Managing in Bali as a foreign leader: how to hear what your team is not telling you.

Moving to Bali as a professional is easy to romanticise. The lifestyle is attractive, people are welcoming and opportunities can come quickly. But managing a hotel, villa or restaurant in Indonesia requires more than bringing experience from Europe and applying the same leadership style.

You need to understand hierarchy, indirect communication, the importance of harmony and how to get honest information from the people around you. Because sometimes your team agrees with you — but that does not mean they believe your plan will work.

What I learned when I arrived in Bali

I arrived in Bali fifteen years ago as a trainee at Sofitel. I expected to observe and learn. Instead, I was quickly handling guest complaints, looking after VIPs and taking on responsibilities that would have been difficult to access as a trainee in Europe. The work was intense, but I loved it. Bali was a place where I was thriving.

At the same time, I started noticing differences in how problems were communicated. Some managers struggled to be assertive. Difficult information could be softened, delayed or left unspoken. In meetings, people could agree with a decision without expressing the concerns they discussed privately afterwards.

Slowly, I began to understand the importance of saving face. It was not simply about avoiding responsibility. Much of it came from a genuine desire to maintain harmony and avoid publicly embarrassing a colleague or contradicting someone more senior.

As a manager, you need to understand the difference between harmony and silence. If you do not, you can easily mistake politeness for agreement.

What “yes” can mean in an Indonesian workplace

Of course, Indonesians say no. But in a hierarchical workplace, disagreement is not always communicated as directly as it might be in Europe or Australia. “Yes” can sometimes mean:

• I heard your instruction.
• I respect your position.
• I will try.
• I do not feel comfortable disagreeing with you.
• I do not know how to tell you this will not work.

The solution is not to become more aggressive. In fact, pushing harder can make people tell you even less. The solution is to ask better questions.

These questions make disagreement part of the job. They allow people to raise concerns without directly challenging your authority. It also helps to share your opinion last — if the most senior person speaks first, the rest of the meeting can easily become an exercise in agreeing with them.

Indonesia is not one workplace culture

It is important not to reduce Indonesia to a simple list of cultural rules. A team in Bali will not necessarily communicate like a team in Jakarta. A family-owned hotel will operate differently from an international chain. A young Indonesian manager with multinational experience may be much more direct than someone working with a foreign owner for the first time.

Communication also depends on age, seniority, personality, trust and previous professional exposure. The point is not that Indonesian employees behave in one particular way. The point is that foreign leaders need to understand the environment before deciding how to lead within it.

Build strong Indonesian leadership around you

Today, I advise GMs, COOs and business owners coming from Europe to manage hospitality businesses in Indonesia, often without previous experience in Asia. One of the first subjects we discuss is the leadership team reporting directly to them.

A foreign leader needs at least one trusted senior Indonesian manager who understands the local team, can explain what is happening below the surface and is confident enough to challenge the foreign leader privately. Whenever possible, I recommend hiring people who have previously worked closely with international managers — not because foreign leaders cannot understand Indonesian teams, but because a strong local manager already understands the cultural codes, relationships and unspoken dynamics inside the workplace.

This person should not simply translate language. They should be able to translate intentions, expectations and reactions in both directions. The best profiles can:

• Communicate difficult decisions without creating unnecessary conflict.
• Challenge the owner or GM respectfully.
• Recognise problems that junior staff may not raise directly.
• Protect the authority of department managers.
• Maintain harmony without hiding operational reality.

These are some of the most important qualities I assess when recruiting Indonesian managers for foreign-owned hospitality businesses.

Be direct without weakening your managers

Being direct is not automatically wrong in Indonesia. The real question is when to be direct, with whom and in what setting. Most of the foreign managers I learned from had spent more than two decades working across different parts of Indonesia. One of the clearest lessons they taught me was not to routinely bypass the hierarchy.

If a GM gives instructions directly to a receptionist while ignoring the Front Office Manager, it may solve one immediate problem. But if this happens regularly, the Front Office Manager slowly loses authority. The same thing happens when an owner sends instructions directly to reservations, housekeeping, engineering and finance through WhatsApp.

Nobody knows who is making the final decision. Managers become messengers instead of leaders, while junior staff learn that their department head can be bypassed whenever they want another answer.

There will always be emergencies when a senior leader needs to intervene directly. When that happens, inform the responsible manager and return ownership to them afterwards.

If you want your managers to lead, you have to allow them to lead.

Why foreign owners lose good managers

Bali has seen rapid growth in small and medium-sized foreign-owned hotels, villas, restaurants and lifestyle businesses. Many owners built their businesses by being involved in everything. During an opening, that involvement may have been essential.

The problem comes when the company grows but the owner’s role does not change. They hire an Operations Manager or General Manager, but continue approving every purchase, contacting junior staff directly and changing decisions without speaking to the person supposedly responsible for the operation.

Eventually, responsibilities become unclear. The manager is held accountable for results but has no real authority to make decisions. The owner then concludes that the manager is not strong enough.

Sometimes that is true. But sometimes the owner hired a strong manager and then removed every opportunity for that person to manage. Recruiting another manager will not fix that structure.

How to get more honest information from your team

Foreign leaders managing employees in Indonesia can create more honest communication through a few practical habits.

Recruitment cannot fix an unclear structure

The recruitment assignments where I have created the most value are the ones where I did more than find a candidate. Before beginning a search, I often need to challenge the structure around the role:

• What can this manager decide independently?
• Which decisions still require owner approval?
• Who will report to them?
• What results will they be accountable for?
• How should disagreements with the owner be handled?
• What should success look like during the first 90 days?

These questions matter because a strong candidate cannot succeed inside a role that has responsibility but no authority. Once the right person is selected, I also work with owners and incoming managers to align expectations, communication styles and decision boundaries — including salary and role structure. That is where recruitment creates long-term value.

The goal is not simply to fill a vacancy. It is to create enough trust and clarity for the manager to build a career, for the team to work with confidence and for the owner to step away from daily operations without worrying that everything will collapse.

The part of recruitment I enjoy most

This is the part of recruitment I enjoy the most — understanding the people behind the job titles. It means identifying the real pain points inside the company, understanding the personalities involved and connecting people who may come from very different cultures and professional backgrounds. Where a business needs deeper support, we also open doors through our operations and workflow partner network.

Sometimes the business needs a stronger manager. Sometimes the manager needs clearer authority. And sometimes the owner needs to stop managing the person they hired to manage.

The right recruitment process should be honest enough to identify the difference.

The cultural observations here are experience-led, and consistent with recent research based on interviews with 55 Indonesian and international managers, which emphasises relationship-building and backchannel communication in Indonesian business (Gray, Poljsak-Rosinski & Guttormsen).