ABP Consulting is a French management-training and coaching firm delivering professional development programmes in Seychelles.https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en-SChttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/managing-across-nationalities-in-seychelles/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/managing-across-nationalities-in-seychelles/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTA team on a Seychellois hotel floor or in a processing plant routinely spans several nationalities, three or four first languages, and four or five distinct assumptions about what a meeting is for. Managers arriving from a single-culture market ask for a country-by-country briefing: how to manage Sri Lankans, how to manage Kenyans, how to manage Seychellois. That briefing does not work, and it is worth being clear about why before describing what does. The variation inside any national group is larger than the average difference between two groups: a Colombo-raised supervisor with ten years in hospitality and a colleague from the same city who has never worked abroad have less in common professionally than either has with a peer from anywhere else in the same situation. And this market selects for people who are already adapted: most of the room has worked in mixed teams for years and has adjusted accordingly. What survives that objection is narrower and more useful. A small number of dimensions genuinely predict friction, and two structural features of working life here amplify all of them. ## Three dimensions that actually matter ### How disagreement is voiced This is the largest single source of misunderstanding in a mixed team, and the one with the greatest consequences. At one end sit professional cultures where contradicting a proposal in a meeting is normal, expected, and read as engagement. French, Dutch, German and South African workplace norms sit broadly here, and so does a good deal of technical culture regardless of nationality. At the other sit cultures where public disagreement with a superior costs the superior face and the speaker standing: much of South Asia and much of Southeast Asia, in different ways and for different reasons. The practical failure is always the same. A manager from the first group presents a plan, invites objections, receives none, and concludes there is consensus. There was no consensus. There was an absence of a mechanism for saying so. **What to change:** stop treating silence as data. The related failure, reading a quiet meeting as agreement, is the subject of [what silence in a meeting actually means](/en/blog/silence-in-a-meeting/). Ask for objections in writing before the meeting, or in pairs during it, or from the most junior person first. All three cost about four minutes and change the information you get. ### How visible hierarchy is expected to be A manager who insists on first names, sits among the team and asks to be challenged is signalling accessibility. That signal is not read identically across the room. For colleagues whose expectation is a visible hierarchy, a manager who declines the role does not become approachable. They become unpredictable, and where authority is ambiguous, the safe strategy is to do exactly what was last instructed and nothing more. The flat manager gets the compliant behaviour they were trying to avoid. The reverse error is equally common. A manager operating with visible authority in a team of European professionals will be read as controlling, and the people best able to challenge a bad decision will stop. **What to change:** be explicit about the register rather than assuming it transfers. Saying *I want to be challenged in this meeting and it will not count against anyone* is a sentence that has to be said out loud, and then demonstrated the first time someone tests it. The first test is the whole thing: the team watches what happens to the person who spoke. ### How much context a message carries Some professional cultures put the message in the words. Others put a substantial part of it in the relationship, the setting, and what was not said. In a mixed team this produces two symmetrical complaints. One group finds the other's communication blunt to the point of rudeness. The other finds the first group's impossible to act on. Both are correct about the effect and wrong about the intent. **What to change:** default to explicit for anything that matters, and write it down. This is the single highest-return habit in a multicultural team, because a short written summary of who decided what, by when, corrects simultaneously for indirectness, for hierarchy and for second-language comprehension. It is dull, it takes five minutes, and it prevents most of what this article describes. ## Two structural factors that are not cultural These get attributed to culture and are not. Both change behaviour more than any national difference on the list above. **A foreign worker's permit is tied to their employer.** For a large part of the room, the job is also the right to be in the country. Losing it means leaving, often at short notice, and in many cases interrupting the money that supports a household somewhere else. This is not a background detail. It makes disagreeing with a manager a materially riskier act than it is in a market with unemployment insurance and a portable right to stay. A manager who reads the resulting caution as passivity, or as a national trait, has misdiagnosed it. The behaviour is a rational response to the stakes. The only thing that shifts it is a demonstrated track record that raising a problem is safe: demonstrated, not stated, and over months rather than weeks. **The working language is nobody's first.** This is the point most often missed here, because it is easy to assume that English is the native language of the Seychellois half of the team. It is not. Most Seychellois think in Creole and work in English; most of the foreign workforce is operating in English as a second or third language too. So the meeting is being held in a language that belongs to almost nobody in the room, which produces one specific and expensive error: fluency gets read as competence. The colleague with the best English in the meeting is assumed to have the best grasp of the problem, and gets the visibility, the client contact and eventually the promotion. Sometimes that is correct. Often it is a measurement of schooling. The corrective is to create channels where the language is not the filter: written input before a decision, small-group work, demonstrations on the floor. It is also the honest reason we state plainly which languages a session is delivered in (English, French or Spanish) rather than leaving a prospect to discover it. ## Three things that need saying out loud **Perceived fairness is fragile in this market.** Pay and conditions for the same role have historically varied depending on where a worker was recruited from, and teams are entirely aware of it. A manager who cannot control pay bands can still control what they distribute: visibility, difficult assignments, guest contact, credit in front of senior people. Distributing those on any basis that correlates with passport is the fastest way to lose a mixed team. **The calendar is shared and not uniform.