She was in tears. I'd sent my account director at the time into her first regional call. A global lead asked her a question she didn't have the answer to. She froze, stammered, reached for her notes. Before she could find the answer, someone from another market responded for her.
I still remember it clearly, years later. It was dramatic, yes. But also avoidable.
For a long time I told that story as a warning. Look what happens when you send someone in unprepared. But the more I've thought about it, the less I see a story about what she lacked. What I see now is everything she already had that nobody told her she could use.
I wish more people knew this: most of what regional work asks for, a good local communicator already owns.
The foundations of PR and comms don't change at the regional level. Message discipline is message discipline. Knowing how to structure a crisis statement or brief a spokesperson under pressure is the same skill, whether you're doing it for one market or for five country leads on the same call. Nobody has to relearn how to write a good release because the audience got bigger.
Neither do the foundations of interpersonal relationships. A good account director already knows how to read a room, and how to tell when a client is nodding but not agreeing. She knows when to push and when to let something sit. Regional work asks for that muscle more often and in front of more people. It doesn't ask for a different version of it.
My account director had all of this. She'd handled harder client conversations than the one that broke her that day. What she didn't have was the belief that any of it counted in that room.
The part that's genuinely different is the layer sitting on top of those foundations.
Cultural nuance. What reads as direct and efficient in one market reads as abrupt in another. A statement that lands as confident in Singapore can come across as tone-deaf in Jakarta. The message is the same. The register is what shifts.
The local media landscape. Who the gatekeepers are. Which outlets actually move public opinion and which ones just make noise. How fast a story travels, and through which channel, changes from market to market too. That knowledge is earned one market at a time. You cannot import it.
The geopolitical context underneath all of it. A message that's neutral in one country can be politically loaded in the next, for reasons that have nothing to do with the client and everything to do with history the communicator wasn't around for.
And the channels themselves. What's read on WhatsApp in one market gets read on LINE in another, and barely registers on either in a third. This is more an issue of fluency than foundations, and fluency takes time and exposure that a title alone doesn't grant.
This is the layer that should genuinely humble someone stepping into a regional brief. Not the fundamentals. The specifics.
Conflating the two is what makes regional work feel so much bigger than it is. If you think you need an entirely new skill set, the jump feels enormous, and it's easy to freeze the way my account director did. If you understand that your foundations already travel, the genuinely new work becomes specific. And specific is a lot less frightening.
Regional isn't a bigger mountain than people think. Most of it is one you've already climbed. The unfamiliar part is a narrower band near the top, and it's learnable the way everything else in this industry gets learned: by doing the work, and by having someone tell you plainly where your read was off.
I sat with my account director after that call. We talked through what she could have said instead. The moment was already gone. The point was to make the next one different so she doesn’t beat herself up over it.
What I did wish I'd said to her before she ever walked into that room was simpler than any of the prep we did afterwards. You already know how to do this job. Just because they seem more important does not mean they are. By being in that room, your value is yours to lose.
It's a reminder for leaders, it's also on us to set our juniors up for success.
If you're handling one market and it feels like a narrower field than the regional seat you're eyeing, don't underestimate what you're building right now.
Get good at the local work. Really good. Learn the market so well you could brief someone else on it without notes. Build the kind of client trust that holds even when you're the one delivering bad news. Fluency in your own patch is what turns the fundamentals from effort into instinct.
That isn't the smaller job. Regional gets built on top of it. And when your own moment comes, the question you don't have a ready answer to in a room full of people watching, the local mastery you put in now is what makes that moment lighter than it was for her.
Not painless. Lighter. That's the whole return on getting really good where you already are.
Patricia Malay is General Manager of Bud Communications, an independent PR and content agency operating across Asia Pacific, and founder of Candour Leads, an advisory practice for leaders navigating transitions and organisational change.
With over 20 years of experience across agency and in-house roles - including positions at FleishmanHillard, Havas, Burson, and Ogilvy - she has built a reputation for exploring the human dimensions of communications work: how talent develops, how leaders communicate honestly, and how organisations build cultures where capable people choose to stay and grow. Patricia is based in Singapore and writes regularly on AI's impact on communications careers, regional talent development, and the gap between what leaders know and what they say.
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