Picture the assignment we would all call a success. Eighteen months in, she has the language. She knows which meetings matter and which are theatre. Her local colleagues have stopped explaining things to her. When she pushes back in a meeting, nobody hears an outsider pushing back — they hear a colleague. Ask anyone in the office how she is doing and you will get some version of the same answer: she has really settled in.
We have a word for this. We call it adjustment, and for over four decades it has been the organising concept of my field. We have measured it, modelled it, and predicted it. We have built selection tools to find people likely to achieve it and training programmes to accelerate it. Behind all of that work sits an assumption so basic that we rarely state it out loud: distance is the problem, and closing it is the point.
I want to question that assumption. Not because adjustment does not matter — it obviously does, and people who cannot function in a new environment do not accomplish much. But because the assumption smuggles in something we never actually meant to say: that being close to people requires becoming like them.
The paradox
Consider why the organisation sent her in the first place. The reason was not because it needed another person who thinks the way the local office already thinks. It sent her because she carried something the local office did not have: knowledge from elsewhere, a different set of assumptions about how things are done, a working relationship with headquarters, the ability to notice what locals had stopped noticing. Every serious rationale for international assignments, from knowledge transfer, coordination, control, to global leader development, depends on the assignee being, in some durable way, not from here.
And then we evaluate her on how completely she dissolves that difference.
This is the adjustment paradox. We select for difference and reward its disappearance. The better someone adjusts, on the terms we conventionally use, the less of the thing they were sent to carry may survive the journey. I have seen the endpoint of this many times in research on repatriation: people come home unable to say what they learned beyond their own personal growth, having no story about the value they created, and their organisations have no mechanism for asking. We usually diagnose that as a repatriation failure. I increasingly think it starts much earlier, in what we told them success looked like on day one.
The failure has a mirror image that the adjustment paradigm handles no better. The assignee who never lets go of the home office script, who remains clearly foreign for three years and is politely worked around — that person has kept every ounce of their difference and cannot get anyone to act on it. Difference nobody will engage with is just as useless as difference that has been erased. One person has closeness without difference; the other has difference without closeness. Our models are built to see only the second as a problem.
Two needs, not one dial
The mistake, I now think, is treating closeness and difference as two ends of a single dial, as though every step towards belonging costs a step of distinctiveness, and the task is to find the least painful point on the line.
They are not one dial. The need to be distinct and the need to be connected are separate and equally fundamental human orientations; the psychologist David Bakan called them agency and communion, and neither can be traded away for the other without cost. This is why the advice to adjust feels wrong to so many people who take it. Connection purchased by giving up what makes you distinct feels more like performance than belonging.
So let me clarify what I mean by proximity, because the word may invite a misreading. Proximity is not maximal closeness. It is the balancing act between our need for distinctiveness and our need for commonality, the attempt to reach belonging without erasing difference. A group that is too tightly connected turns insular and stops hearing anything from outside, which is its own failure, and a common one in long-established local offices.
This raises the practical question: how do you actually build commonality with people you are not like?
Usually we look for it in the categories already lying around, and on an international assignment those categories are precisely the ones the newcomer can only ever half occupy. Local and foreigner. Headquarters and subsidiary. Us and them. This is the structural condition of working across boundaries: when a group draws a line around itself, the person who has crossed that line is inside and outside at the same time. The adjustment paradigm resolves the contradiction in one direction only, by asking the newcomer to move fully inside.
But it can be dissolved from the other direction, by finding a more encompassing basis for commonality, one that does not require anybody to shed what they brought. A problem both parties genuinely own. A shared ambition. The experience, which more colleagues have than you would guess, of having once been the stranger somewhere. Common ground of this kind cuts across the local/foreign line rather than running along it, and it is available to a group that stops treating its existing categories as given. The categories that separate people are not fixed. Redraw them and the same room contains entirely different alignments.
Fitting in and standing out, in other words, are not opposing forces. They can be integrated. But that takes someone doing the work of finding a boundary that is inclusive, and no amount of individual adjustment will do it, because adjustment leaves the boundary exactly where it was.
Viewed this way, the standard advice of “Fit in first, contribute later” turns out to be a strategy for arriving too late: by the time you have fully fitted in, the fresh perception you were carrying has faded, and the licence you earned is a licence to say what everyone already thinks. Proximity is not a reward you receive after successful adjustment. It is something built alongside difference, from the beginning, or not at all.
What follows
For globally mobile professionals, the question shifts from “How well have I adapted?” to something harder: what am I still able to see here that my local colleagues cannot, and have I built the relationships that let me say it and be heard?
For organisations, the shift is bigger, because most of the machinery points the other way. If you brief assignees on integration and never on what you sent them to notice, you should not be surprised when they come back with nothing to report. If your performance conversations reward smooth relations with the local team and never ask what got challenged, you are paying for adjustment and hoping for value.
Distance, in short, was never the problem. Distinctiveness is the asset, it is the reason the journey was worth paying for. The problem is distinctiveness that no common ground has been built across, and connection that has quietly consumed the difference it was meant to carry.
This post draws on ideas from my forthcoming book, Proximity: How to Balance Belonging and Difference in Today’s Workplace (Bloomsbury, September 2026).