** The Seychellois public calendar is largely Catholic, and the room will also contain colleagues observing Diwali, Eid and other dates that do not appear on it. The leave requests that matter most are the ones attached to families in another country: long, planned far ahead, and non-negotiable in practice, because a trip home is not a weekend. Plan the year around them rather than adjudicating them one by one. **Everyone meets again.** The country is small enough that a manager and the person they corrected on Tuesday will see each other on Saturday, and their families may already know each other. This cuts both ways. It makes an unresolved conflict more expensive than it would be in a city, where two people can simply avoid each other for a year. It also makes a reputation for handling things fairly travel faster than any internal communication ever will. ## What to do first If you take one action: after every meeting where something was decided, write three lines (the decision, the owner, the date) and send them to the room. It corrects for the colleague who could not say no, for the one who did not catch the fourth sentence, for the one who was waiting to be asked directly, and for the one who assumed the outcome was obvious from context. One habit, four failure modes closed. The motivation side (which follows different rules again in a team where part of the room is planning around a family in another country) is covered in [motivating a multicultural team](/en/blog/motivating-a-multicultural-team/). The way this plays out in meetings, where objections are held back rather than voiced, is the subject of [what silence means in a Seychellois meeting room](/en/blog/silence-in-a-meeting/).seychelles-businessseychellesmulticulturalmanagementleadershipcommunicationhttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/motivating-a-multicultural-team/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/motivating-a-multicultural-team/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.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTIn most Seychellois companies, salaries are set by the owner, by head office abroad or by a grid that nobody on site can change. Ask a supervisor what would motivate the team and the first answer is pay. Ask what they actually control, and the answer is: not pay. That is not the end of the conversation. It is where the useful part starts. ## Five levers you already hold **The rota.** In a hotel, a restaurant or a plant working in shifts, the schedule decides a large part of people's lives. A day off for a christening, a predictable week during the high season, not being put on every late shift: for many employees, these matter more than a small bonus. The rota is also where unfairness is felt fastest, and in a small team everyone compares. **Recognition.** Being seen accurately, for the specific thing that was hard. "Good job, everyone" reaches nobody. "You handled that guest complaint on Saturday calmly, and the family booked again" reaches the person concerned. **Training.** A course that leads to a recognised qualification has value outside the company. That is precisely why it retains people: it shows that the employer is investing in them, not only using them. **Responsibility.** Leading a new project, training the new arrivals, being the contact for a supplier. Giving someone a visible piece of the work often does more than any speech about the company's values. **Clarity about the future.** What someone can expect in one or two years, what they need to show to get there, who decides. Saying it clearly costs nothing. ## Why the same lever does not work for everyone A typical Seychellois team combines Seychellois employees with colleagues from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Madagascar or the Philippines, most of them on work permits. The two groups are not in the same situation, and that changes what motivates them. **Seychellois employees** are at home. Their family is here, and so is the rest of their career. They are often looking for a path: the next step, a qualification, the prospect of becoming a supervisor. A lack of perspective is what makes them look at the hotel down the road. **Colleagues on work permits** are in a different position. Their permit is tied to the employer, part of their pay often goes home, and their horizon is the end of the contract. What weighs most for many of them is clarity: will the contract be renewed, when can they take leave to see their family, what will they leave with. Uncertainty on these points demotivates more than anything else. These are tendencies, not rules. A Seychellois employee may be planning to emigrate; a colleague from Kerala may have been here for fifteen years and see no reason to leave. That is why the only reliable method is the next one. The differences between nationalities in a Seychellois team are covered in [managing across nationalities in Seychelles](/en/blog/managing-across-nationalities-in-seychelles/), and the specific case of younger staff in [keeping young Seychellois talent](/en/blog/motivating-and-retaining-gen-z/). ## Ask, precisely "Are you happy here?" produces a polite yes. Better questions: - What does a good week at work look like for you? - What would you like to do more of in the next six months? - If you could change one thing about how your shift is organised, what would it be? The answers are concrete, and concrete answers can be acted on. For managers who want a structure behind these conversations, the [Enneagram](/en/glossary/#enneagram) is useful because it describes what a person is moving towards and away from, which is exactly what you are trying to learn. ## The limit If someone is clearly paid below what competitors offer, none of these levers will hold them for long. The mistake managers make is to treat a pay problem as a motivation problem, because motivation is what they can act on. Six months of effort later, the person leaves anyway. Diagnose first. If the problem is pay, the manager's job is to raise it with the people who decide, with figures, not to compensate for it with a better rota. ## To start this week Choose one person. Ask what a good week looks like. Change one thing in how their work is organised, based on what they said. That is a smaller step than a motivation programme, and it works more often. The full method, including how to redesign a job without a budget, is the subject of [Motivating without a budget](/en/training/management/motivation-without-budget/).managementmotivationmanagementmulticultural-teamshttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/silence-in-a-meeting/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/silence-in-a-meeting/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.Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTPicture a morning briefing in a hotel on Praslin, or a team meeting at a processing plant in Victoria. The manager explains a new procedure in English, then asks whether anyone sees a problem with it. Nobody does. Two weeks later the procedure is being applied by half the team, and the other half has quietly kept the old way. The manager reads this as resistance. It is more often a meeting format that made objecting too expensive. In Seychelles, three local facts raise that price. ## Three reasons the room goes quiet here **The meeting runs in a second language.