The PI work you can't get to.

Travel, time zones and capacity shouldn't cost you the engagement. Here's how partner to partner delivery actually works, using a session we ran in Japan for MCG Partners.

In August I stood in a room in Japan with a group of senior engineering managers, running a full day session built around Predictive Index.

They were not my client.

They were the client of MCG Partners, the PI partner in the United States. I was in the room because Boston to Tokyo for one day of facilitation is a very expensive day, and Sydney to Tokyo is not.

That is the whole point of this article. If you are a PI partner holding an opportunity in a market you cannot easily reach, you are not choosing between flying it yourself, handing your client to a stranger, or letting the work go.

The setup

Erinne Tripp at MCG Partners had a client with a team in Japan. They wanted a full day. Half of it focused on Predictive Index and self awareness, given the group's roles as senior engineering managers. The other half focused on their own company essence and values. They wanted PI materials threaded through the day rather than bolted onto the front of it.

I facilitated in English. The room was Japanese.

The thing partners underuse: PI exists in 68 languages

This is not a footnote on a feature list. It changed how the entire day ran.

• Reference profiles on the wall. We printed the seventeen reference profiles as A3 laminated posters in both Japanese and English, and worked with them in the room.
• Results in both languages. Every participant had their behavioural report in Japanese and in English, so they could read their own results in their first language while following the discussion in their second.
• Japanese content on screen. While I facilitated in English, I could bring existing Japanese PI content up on the screen. When we moved into needs and motivation, that mattered enormously. People were not translating my words. They were reading their own drives.
• Something to leave behind. The posters stayed with them, with the suggestion that as the rest of the team completes their assessments, everyone's placard goes up under the matching reference profile. It gives a team a shared language that lives on a wall rather than in a folder.

Then the room asked exactly the same questions as every other room

I will admit I was nervous walking in. Language barrier, unfamiliar market, someone else's client.

I was welcomed warmly and almost immediately, and within the first hour the questions coming at me were the questions I get from a group of engineers in Sydney. Not similar questions. The same questions.

• Do our profiles change over time?
• How does someone who is more reserved show up as more socially oriented?
• If I am situational on one of the factors, what does that mean?

The accuracy held too. People sat with their results and recognised themselves. When we explored what they need in order to stay motivated, they were able to give clear, specific, real examples without much prompting at all. The four factor exercises landed hard.

The feedback backed it up. We ran an optional survey at the end of the day while everything was still fresh. Across twenty items, from ten respondents, the day scored 9.1 out of 10, and both halves scored well. Not the PI section carried by the values section, or the other way around. The whole day.

The client's own words afterwards, from the HR manager who commissioned the session:

It was truly inspiring for our managers and helped them better understand the importance of effective communication.

We would say that is predictable. There are seventy years of science behind this work, and behaviour is not a cultural artefact. Drives are drives. What changes across a border is the context people express those drives in, not the drives themselves.

One practical warning

Ask which language your participants completed the assessment in.

I covered PI's validity and history in the session, including the fact it is available in 68 languages, and then asked the room who had taken the assessment in Japanese and who in English. Most had taken it in English, despite Japanese being their first language.

They still resonated with their results, which says something about the instrument. But it is an easy thing to get right, and worth building into your invitation process before a wider rollout. Be explicit with participants about language choice rather than assuming they will find it.

The part that matters most: whose client is it

This is the question every partner is actually asking, so let me answer it directly.

It stayed MCG Partners' client at every point.

• Erinne remained the primary point of contact and the PI partner on the account.
• She was copied on every email that went to the client, throughout.
• She received progress updates through the lead up, not just at the end.
• After the session I sent her a full written debrief covering how the day ran, what landed, what the feedback said, what the group asked for, and where the follow up needed to sit.
• Every opportunity that surfaced in the room went back to her. The managers wanted their direct reports assessed. The director wanted the wider engineering team on the team wheel. Several of them got curious about profiling roles for recruitment. All of that is hers.

I am not there to inherit your client. I am there so your client gets a very good day, and so you get a debrief detailed enough to sell the next piece of work.

Erinne's words at the end of it:

You truly went above and beyond to make this workshop a success, and I would highly recommend you to anyone looking for international support.

Erinne Tripp, MCG Partners

When this kind of collaboration makes sense

• The travel cost or the time out of your business cannot be justified for the size of the engagement.
• The time zone makes live delivery brutal for you, your client, or both.
• The client wants someone physically in the room, and you are on the other side of the world.
• You are at capacity during the window the client needs.
• The market or the language sits closer to another partner than to you.

The commercial side, settled before anything reaches the client

We have a standard model for working with international partners, and we agree the split before a single price goes to your client.

That order matters more than it sounds. Agreed up front, it is a five minute conversation between two partners. Agreed after the client has already fallen in love with a number, it becomes a negotiation about margin, and one of us ends up disappointed. Who invoices whom gets settled at the same time, for the same reason.

I would rather have that conversation on day one, before either of us has done any work, than discover on day sixty that we each assumed something different.

What we need from you, and what you get back

From you: the client context and history, where they are up to with PI, access to the reports, what outcome you want the session to drive, and a clear line on who owns the follow up.

From us: visibility the whole way through, copies of everything that goes to your client, materials in the languages your people actually read, and a written post workshop review you can act on commercially.

If you have something sitting in Australia, New Zealand or Asia Pacific that you cannot get to, I would like to hear about it.

Cheers,

Alicia Founder, Red Wolf Group alicia@redwolfgroup.com.au