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Systemic Intercultural Coaching

Online and in Freiburg and surrounding area

What's special about intercultural coaching?

In intercultural coaching, the focus is once again on personality and its development. The focus is on irritating or stressful interactions, which are reflected on using knowledge and action-oriented methods with the aim of developing new solutions for systemic-cultural issues. In intercultural coaching, specific cultural influences such as the cultural meaning of symbols, the character traits and characteristics of typical heroic figures and culture-specific traditions and rituals are analyzed in addition to the usual topics such as conflicts of goals, roles and values as well as belief patterns.

Onion modell

A modification of the onion model according to Geert Hofstede. See Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede: Local thinking, global thinking (6th edition 2017), p.7

Intercultural coaching is about values

An important part of intercultural coaching is the personal examination of one's own values. The question of how your values affect your own behavior and your cooperation and communication with international colleagues. In the usual coaching setting, it is mainly the conscious values that are considered and examined for their influence on one's own perception, thinking and actions. In intercultural coaching, clients also gain access to unconscious values by comparing their own cultural value system with a foreign cultural value system. This comparison of two or more cultures enables the client's own values to become visible. Previously, the cultural value system was taken for granted to such an extent that the individual was no longer aware of it. The degree of irritation triggered by the cultural comparison also provides an indication of how important one's own value is to the individual, or how little one was aware of this value. In addition to exploring their own values, intercultural coaching also strengthens tolerance of ambiguity by teaching clients to exchange "right and wrong thinking" and "either-or thinking" for "both-and thinking" and to tolerate the ambiguity of things. Ideally, this expands the client's own range of possibilities, increases creativity and the coachee learns to engage with the other person's values with curiosity and interest, while at the same time preserving their own, possibly even contradictory values.

Educational elements in intercultural coaching

In contrast to systemic coaching, educational elements about one's own and foreign culture can also be used in intercultural systemic coaching. In addition to the basic knowledge of the cultural dimensions according to Hofstede or the cultural standards according to Thomas, your own experiences are analyzed with regard to cultural stumbling blocks. Experience has also shown that basic psychological knowledge increases the ability to reflect on critical interactions and also contributes positively to ensuring that the behavior of others is not interpreted according to one's own values.

Systemic intercultural coaching: the supreme discipline in systemic coaching

If you want to cooperate with foreign cultures, you need a high degree of personal and emotional maturity that enables you to continuously reflect on yourself. Those who work on the more superficial symptoms in conventional business coaching cannot avoid looking a little deeper and facing up to their own fears here and there in intercultural coaching. Intercultural coaching is therefore more profound and requires more courage and the ability to introspect. The advantage of the systemic intercultural approach is that its methods are not only suitable for Western cultures. Through proxy techniques and narrative techniques, collectivist cultures or individuals can also be coached without focusing too much on themselves.

For whom is systemic intercultural coaching for?

In intercultural coaching, I support managers and employees who have reached the limits of their value system, thinking and behaviour patterns within an organization, work area or work team. As a rule, clients have already acquired basic knowledge of the foreign culture through intercultural training or similar. Through intercultural coaching, they receive in-service, reflective support in dealing sensitively with their own and other cultures' values and orientation systems, as well as in maintaining their tolerance of ambiguity. Both domestic managers who work in an intercultural field and foreign managers who are not yet familiar with German (working) culture benefit from systemic intercultural coaching. Intercultural coaching is also suitable for employees who want to improve their professional relationships, strengthen their internal and external networks and increase their willingness to cooperate.

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