** Kreol Seselwa is the language most Seychellois staff grew up in, think in and joke in. English is the language of procedures, emails and meetings. Following a detailed proposal in English is fine; building an objection to it, in English, in real time, in front of a manager, is a different task. By the time the argument is ready, the meeting has moved to the next point. For the foreign colleagues in the room, from India, Sri Lanka, Kenya or Madagascar, English may be a third language. The delay is the same, sometimes longer. **The island is small.** With around 100,000 inhabitants, a supervisor who is contradicted in public by a junior colleague will see that colleague at church, at the market or at a family event. The disagreement does not stay in the meeting room. Many people prefer to raise it later, one to one, where it costs nobody their standing. **A work permit changes the calculation.** A foreign employee's permit is tied to the employer. Nobody needs to threaten anything for that fact to weigh on the decision to speak up in front of management. It simply makes silence the safer choice. None of this is passivity. It is a reasonable reading of the risks. How nationalities mix in Seychellois teams is covered in more depth in [managing across nationalities in Seychelles](/en/blog/managing-across-nationalities-in-seychelles/), and the language question in [choosing the language for a training session](/en/blog/choosing-a-training-language/). ## What does not work Asking more firmly. "Any objections? No? Are you sure?" makes the barrier higher, because each repetition signals that the manager expects a no, and that the person who objects will be the one holding everybody up. Waiting for the most senior Seychellois supervisor to speak for the team does not work either. They will often translate the mood accurately in private and say nothing in public, for the same reasons as everyone else. ## Three changes to the meeting itself **Let people think in pairs, in any language.** After presenting the proposal, give the room three minutes: each pair discusses what could go wrong, in Kreol, English, French or Tamil, it does not matter. Then each pair reports one risk in English. The objection no longer belongs to one person, it belongs to the pair, and it has been formed in the language people think in. **Ask what people would need, not whether they agree.** "What would you need to make this work on your shift?" is an easy question to answer honestly. The answers are the objections, stated as requests: another person on the evening shift, a delay until the end of the high season, a version of the checklist that fits in a pocket. **Plan for the objection that comes after.** The most useful comment of the meeting will often come on the walk back to the kitchen or the store. Build that moment in: five minutes with each supervisor after the meeting, or a short written summary sent the same day, with a simple request to reply if something is wrong. People who would never contradict the manager in the room will answer a message. ## Why this matters more in Seychelles than elsewhere In a large city, a decision that half the team never accepted produces friction. Here, it produces friction that follows people out of work, into a community where they will keep meeting for years. A manager who brings the objections out early is not being soft. They are preventing a conflict from settling in. The good news is that none of these changes require guessing anyone's culture or background. They work because they lower the cost of speaking, for everyone at once. This is one of the practical modules of [The manager-leader toolkit](/en/training/management/manager-leader-toolkit/), where participants test these formats on their own meetings.seychelles-businessmeetingsmulticultural-teamsdecision-makinghttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/choosing-a-training-language/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/choosing-a-training-language/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.Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTA training group in Seychelles has a language situation that is easy to misread, because on paper it looks simple. Everyone works in English. The meeting will be in English. So the session should be in English. That is a reasonable default and it is based on the wrong test, and the reason it misleads here in particular is worth stating first. ## The working language is nobody's first In most markets, a mixed group has a local majority operating in its mother tongue and a minority working in a second language. Here that is not the case. Most Seychellois colleagues think in Kreol Seselwa and work in English. Much of the foreign workforce is operating in English as a second or third language too. So the room is conducting its professional life in a language that belongs to almost nobody in it. That does not make English the wrong choice: it is the language of government, of business and of most written record here, and for a mixed team it is usually the right call. It does mean that a manager cannot assume the local half of the room is at home in the session and only the visitors are working. ## Following is not participating Comprehension and production are different skills, and they separate widely under pressure. Plenty of people understand a session in their second or third language without difficulty and cannot argue in it, not because the vocabulary is missing, but because arguing requires composing a position in real time, in front of colleagues, fast enough to be relevant. Which matters, because a training session is not a lecture. Its value comes from participants disagreeing with the method, testing it against their own situation, and rehearsing conversations out loud. A training like [Self-awareness and positive communication](/en/training/communication/self-awareness-communication/) is almost entirely practice, and a participant who cannot practise is a spectator. Someone who can follow but not contest receives a fraction of what the session offers, and usually the least useful fraction. So the test is not "can everyone follow this". It is: **can the least fluent person in the room comfortably disagree with the trainer?** That is a higher bar, and it changes the answer more often than people expect. ## When to split the group If the answer is no, splitting the group is usually better than compromising the language. Two cohorts of eight, each working in a language its participants can argue in, will deliver more than one group of sixteen in a language half of them merely tolerate. It costs more. It is generally still the right call, and it is worth putting that trade-off to whoever holds the budget rather than quietly accepting the cheaper option. In practice the useful split here is rarely English against French. It is seniority and role: a group of heads of department and a group of floor supervisors are not fluent in the same register of English, and the second group is the one that goes quiet. ## Why switching language in plenary does not work The intuitive middle path (run mostly in English, switch when someone struggles, let colleagues translate for each other) sounds accommodating and reliably fragments the room. Side translation creates a parallel conversation that excludes whoever is not part of it. The trainer loses the group's shared attention. And the person being translated for is marked out as needing help, which does not help them contribute. **Sub-group work is the exception, and it is not the same thing.