International Development Assignees — What Happens When They Come Back?

I remember this overwhelming feeling of becoming Head of Talent in a big multinational company in Russia almost 10 years ago.  I thought I will be doing things right, I will be following up on every talent process we had scrutinising all the stages:  from planning to post debriefing, from creating lessons learned to actually learning from these lessons.

One of the talent management tools I thought I really needed to have a closer look at was International Assignments.  We were using them as ultimate development took for our Hi-Pos and getting excited about every assignment we could secure.  But once the assignees were out of sight we would conveniently relax and most of the time would be caught unprepared for them when they would return.