The Courage To Rebuild - Beginning Again After War in Ukraine - Tonya Bulgakova

Tonya Bulgakova joins The Change Agent Podcast to talk about Ukrainian refugee leadership, tracing her path from a small city in central Ukraine to leading an NGO team in Brussels made up entirely of expats. She fled the war with two kids, picked up English on the job, and built a management role from nothing.

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Tonya grew up in a small city in central Ukraine and left home at 15. She worked her way through a call center job, then five years with the Ukrainian prime minister's office, before starting her own business, which she ran until the war forced her to leave the country. She fled to Belgium with her two kids and had to rebuild almost everything at once, starting with a language she barely spoke. She landed at an international NGO that supports youth career readiness, on a team where every single colleague, including her, was an expat. Three national languages in one country, and none of them her native Ukrainian. Leading as a Ukrainian refugee in that setting meant learning to read people first and translate second, a skill she says took years to build.

The turning point wasn't a promotion. It came from watching how differently Ukrainians and their Spanish and Brazilian colleagues handle a simple email reply, and realizing her own directness had a reason behind it. That kind of self awareness, paired with a habit of asking for more responsibility instead of waiting for it, is what eventually earned her a management role that didn't exist before her in the organization. She talks candidly about what she had to give up to get there, and what she's only now getting back.

00:00 Introduction
05:06 Finding a role model in her sister
10:29 Culture shock inside an all expat team
16:11 Asking her way into a management role
21:16 Trading a business for team responsibility
26:50 Freedom to reshape her team culture
33:35 Advice for leading across languages

Tonya Bulgakova LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonya-bulgakova/

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