** When four people who share a mother tongue go away to work a case for twenty minutes, using that language is not fragmenting the room: the room has been deliberately divided, and the sub-group is arguing at full speed instead of at the speed of its weakest English. They report back in the session language. This is how a Creole-speaking group gets the benefit of a session ABP cannot deliver in Creole, and it is worth designing into the day rather than tolerating when it happens. ## Materials Written materials should be in the session language. Translating handouts into a language not used in the room seems generous and produces two versions of the content. Participants read one and hear the other, and any discrepancy between them, and there is always a discrepancy, undermines both. Where a summary in another language genuinely helps someone, make it visibly a summary rather than a parallel edition. ## What ABP does Training and coaching are delivered in **English, French or Spanish**. This site is published in English and French. Kreol Seselwa is not on either list, and we say so plainly rather than letting a local presence imply otherwise. For a mixed team here, English is usually the right choice. For a group that is entirely Seychellois or largely francophone, French is often better than defaulting to English on principle: comfort in the working language is worth more than consistency with everyone else's booking. Where a group genuinely needs Creole-language delivery, we will say so rather than take the booking. That is an easier conversation to have before the invoice than after the session, and the same principle governs how we handle [fees and formats](/en/faq/#pricing). The same language gap shapes everyday meetings, not only training rooms: see [what silence means in a Seychellois meeting room](/en/blog/silence-in-a-meeting/).seychelles-businesslanguagestrainingseychelleshttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/motivating-and-retaining-gen-z/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/motivating-and-retaining-gen-z/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.Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTEvery employer in Seychelles has the same story: a promising young employee, trained for a year, who leaves just as they become useful. The usual explanation is that this generation is not loyal. It is more useful to ask where they went, because in Seychelles there are only three doors, and each one opens for a different reason. ## Door 1: the competitor down the road A receptionist leaves one resort for another ten minutes away. A junior accountant moves to another firm in Victoria. The salary difference is often small. What drives this exit is almost always the daily experience: a manager who only speaks when something goes wrong, a rota that always lands on the same people, a supervisor who takes credit upwards. In a market this small, young employees know precisely how their friends are treated elsewhere, and a better atmosphere at a competitor is visible within weeks. This is also why the counter-offer fails. By the time someone resigns, the decision has been forming for months. Matching a salary addresses the reason given at the meeting, not the reason the search started. **What closes this door:** the direct manager. Feedback every two weeks, ten minutes, on the work rather than on the person. Credit given by name, in front of the people who matter. Difficult tasks shared fairly rather than always given to the same reliable person. None of this costs money. All of it takes attention. The friction between generations that often sits behind this exit is described in [the founder and the returning graduate](/en/blog/gen-z-and-baby-boomers/). ## Door 2: another sector A young waiter becomes a bank clerk. A trainee chef joins a government department. A housekeeping supervisor retrains in IT. This exit is usually about the path. Tourism is the largest employer in the country, but young Seychellois often cannot see what comes after the job they are doing. A receptionist who cannot picture the next step after reception will start looking at sectors where the steps seem clearer. **What closes this door:** describing the next step, concretely. Not a career grid in a drawer, but an answer to a simple question: "What could my job look like in two years, and what do I need to show to get there?" Most managers have never said it out loud. The employee concludes that no answer exists. Responsibility given early helps as much. Let the junior run the morning briefing once, even if it is imperfect. Put them in charge of training the next recruit. Give the stretch task to the person who is almost ready, because that is the only way anyone becomes ready. ## Door 3: abroad Some young Seychellois leave to study in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia or India, and some leave to work there. This exit is not always a failure. Often it is a sensible plan, and trying to prevent it creates resentment. **What keeps this door open in both directions:** a clear offer for the return. Support the departure, stay in touch, and say explicitly that there is a place if they come back. Seychellois who return after a few years abroad bring skills and networks that are hard to recruit locally, and they remember who supported them when they left. ## What does not work, whichever the door **Perks.** A staff party, a new uniform, a well-being day. Their absence generates complaints; their presence rarely keeps anyone who was leaving. **Values posters.** A mission statement on the wall of the staff room is read, correctly, as marketing. Meaning matters, but it is found at a much smaller scale: knowing that the guest who complained wrote back to thank you, that the report you prepared was used in the decision, that your idea changed the procedure. Pass that information on. It costs one email. ## One practice worth adopting: the stay interview Exit interviews come too late and ask the wrong people. Twice a year, ask the people who are still here three questions, in private: - What would make you consider leaving? - What would you change about your role? - What would you like to be doing in two years? The answers arrive while there is still time to act. They also tell the employee something important: that their manager has noticed they could leave, and cares about it. For managers who want to work on the levers they control without a budget, [Motivating without a budget](/en/training/management/motivation-without-budget/) covers them in detail, and the coaching posture that makes the fortnightly conversation work is at the heart of [The manager-leader toolkit](/en/training/management/manager-leader-toolkit/).managementgenerationsmotivationretentionmanagementleadershiphttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/who-is-actually-working/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/who-is-actually-working/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.Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMTAsk a hotel manager in Seychelles who works hardest in the team and the answer comes quickly. It is usually someone the manager sees often: at reception, on the restaurant floor, in the office next door. Ask who would be missed most if they left tomorrow, and the answer is often someone else. The gap between these two answers is where many management mistakes begin. Four cases come up again and again. ## 1. The one you always see The restaurant supervisor who is everywhere during service, greets every table and is the last to leave. The manager sees them constantly and naturally reads this as commitment. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the supervisor is compensating for a service that is badly organised, doing the tasks of three people because nobody has fixed the rota, and producing tired staff and slow tables despite their energy. Visible effort and good results are not the same measure. **What helps:** looking at the results of the service rather than the supervisor's energy. Waiting times, complaints, staff turnover on the team. If these are good, the praise is deserved. If not, the conversation is about organisation, not about effort. ## 2. The one nobody sees The storekeeper who makes sure the kitchen never runs out, the maintenance technician who fixes the air conditioning before guests notice, the night auditor who closes the day's accounts. Their work is invisible by design: when it is done well, nothing happens. These colleagues are regularly underestimated, and they rarely complain. They are noticed the week they are on leave, when the problems start. By then, few people connect the problems to their absence. **What helps:** the manager making the work visible, not the person. Asking someone to promote their own work puts them in an uncomfortable position. Naming it yourself, once, precisely, in front of the team, changes how everyone sees it: "The kitchen has not run short once this season, and that is because of Joseph's ordering." ## 3. The one on another island A company with its head office in Victoria and teams on Praslin or La Digue, or a hotel group with properties on several islands, faces a specific distortion. Colleagues close to management are seen at work; colleagues on another island are seen only in reports and video calls. The result is a distance bias, sometimes called [proximity bias](/en/glossary/#proximity-bias): presence near the decision-makers reads as contribution, and absence reads as absence. The supervisor on Praslin who runs a good team without calling head office every day may be the best manager in the group, and the least well known. **What helps:** judging all sites on the same written results, forwarding positive guest and client feedback to the whole company, and visiting in person at regular intervals rather than only when something goes wrong. ## 4. The one who is always there Arrives early, leaves late, answers messages at night. They sincerely believe this shows commitment, and are hurt when it is not recognised as such. The difficulty is the standard it sets. In Seychelles, many employees have constraints on their hours: a bus from the south of Mahé, children to collect, a ferry to catch, sometimes a second job. A team that treats long hours as proof of seriousness penalises all of them, and produces lasting resentment. **What helps:** stating clearly what is measured, and behaving accordingly. If results are what counts, say so, and stop commenting approvingly on late departures. ## Three questions before judging anyone **What was agreed?** If the expected results were never written down, there is no performance question yet, only an expectation that was never shared. Start there. **What arrived, and when?** Compared with what was agreed, not with an impression. This question separates the four cases: the invisible worker has delivered, the busy supervisor has delivered at a high cost, the colleague on another island has delivered without being seen, the one who is always there has delivered a normal amount over abnormal hours. **Who knows about it?** If the results are real and the team does not know, the gap is the manager's to close. It is not a performance problem at all. The common mistake is to skip all three and move straight to a conversation about attitude. That conversation cannot be won, leaves the person with nothing concrete to change, and easily turns a perception problem into a conflict, with the dynamics described in [four roles that keep a team conflict alive](/en/blog/four-roles-in-a-team-conflict/). Defining results rather than watching effort is at the core of [The manager-leader toolkit](/en/training/management/manager-leader-toolkit/).managementmanagementperformanceteam-cohesionfeedbackhttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/gen-z-and-baby-boomers/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/gen-z-and-baby-boomers/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.Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT"Generation Z does not want to work" and "the old guard will not change" are said about workplaces all over the world. In Seychelles, the reality behind these phrases is usually more specific, and more manageable, than a clash of values. Three situations account for most of the generational friction found in Seychellois companies. ## 1. The founder and the returning graduate A large share of businesses here are family-run: guesthouses, construction firms, shops, tour operators, restaurants. Many were built by one person over thirty years, on personal relationships, long hours and decisions taken quickly at the counter. Then a son or a daughter comes back after a degree in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa or Mauritius. They bring spreadsheets, fixed meeting times, written procedures and an expectation that decisions will be explained. Within a few months, the founder feels their judgement is being questioned, the graduate feels their training is being ignored, and the staff do the sensible thing: they keep asking the founder. The problem here is not age. It is that nobody has said who decides what. **The explicit rule:** write down the handover. Which decisions the successor now takes alone, which are taken jointly, and which stay with the founder until a stated date. Then announce it to the team. A successor who is never publicly given authority will not acquire it, however competent they are. ## 2. The small market next door Young Seychellois employees know exactly what their friends earn and how they are treated at the hotel down the road, because they talk about it every week. In a market this small, an employer's reputation travels fast. The older rule in many companies was that loyalty is shown by staying, and that progression comes with time. Younger staff are not against staying. They want to know what staying leads to. "Be patient" without a horizon sounds to them like "we have not thought about it". **The explicit rule:** say what the deal is. What someone will learn here in the next two years, who will teach them, and what could follow. An honest two-year proposition keeps people longer than an implied twenty-year one nobody believes. The other reasons young employees leave, and what keeps them, are covered in [keeping young Seychellois talent](/en/blog/motivating-and-retaining-gen-z/). Feedback follows the same logic. An annual review made sense when careers lasted decades in one