Scaling People: A Conversation with Rusudan Tamazashvili
Companies don’t usually fail to scale across countries because of strategy. They fail when leadership, culture, and decision-making stop scaling with the business.
Rusudan Tamazashvili is a People & Culture leader with experience in organisational transformation and international team growth. In this interview, she explores what really breaks when companies scale across countries and why manager capability and alignment are key to sustainable growth.
People as scaling infrastructure
Hello Rusudan, thank you for joining us in this new edition of Talent-R Tech Talks and for sharing your vision with our community. When a company starts scaling across countries, what usually breaks first: alignment, manager capability, or decision-making?
“Manager capability, almost always. Alignment and decision-making are symptoms. The root cause is that managers who were brilliant in one market suddenly find themselves leading people they have never met, in cultures they do not fully understand, through systems that were not built for them. Companies promote their best local performers and assume leadership scales automatically. It does not. The manager who thrived in one office becomes the bottleneck across five countries.”
“Onboarding gives people information. Integration gives them belonging.”
You’ve supported teams across six countries. What is the hardest thing to standardize globally without losing local relevance?
“Performance management. Every culture has a different relationship with feedback, with hierarchy, with what it means to be told you are not meeting expectations. In some markets direct feedback is respected. In others the same words destroy trust and psychological safety overnight. The framework can be global, the conversation has to be local. I learned this the hard way watching managers apply the same calibration language in Georgia, Italy, and Brazil and getting three completely different outcomes.”
At what point does a People function stop being “support” and become a real scaling infrastructure for the business?
“When it stops reacting and starts predicting. A People function becomes infrastructure the moment it can tell the business what will break before it breaks, which managers are not ready, which markets are losing alignment, which teams are six months away from attrition. That shift from reactive to predictive is the line between HR as administration and HR as a genuine business capability. Most functions never make that crossing because they are too busy putting out fires to look ahead.“
Integration, managers and alignment
You’ve built onboarding for remote, hybrid, and acquired teams. What’s the difference between onboarding people… and actually integrating them?
“Onboarding gives people information. Integration gives them belonging. You can onboard someone in a week, send the laptop, share the handbook, schedule the welcome calls. But integration is the moment six months later when that person feels like they actually understand how decisions get made, who to call when something goes wrong, and why the company does things the way it does. Most organisations measure onboarding completion. Almost none measure integration. That gap is where new hires quietly disengage.“
In international growth, managers often become the pressure point. What problems show up when they are not ready for scale?
“Three things consistently. First they over-control because distance makes them anxious, which kills autonomy and slows execution. Second, they communicate less because they assume people have the same context they do, which creates confusion and rumour. Third they apply their home market instincts to new cultures and mistake discomfort for underperformance. I have coached managers through all three and the thread connecting them is always the same, nobody prepared them for what leading across borders actually feels like.”
You work with people analytics and capability data. What signals tell you early that a growing organization is losing alignment across markets?
“Three early signals I watch for. First, eNPS scores diverging significantly between markets when the business context is similar. Second, managers in different countries describing the same company priority in completely different ways. Third escalation patterns, when local teams stop making decisions independently and everything starts travelling up the chain. That last one is the most telling. When people stop trusting their own judgement it usually means the alignment infrastructure has already quietly collapsed.”
The decision that shapes scale
If a company is scaling internationally right now, what is one People decision it should get right early, before growth starts exposing the cracks?
“Invest in your managers before you need to. Not after the first country launch reveals the gaps before. The companies that scale well internationally are not the ones with the best strategy documents. They are the ones whose managers understood the culture, the communication style, and the people expectations of each new market before they walked in. That investment looks expensive in year one. It looks cheap compared to the cost of rebuilding trust in year two.”
Companies scale across countries more successfully when People stops reacting to growth and starts preparing for it. The real advantage lies in building the manager capability, alignment, and local understanding that allow growth to hold together over time.
