Awareness of Culture for Coaches

These are the takeaways from the participants at our cross-cultural coaching workshop at CoachUP on Saturday.

What struck our participants: Coaches provide better coaching when they are aware of the different cultural styles of their coachee and work with them. It's the coach's job to remain detached and restrain their own culture from dominating a conversation, or "check my own internal biases," as a participant mentioned here. Instead the coach can work with the coachee's cultural communication style, trust style, thinking style, and analysis style.

And even more importantly, cultural differences can be leveraged as assets! When we know enough about our coachee's cultural styles, we can be more creative and effective "in our questions, responses and actions" in a coaching session, as someone commented.

This knowledge can be used "with colleagues and even in my personal life." The more we know about our coachee, the more we can ask "questions that the coachee has never asked to him/herself," as someone else pointed out.

Our thanks to the thoughtful participants who clearly found this to be a stimulating workshop.

Read more about the workshop here.