company. For someone who will decide in eighteen months whether to stay, eleven months without a word on their work is not patience, it is silence. Ten minutes every two weeks, on the work rather than on the person, costs less than one formal review and removes most of the uncertainty. ## 3. The knowledge that is written nowhere In many Seychellois companies, the most valuable information is held by someone who has been there for twenty-five years: which supplier on Mahé delivers on time, how to handle a particular government office, which client needs a phone call rather than an email, how the old generator really works. That person often feels that younger colleagues do not respect what they know. The younger colleagues often feel that the older one will not share it. Both are partly right, and the company is exposed: when that person retires, the knowledge goes with them. **The explicit rule:** pair them on real work. Not a mentoring programme with a launch meeting, but a shared task with a real deadline, where each one needs what the other has. The experienced colleague brings the history and the network; the younger one brings the tools and new practices. Knowledge moves in both directions, and the relationship lasts because it is built on work. ## What the three situations have in common In each case, one side is following a rule it thinks is obvious, and the other side never agreed to it. The friction is not about values. It is about rules that were never written down. Two conditions make written rules work. First, they must be short: response times, how feedback is given, who decides what, how disagreement is raised. Six lines are enough. Second, they must apply upwards. A rule that the owner or the general manager ignores is not a rule, and the youngest people in the team will notice within a week. The manager's own posture is what makes these rules hold over time. That is the subject of [The manager-leader toolkit](/en/training/management/manager-leader-toolkit/), and the question of what keeps people motivated when budgets are tight is covered in [Motivating without a budget](/en/training/management/motivation-without-budget/).managementgenerationsmanagementconflictleadershiphttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/disc-or-enneagram/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/disc-or-enneagram/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.Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 GMTMany Seychellois companies are small enough that the management team fits around one table: an owner, a finance person, an operations manager, perhaps a head of sales or a head chef. When that team decides to work on how it communicates, the question comes quickly. DISC or the Enneagram? Both models are serious, both are widely used, and they do not answer the same question. A short definition of each sits in the [glossary](/en/glossary/#disc). What follows is not a debate about the models. It is five questions about your team, which usually settle the matter in a few minutes. ## 1. What is the problem you want to solve? If it is **friction**, meaning meetings that drag, two managers who cannot run a project together, handovers between shifts that go wrong, start with DISC. Friction is usually a mismatch of style: one person wants the conclusion first, the other wants the detail, a third needs to feel the relationship is fine before discussing anything. DISC names those differences in a way people can use the next morning. If it is **a pattern that repeats**, meaning the same conflict with different people, a colleague whose reactions seem out of proportion, a leader who keeps taking on everything, the Enneagram is more useful. It works on the layer where those patterns come from: what someone is trying to obtain or to avoid. ## 2. How many first languages are in the room? In a Seychellois team, the answer is often three or more. Kreol, English and French for Seychellois staff, plus Hindi, Tamil, Malagasy or Swahili among colleagues from abroad. DISC copes well with this. Four dimensions, simple words, examples taken from everyday work. A group that shares no first language can use the vocabulary together by the end of the first day. The Enneagram needs more nuance. Talking about what drives you and what you fear is hard in a language you only use for procedures. It works best when the session runs in a language everyone is comfortable with, which in practice means English or French, and when the group is given time. ## 3. How much trust is there between the people in the room? DISC can be done with a team that does not yet trust itself. It talks about behaviour, which everyone can already see. The Enneagram asks people to say things about themselves that are not visible. A team without trust will give careful, polite answers. The session will feel deep and change nothing. ## 4. Who will meet whom after the session? This question matters more in Seychelles than in a large city. The finance manager and the operations manager may sit on the same parish committee. Their children may be in the same class. What is said in a session about motivations and fears must stay in the room, completely. DISC exposes little that is sensitive. The Enneagram exposes more, and it only works if everyone is certain that nothing will circulate. Say this explicitly at the start, and make sure the facilitator does not report individual results to anyone. ## 5. How much time can you give it? DISC produces something usable in one or two days. The Enneagram takes longer to settle, and its value comes from returning to it over several months. If the high season leaves the team one free day in the next six months, DISC is the realistic choice. ## If you are still unsure Start with DISC. It is quicker, it resolves most friction on its own, and it tells you whether the remaining problem is deeper than style. A team that finishes a DISC session saying "we understand each other better but we still cannot work together" has just identified its need for the Enneagram. Whichever model you choose, one rule applies: a profile is a hypothesis, not a verdict. "She is a D, that is why" ends the conversation. "She is probably a D, so what does she need from me on this project?" starts it. ## Where to go from here [DISC and Driving Forces](/en/training/communication/disc-and-driving-forces/) covers DISC in depth over two days. [Managing with the Enneagram](/en/training/management/managing-with-the-enneagram/) applies the Enneagram to the day-to-day work of a manager. [Self-awareness and positive communication](/en/training/communication/self-awareness-communication/) uses both models for teams that want to work on communication as a whole.leadershipdiscenneagramleadershiphttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/self-awareness-tools-compared/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/self-awareness-tools-compared/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.Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMTMost self-awareness tools arrive in a Seychellois company the same way: a manager took one at a previous employer, often abroad, found it useful, and proposes it to the team. Nobody compares it with anything else. For a large company with an HR department, that is a small risk. For a hotel of eighty people, a family-run firm or a small public body, where the budget allows one session a year at most, choosing the wrong tool means a lost year. Three filters help. ## Filter 1: what problem are you trying to solve? This is the filter that eliminates the most options. - **Friction between people who want to cooperate.