Blog
Longer pieces on the management problems that come up repeatedly in Seychelles: written for practitioners, not for search engines.
A team mixing Seychellois staff with workers from a dozen countries does not need a country-by-country manual. Three dimensions explain most of the friction, and two of them are structural rather than cultural.
Salaries are set by head office or by the owner. The rota, the next training, the choice of who leads the new project and the date of someone's leave are set by you. That is where motivation is decided.
The briefing runs in English, the team thinks in Kreol, and everyone will meet again at the shop on Saturday. Small wonder the room goes quiet when the manager asks for objections.
Most groups pick the language everyone can follow. That is the wrong test. A training session works when participants can argue in the language, not when they can follow it.
A young employee in Seychelles who leaves has three options: the hotel next door, a job in another sector, or a flight abroad. Each exit has a different cause, and most of the causes sit with the direct manager.
The waiter everyone sees, the storekeeper nobody sees, the supervisor on Praslin who only appears on video calls. In most teams, the reputation for hard work follows visibility far more than it follows results.
The founder built the business on handshakes and long hours. The daughter comes back from a degree abroad with dashboards and fixed hours. Neither is wrong, and the team is watching to see who gives way.
In a small company in Victoria or a resort on Praslin, the choice between DISC and the Enneagram depends less on the models than on the room: its languages, its level of trust, and who meets whom after work.
A hotel, a family firm or a small public body in Seychelles does not need to master seven personality models. It needs the one that fits its problem, its languages and its budget. Three filters do most of the sorting.
Two supervisors stop speaking to each other. Six months later, half the hotel has taken a side, a cousin is carrying messages and a good receptionist has resigned. The conflict was never about two people.
In many Seychellois teams, the difficult message is never said to the person. It is said about them, to someone else. Non-violent communication is useful here less to calm anger than to make direct speech possible.
