Arabian Peninsula. A housekeeper from Manila joins the staff of a townhouse in Mayfair. A driver from Mumbai presents himself, smartly turned out, at the gates of an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. A chef from Chiang Mai stands at the back door of a chalet above Gstaad on the morning of his first winter season. In each case, a life of service is continued, but the ground beneath it has shifted in ways no contract can describe.
We have placed many such people over the years, and we have come to regard the move abroad as one of the most consequential decisions a member of staff is likely to make. It can be the making of a career and, in the right house, of a life. It can also, when undertaken without due preparation, become a slow and private unhappiness which neither side knows quite how to repair. The difference between the two outcomes lies less in the candidate's professional accomplishments than in qualities of temperament that are rarely tested by an ordinary interview.
Members of staff who have crossed a border for a new position tend to describe the same surprise. The work itself is recognisable. A table is laid much as it has always been laid; a guest is announced much as a guest has always been announced. What proves unfamiliar is everything around the work. The hour at which the principal takes his first coffee. The day of the week on which the house is at rest. The degree of formality expected in a passing greeting. The presence, or absence, of women at the family table. The manner in which a request is made, and the manner in which it is refused.
A Western butler who joins a Gulf household may find that the working week runs from Sunday to Thursday and that the most important entertaining of the year takes place after midnight, in a season when his own family at home is asleep. A Filipina housekeeper in London may find that the casual familiarity of an English principal, who calls her by her first name and asks after her children, is at first disorienting after years in a house in which such intimacy would have been thought improper. A Thai chef in Geneva may discover that the precision of the Swiss week, the punctuality of suppliers, the silence of neighbours, requires a different inner pace from the one he carried through the kitchens of Bangkok.
None of this is hardship. It is merely the recognition that what one took to be universal turns out to have been local. The members of staff who do best are those who arrive expecting to be surprised, and who hold their previous habits lightly enough to lay them aside when the new house requires it.
The written terms of a senior appointment abroad are, by now, well understood. Salary, accommodation, flights home, schooling for children where relevant, medical cover, end of service settlement: these are matters in which we take great care, and on which we counsel both sides candidly before the offer is made. What no contract can capture, and what causes most of the difficulty we are later called upon to mediate, are the unwritten expectations of the principal and the unspoken assumptions of the staff.
A principal in one part of the world may regard a fifteen hour working day as the natural shape of senior service, and the willingness to be present for it as the truest mark of loyalty. A principal in another part of the world may regard the same hours as a sign that the household has been poorly organised, and may prefer staff to keep ordinary working time and a settled private life. A principal in a third tradition may expect the senior man of the house to travel without notice for weeks at a stretch, to attend to a yacht in one season and a hunting lodge in another, and to be ready at all hours for guests whose arrival was not foreseen at breakfast.
None of these expectations is wrong. Each belongs to a coherent tradition of household life. The error lies in supposing, on either side, that one's own assumptions are the standard against which the other should be measured. A great deal of avoidable distress is caused by staff who arrive with the rhythm of their previous house intact, and by principals who assume that a senior appointment means the same thing in Riyadh, in Greenwich and in Cap Ferrat.
The work is the same the world over. The life around the work is not.
It is in matters of bearing, more than in matters of skill, that the foreign posting tests a member of staff. The eye contact one offers to a principal; the moment at which one withdraws from a room; the manner in which one addresses a child of the house; the dress worn in front of guests of one faith and the dress worn in front of guests of another: all of these are governed by local conventions which the new arrival must learn quickly and observe without remark.
An Indian driver taking up a post with a family in Connecticut may find that the deference he was trained to show, the lowered gaze, the soft voice, the willingness never to be addressed first, is read by his American principal as a kind of unhappiness, when in fact it is the very mark of his professionalism. A Thai member of staff in a Parisian apartment may find that the warm informality of European life, the kiss on each cheek at greeting, the seat offered at the family table on a quiet evening, requires of her a confidence she was not asked to display at home.
The remedy is not to abandon the bearing one has cultivated, but to learn a second language of conduct alongside it. The most accomplished members of staff we know are bilingual in this deeper sense. They retain the formality of their training when it is useful, and they set it aside when it would be misread. They are themselves throughout. They have simply learnt that to serve a foreign house well one must, in part, become a guest in it.
If the difficulties are real, the rewards are greater still, and they are not only financial. The financial reward is, of course, considerable. A senior appointment in a major household abroad will typically offer a salary, accommodation and benefits which would not be available to the same candidate at home, and which, properly husbanded, can build over a decade or two into a private security that the next generation of the family will be quietly grateful for. We have known drivers, housekeepers, butlers and governesses who have, through a single career abroad, educated children to university, settled a parent in comfortable retirement, and bought a small house in their home town outright. None of that is to be dismissed.
Yet the deeper rewards, in our observation, are of a different order. There is the satisfaction of a craft practised at its highest level, in a house where standards are taken seriously and where one's discretion is genuinely valued. There is the slow, often unspoken trust that grows between a member of staff and a principal of another culture, a trust the more remarkable for the distance it has crossed. There is the education in the world, in languages, in cuisines, in the manners of a great variety of guests, which would be available to almost no one else in the candidate's circle at home. There is, in the best appointments, an affection between family and staff which neither party expected and which neither would now relinquish.
We have placed members of staff who, after fifteen years in a household far from their birthplace, would not contemplate returning. They have made a life. The principal's children have grown up in their presence. They have been remembered at weddings, at funerals, at the births of grandchildren on both sides. The house that once seemed strange is now the house in which they are most at home. It is a quiet outcome, and it is not arranged in advance. It is the gift, slowly accumulated, of a posting taken in good faith on both sides and tended with patience over many years.
A Private Advisory Office cannot remove the difficulty of a foreign posting, and would be wrong to pretend that it could. What it can do is to make sure that nothing essential is left unspoken. Before any offer is exchanged, we sit privately with the candidate and we set out, in plain language, the rhythm of the household to which he or she is being introduced. We describe the working week as it is actually kept, not as it appears on paper. We describe the days of religious observance, the hours of entertaining, the seasonal moves between residences, the customs around dress, around language, around the company of women and men. We describe the principal's temperament as we have come to know it, with the candour the candidate is entitled to expect of us.
Equally, we sit with the principal, and we set out what the candidate brings with him from his own tradition: the assumptions about working hours, the habits of address, the religious or family obligations which must be honoured if the man or woman is to do his or her best work. We are, in this respect, interpreters between two coherent ways of household life, and we take some trouble to make sure that the translation is accurate in both directions.
Where the offer proceeds, our work does not end with the signing. We remain in quiet touch with both sides through the first year, which is when most of the strains, if there are to be any, will appear. A small adjustment made in the third month, a brief conversation in the sixth, a private word in the ninth: these are the unobtrusive interventions which, in our experience, allow a posting to settle into the long and rewarding relationship that both sides hoped for at the outset.
Service across borders is not, in the end, a matter of geography. It is a matter of two households, the one the member of staff carries within him and the one he enters, learning to keep house together. Where that meeting is well prepared and patiently tended, it produces some of the finest careers, and some of the most enduring affections, that our profession has to offer.
HouseholdThe Mutual Care of House and Family
The finest households are sustained by a quiet reciprocity. Staff watch over the family, and the family, in turn, watches over the staff. We reflect on the trust, appreciation, and at times genuine love which binds the two.
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