Michael Symons

As a General Manager, I've been responsible for building and leading teams spanning Australia, India and the Philippines. My job, for years, has been to make cross-cultural, distributed teams function effectively.

And from that seat, I watched the same pattern repeat across industries, roles and organisations: brilliant, hardworking professionals getting stuck, frustrated and overlooked, while others, often with less raw technical skill but a better grasp of communication and expectations, got promoted faster.

The difference was never talent. It was whether they understood the hidden expectations their managers relied on but rarely, if ever, explained.

The ideas in Passing the Global Test come from watching the same misunderstandings repeat themselves, and from seeing how small changes in signalling radically alter trust. Careers rarely follow a straight line; I've navigated high-pressure environments and learned many of my own professional lessons the hard way. Work Global is the practical guidance I wish I'd received earlier in my own journey, and the playbook I wish someone had given my own team members years ago.

One more thing, because it matters: the burden of adaptation is not solely on you. True cultural intelligence is a two-way street, and the book includes a direct challenge to my fellow Western managers, be explicit, decode rather than judge, and meet your global colleagues halfway. But while workplaces slowly catch up, you deserve to know the rules of the test you're already sitting.