This article by Richard Cook and Philippe Rosinski includes several extracts directly from the book ‘Coaching Across Cultures’ written by Philippe Rosinski - New Tools for Leveraging National, Corporate and Professional Differences, published this month by Nicholas Brealey Publishing reproduced by permission.

The Recent Discipline of Coaching

Coaching is a pragmatic humanism. Coaching values well-being and fulfillment. It emphasizes self-care, quality of life, and human growth. Coaching is also a method to enhance performance and a leadership style that gets results.

Coaches help people find practical solutions to the concrete challenges they face: how can people make the most of their time, improve leadership and communication, achieve ambitious work goals, have a better life balance, understand and use emotions, develop their creative thinking, overcome harmful stress, establish constructive relationships, and so on?

Coaching and interculturalism have existed till now as separate disciplines, missing cross-fertilization opportunities. I have endeavored to systematically integrate these two domains with the goal of building bridges between coaching and interculturalism to the benefit of both professions.

The global & cross-cultural context

Facing increased competition and changing conditions, corporations and other organizations have to achieve more output with fewer resources. They need creativity and flexibility to deal with unexpected challenges and to seize new opportunities. They can no longer afford to waste their human talent. Instead, they must nurture, develop, and deploy their human capabilities, while making themselves attractive to the best talent. Until recently, coaches have relied on common sense, communication techniques, and psychological perspectives (such as behavioral psychology and emotional intelligence). Given the amazing challenges in a global and turbulent environment at home and abroad, this is no longer sufficient. Traditional coaching has assumed a worldview (i.e., American and, to some extent, Western European) that doesn’t hold true universally. Culture must now become part of the equation. Although the concept of culture sometimes evokes nations (e.g., British culture, French culture), the Coaching Across Cultures approach considers cultural groups of various kinds, the most common ones (apart from nations) being corporations (e.g., Unilever and Bestfoods) and professions (e.g., artists, teachers or professors, engineers, and business managers). In other words, the Coaching Across Cultures approach is not solely written for working across cultures in an international sense but also for those working with people from different organizations and backgrounds. This said, the Coaching Across Cultures approach is in fact more concerned with cultural perspectives (e.g., alternative ways to communicate) and what can be learned from them than, say, describing the cultural characteristics of particular nations, corporations, or professions.

The evolution of coaching

Because coaching is about helping people to unleash their potential, integrating the cultural dimension in your coaching process makes it possible to deploy even more potential by tapping into various possible worldviews and also by expanding your repertoire of options. Coaching across cultures should not be viewed as a new coaching specialty. It is, rather, a “paradigm shift,” an enlargement of coaching as most people have practiced it to date. In our international and intercultural society, coaching across cultures represents a positive and inevitable evolution of coaching. Consequently, it is destined to become mainstream.

Communicating across cultures

One key problem is that each person brings with them a set of expectations as to how to approach the communication. The danger is to assume that the communication style and the core values that underpin that style will automatically be accepted as the most appropriate by people from other cultures.

However, there are significant cultural differences in terms of ‘best practices’ associated with communicating with others in a coaching context. If such differences are not appreciated and managed, the resulting frustrations and misunderstandings can lead to confusion, a sense of discomfort and to frustration and poor results.

On the other hand, when those differences are embraced as an opportunity and as a source of richness new options and more choices become available to all parties.

Leveraging cultural differences

Coaching across cultures means looking for opportunities to unleash more human potential by leveraging cultural differences. The outcome is increased performance and fulfillment. The following case study illustrates how this can be done.

Case Study 1

Mark Philips, a British director of the U.K. operation of an international corporation, was asked to manage the European Nordic Region. The regional head office was based in Stockholm, and most employees were Swedish. These Swedes had acquired a negative reputation among other European staff members, resulting from a series of misunderstandings due to poor inter-cultural awareness on all sides. During the coaching sessions, the coach encouraged Mark to learn more about Swedish culture.

Stepping into the ‘others’ shoes’

Rather than assuming a lack of commitment from the Swedes, Mark was challenged to view the puzzling behaviors he had observed through the lens of Swedish culture itself and to proactively look for the merits of their cultural orientations rather than the pitfalls. Mark realized, for example, that the Swedes’ absence of agitation and frenzy (which he was accustomed to) had some advantages. For Swedes, being referred to as kolugn (calm as a cow) is a compliment. It suggests virtues of patience and of maintaining one’s cool no matter what happens. Mark had initially been infuriated seeing Swedish employees calmly sipping their cups of coffee and taking a lot of time off, apparently unaffected by the business pressures to deliver results quickly.

As it turns out, this is not laziness; Swedes simply value their leisure time highly. Furthermore, Mark found that independence is also important to Swedes, who want to be their own masters. They do not show off or try to appear different. Yet, they simply back out when coerced. However, Swedes are comfortable with very direct communication and in fact expect straightforwardness.

Consequently, Mark stated his expectations precisely and quietly, while offering his support if they needed help. He gave the Swedes time to reflect on how they would go about meeting specific business challenges. They eventually agreed on a plan. The Swedes proved very reliable at carrying out the project as stated. Their fellow European colleagues started to appreciate them.

Mark was able to earn the respect of Swedish employees. Even more important, Mark went beyond adapting his behaviors to fit into the Swedish culture. He was inspired by the Swedes and what he was learning from them. Life balance is something Mark decided, having seen the Swedish example, to make a top priority for himself. Moreover, he learned from the Swedes the virtues of being patient and of calmly putting issues on the table without beating about the bush. He blended these traits with his own British cultural traits and thus enhanced his leadership repertoire.

As this example shows, the coach’s aim was not only to unleash human potential (as a traditional coach would do), but also aspire to make the most of alternative worldviews. In reality, coaches and leaders may not always be able to emulate individuals who manage to find richness in cultural differences. But it is important to become aware of your own cultural characteristics, decipher underlying worldviews of others, and use cultural differences constructively as this case study shows.

Coaching with a national and corporate cross-cultural focus does not yet prevail. It should be apparent that traditional coaching has implicitly reflected particular norms, values, and basic assumptions that reflect the originating culture of the field of coaching, the United States, and do not necessarily hold true universally.

The author of Coaching Across Cultures can be contacted at: philippe@philrosinski.com