** Meetings that drag, handovers that go wrong, two managers who clash on style. **DISC.** - **Behaviour that becomes destructive under pressure.** A supervisor who turns rigid during the high season, a manager who becomes sarcastic when a guest complains. **Process Communication**, the only tool of the seven that describes what happens under stress and what to do in the moment. - **A project team that produces ideas and nothing else.** **Belbin**, which describes who does what in a group, rather than who people are. - **A pattern that keeps repeating** and that nobody can explain. **The Enneagram**, which works on motivations and fears. - **A career conversation** with an individual. **CliftonStrengths**, which ranks a person's talents. - **A context where you must justify the method**, for example to a board or a public authority. **The Big Five**, the only one built from research. - **No specific problem, just a wish for a common language.** **MBTI**, as a starting point for conversation rather than as a measurement. ## Filter 2: who is in the room? **Languages.** A Seychellois team often has three or four first languages: Kreol, English, French, and those of colleagues from India, Sri Lanka, Kenya or Madagascar. Tools with a short, concrete vocabulary travel better. DISC has four dimensions and Belbin has nine roles, each describing visible behaviour. The Enneagram and Process Communication ask for a more nuanced discussion of motives and needs, which is easier in a language everyone is comfortable with. **Size.** Some tools require certified facilitators and licences paid per participant. Process Communication, MBTI and CliftonStrengths fall into this category. For six or eight participants, the fixed cost weighs heavily. DISC and Belbin are usually more economical for small groups. **Trust.** Tools that explore fears and motivations, like the Enneagram, need a group in which people feel safe. In a small society, where colleagues meet outside work, this condition deserves particular attention. A group that is not there yet should start with a tool that talks about behaviour. ## Filter 3: what will the results be used for? **For development only.** All seven tools can serve, provided the rules are clear: individual results belong to the participant, nobody is profiled in their absence, and any group summary is anonymised and agreed in advance. **For recruitment or promotion.** None of them. They are self-reported, easy to influence for anyone who has seen the questionnaire, and none was designed to predict job performance. A structured interview and a practical exercise do that much better. ## The seven tools at a glance | Tool | What it describes | Where it is strongest | Main limit | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **DISC** | Observable behaviour, four styles | Reducing friction quickly | Says how, never why | | **MBTI** | Preferences, sixteen types | A shared language | Unstable results when retested | | **Enneagram** | Motivations and fears, nine types | Understanding a puzzling behaviour | Not validated as a test | | **Process Communication** | Channels and behaviour under stress | Situations of pressure | Costly, certified facilitation | | **Big Five** | Five traits on a continuum | When the method must be defensible | No memorable types | | **CliftonStrengths** | Ranked talents | Career and role design | Tends to ignore weaknesses | | **Belbin** | Roles in a team | Composing or unblocking a project team | Describes the role, not the person | ## One rule for all seven A profile is a hypothesis, not a verdict. "He is a D, that is why he talks like that" ends the conversation. "He probably prefers the conclusion first, so how should I present this to him?" starts it. For a closer look at the two tools most often hesitated between, see [DISC or the Enneagram](/en/blog/disc-or-enneagram/). DISC is covered in depth in [DISC and Driving Forces](/en/training/communication/disc-and-driving-forces/), and both DISC and the Enneagram are used in [Self-awareness and positive communication](/en/training/communication/self-awareness-communication/).leadershipdiscenneagrammbtileadershipself-awarenesshttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/four-roles-in-a-team-conflict/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/four-roles-in-a-team-conflict/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.Tue, 26 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMTTake a mid-sized hotel on Mahé. The head of housekeeping and the front office manager disagree about who is responsible for late check-outs. It starts as a dispute over a procedure. Six months later, they no longer speak to each other, room status updates go through a third person, and one of the best receptionists has just handed in her notice to join a competitor down the coast. Everyone describes this as a conflict between two people. It is not. A disagreement between two people burns out in a few weeks. A conflict that lasts six months is being kept alive, and in a small society the people keeping it alive are not always on the payroll. Four roles are usually involved. ## The one who is right One of the two protagonists is often right on the facts. The procedure really was unclear. The late check-outs really did disorganise the cleaning schedule. This is what makes the position so stable. Being right removes any reason to look at how one behaves: the tone in the corridor, the complaint made in front of staff, the refusal to answer a message. Each time the facts are discussed again, the position is confirmed, and the behaviour is never examined. The manager's move is to separate two questions: was the complaint justified, and did the way it was expressed work? Most people accept the second point easily once it is no longer mixed with the first. ## The go-between In Seychelles, this role is often taken by someone who knows both people well, sometimes a colleague, sometimes a relative who works elsewhere in the company. They carry messages, soften them, explain to each side that the other did not mean it. The intention is good, and the effect is to make the conflict comfortable. As long as messages travel through a third person, the two protagonists never have to have the one conversation that would settle things. The go-between also pays a high personal price, absorbing the tension that the two others no longer feel. Asking them to stop does not work. Giving them a new role does: they are usually the person both sides trust, which makes them useful in preparing a direct conversation rather than replacing it. ## The arbiter outside the organisation chart In a large company, the informal arbiter of a conflict is a colleague who listens in the corridor and hands out verdicts. On an island of around 100,000 people, the arbiter is often outside the company: a respected relative, a senior figure at church, a former manager now working elsewhere. Each protagonist tells their version at home or in the community, and comes back to work with a verdict that has already been given. A manager cannot control what is said outside work, and should not try. What they can do is make the internal decision faster and clearer than the external one. When the question of who handles late check-outs has been decided in writing, by the person with the authority to decide it, the verdicts from outside lose their weight. ## The one who leaves The receptionist who resigned was never part of the dispute. She simply concluded that the atmosphere would not change, and that a colleague at a competing hotel had a better daily life. In Seychelles, this role costs more than elsewhere. The market is small, the good people are known, and the person who leaves goes to a competitor a few kilometres away, taking with them an account of why they left. For a foreign colleague, withdrawal takes a quieter form: precise, polite, and no longer volunteering anything, until the contract ends. ## The order that works The natural reflex is to sit the two protagonists down together. Done first, it fails: the four roles reform the following week. **Decide the factual question first.