Cross cultural coaching

For many managers globalisation has made cross cultural working routine. Client companies may now offer adaptation courses or perhaps coaching before managers either go overseas on a posting or work with cross cultural teams. Which means that our coaches have also had to adapt to the same demands. Here, Mike Stimson gives a few tips.

Whatever the context, coaches may encounter the issues Elisabeth Marx notes in ‘Breaking through Culture Shock’:

• Strain as managers try to adapt.
• Sense of loss and feelings of deprivation in relation to friends, status, profession and possessions.
• Feeling rejected by or rejecting members of the new culture (or old culture in the case of a return to the United Kingdom).
• Confusion in roles, values and self identity.
• Anxiety and even disgust about ‘foreign’ practices.
• Feelings of helplessness – not being able to cope with the new environment.

Three approaches can help coaches and managers to make sense of these experiences. First, observe and appreciate culturally different behaviours. Second, be aware that different cultures will deal differently with giving and accepting feedback. Asian cultures and loss of face are widely quoted but there are European differences too – the Dutch for instance, are far more direct in giving feedback than we are in the UK. Third, in this example to appreciate the effect of different cultural values on management practice and therefore our coaching.

I was coaching the Head of Organisational Development in a large chemical company in Portugal. One key concern for her was the maintenance of friendly relations with her boss, not unexpected in a high power culture where decisions tend to get pushed up the line rather than down as in the UK. But more surprising were her worries about recruiting three junior managers and the choice of selection process. She wanted an assessment centre rather than selection interviewing and when probed for her reasons, spoke of friendships, relatives and the smallness of the town where the selection was being conducted.We talked through her concerns and the action she might have to take but afterwards, feeling
that her degree of concern was by UK standards disproportionate I checked where Portugal came on the Hofstede scale for Individualism /Collectivism. Sure enough, Portugal is ranked most highly collectivist of all European countries – 3rd on this scale – the UK coming 33rd of 53 – and the reasons for her concentration on ‘family’ became much clearer.

As Jean Monnet put it: ‘If I had to begin again, I would begin with culture’.