The Need for Intercultural Coach Training

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Ghadah Angawi, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

The last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in hiring people from diverse backgrounds in organizations. Most of these organizations aimed to widen their customer base by expanding the knowledge gained across the organization due to diverse backgrounds and cultures of its employees. Some organizations also focus on diversity as a way to say they value fair opportunity and equality. They hire people from diverse backgrounds and prepare them through training and development programs. While diversity may be seen as an addition that can enhance organizational effectiveness, it may also cause many problems due to the one-way communication from the majority of the employees towards the diverse group or multicultural group (Ely 1996). This is exhibited in how an organization tries to align its members to its main dominant culture overlooking or even opposing the diverse cultural back ground of these employees. It is also exhibited in how an employee is trained and directed on how the system works in this specific organization. The organization does not acknowledge or utilizes the employee’s own cultural experience.
Cultural coaching in organization is gaining gradually more weight in how these organizations succeed in this diverse environment. More and more coaches are realizing there are skills to be gained and knowledge to be acquired in relation to this aspect of coaching cultures. Certainly, there are lessons to be learned from the literature and research on the subject of cross cultural management and leadership in organization for coaches, but the field of cultural coaching is still under-researched and in need for theoretical underpinning to facilitate practical models for coaches to use and explore in their own context. Moreover the field of coaching and its competencies is in its infancy and new emerging applications in different cultures are being explored by coaches around the world. What we know now is there are differences in coaching approaches that require a learning attitude from the coaches themselves towards their diverse clients.
Some coaches argue that they can almost deal with any cultural situation that arises in coaching. They argue that the coach training covers all the required competencies a coach needs to handle a client regardless of their background or culture. Other emerging coaches who come from a different cultural background, disagree and argue that the eleven competencies identified by the International Coach Federation (ICF) is not enough to prepare a coach for intercultural exposure in the coaching practice (Barosa-Pereira, 2014). My own position regarding this issue is relative. A coach training is designed and delivered according to western standards in relating to western culture. Coaching instructional material and the delivery of this material in another culture is in the process of adaptation by the trainers/coaches themselves who are part of that other culture. Nevertheless, the material and competencies stay the same in its major content and does not account for the other culture’s need for other competencies or content. While this approach may be acceptable in the western culture, the receiving culture(s) may find some or part of the content incomplete or not in harmony. Therefore the coaches receiving training in the other culture are confused on how to practice coaching under the ICF regulations and ethical framework while their culture(s) may contradict with some of it.
The other issue I like to raise here is that a receiving coach who is from another culture differ in his competencies from the delivering trainer/coach from the original western culture. The receiving coach, by training with the western cultured coach, is already gaining the intercultural experience and competency that will enable him to have an additional skill in handling their own client if they come from a western culture. The skill that coach/trainer might skip gaining in their occupation with the delivery of the instructed material. Thus, when a coach from a non-western culture is exposed to another third culture, they already know how to manoeuvre and adapt, claiming they have no need for cultural competency and that any coach in their basic training will be able to handle their culturally distinctive client. That is very true only for the western culture they are receiving from. Yet we need to discover if they can deal with an Asian or African or North European culture with the same ease. I am stressing the importance of conducting cultural coaching studies to assess the validity of introducing a new competency. Having said that I argue strongly that ICF and the like organizations review their approach in training coaches, the competencies and the material required to build those competencies.