** If the conflict started from an unclear responsibility, settle it and write it down. No mediation fixes a decision that was never taken. **Speak to each role separately.** The one who is right, about the behaviour. The go-between, about their new role. The team, about the fact that the question has been decided internally. **Then bring the two protagonists together**, with the factual issue off the table, so the conversation is about how they work together from now on. The method is the one described in [non-violent communication at work](/en/blog/non-violent-communication-at-work/). **Finally, check on those who have withdrawn.** They will need to see a concrete change before they invest again. The individual behaviours are the subject of [Self-awareness and positive communication](/en/training/communication/self-awareness-communication/). The collective version is handled in a [Team coaching programme](/en/training/coaching/team-coaching-programme/), and the manager's own posture in [The manager-leader toolkit](/en/training/management/manager-leader-toolkit/).managementconflictmanagementteam-cohesionleadershiphttps://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/non-violent-communication-at-work/https://www.abp-consulting.sc/en/blog/non-violent-communication-at-work/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.Tue, 13 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMTNon-violent communication is usually presented as a way to calm tempers: how to disagree without shouting. In many Seychellois workplaces, shouting is not the problem. The problem is quieter. A supervisor is unhappy with a colleague's work. They do not say so to the colleague. They say it to another colleague, who mentions it to a third, who tells a cousin. Two weeks later, the person concerned hears a distorted version of the criticism, from someone who had no business delivering it, and feels publicly humiliated by something nobody ever said to their face. In a small society where everyone will keep meeting, avoiding direct criticism feels like kindness. It produces the opposite. The same reluctance explains why meetings go quiet, as described in [what silence means in a Seychellois meeting room](/en/blog/silence-in-a-meeting/). Non-violent communication is useful here because it offers a way to say the difficult thing directly, while keeping everyone's dignity intact. The method has four steps: observation, feeling, need, request. Here is how each one works in practice, with one adjustment. ## Start from what a camera would have recorded An observation is a fact that anyone present could confirm. An interpretation is what you concluded from it, or what you heard about it. > *People are saying you are not serious about your work.* That sentence is an interpretation, based on rumour. The only possible answers are denial or hurt, and the rumour now has an official stamp. > *You arrived after 7:30 on four mornings last week, and the breakfast set-up > was not ready when the first guests came down.* That is an observation. It does not quote anyone else. It cannot be argued with, so the conversation moves directly to why, which is where it needed to go. A simple test: could someone who does not like you disagree with the sentence? If yes, it is not yet an observation. ## Replace the feeling with the consequence In its original form, the second step asks you to name your feeling: *I felt frustrated.* Between friends, this works. At work, especially from a manager to a junior colleague, it goes wrong. The junior colleague stops listening to the message and starts managing the manager's mood. What works better is to state the consequence for the work: > *Two of the waiters had to set up alone, and one table of guests complained to > the duty manager.* It carries the same weight, it is factual, and it keeps the conversation about the work rather than about anyone's emotions. ## Name the need, briefly The need is what the work requires: a breakfast ready at 7:00, a report on Tuesday, a handover done in person. Stating it in one sentence helps the other person understand that the issue is the need, not them. ## Make a request, and be honest about whether it is one A request only counts as one if the other person can say no. Many requests at work are really instructions, and dressing an instruction as an invitation makes it worse, not better. If there is no choice, say so kindly: *The 7:30 start is not something I can change.* If there is room, show where it is: *Is there something in the mornings that makes 7:30 hard? I would like to understand before we decide what changes.* The second version often reveals the real cause, in Seychelles as elsewhere: a bus from the other side of Mahé that arrives late, a child to drop at school, a second job. None of these appear if the conversation starts with a judgement. ## Where and when matter as much as the words In a close-knit workplace, the setting decides whether the message is received as help or as humiliation. **In private.** Never in front of guests, never in front of colleagues, never in a group message. A criticism given in public becomes a story that circulates for months. **Soon.** A remark made the same day or the next is about the event. A remark saved for three weeks is about the person. **Followed by action.** If something is agreed, write it down in two lines and check in a week later. That shows the conversation was about the work, and that it is now closed. ## Where the method does not apply Non-violent communication assumes good faith on both sides. Harassment, discrimination, safety breaches and deliberate sabotage are not communication problems. They need a procedure, a written record and, often, someone with authority. Rephrasing indefinitely in front of bad faith is not patience; it is letting a situation continue. Knowing which situation you are in is the first skill, and it is where [Knowing yourself to communicate better and stand your ground](/en/training/communication/assertiveness-without-authority/) starts. The preparation of a difficult conversation, step by step, is practised in [Self-awareness and positive communication](/en/training/communication/self-awareness-communication/).communicationcommunicationconflictfeedbackassertiveness