Cross-cultural coaching asks you to check whether the way you usually coach fits the client in front of you. Culture can shape how a client defines a goal, responds to feedback, interprets silence, makes decisions, or thinks about who else should be involved. These differences can come from nationality, but they can also come from family, profession, organization, generation, or other parts of the client’s life.
A client may say they want a promotion, for example, while also thinking about family expectations, responsibilities to their team, or how advancement is viewed in their organization. Understanding that context helps you ask better questions instead of deciding in advance what the goal should mean.
TL;DR
Cross-cultural coaching is less a separate discipline than a habit of checking whether the way you usually coach fits the person in front of you. Culture can shape how a client states a goal, hears feedback, uses silence, or decides who else has a say. Frameworks such as Hofstede, GLOBE, the Culture Map, and Rosinski’s Cultural Orientations Framework are useful for working out what to ask, never for deciding in advance what a client believes. Group-level patterns describe populations, not people. Nationality is also only one influence: profession, organization, generation, and family often matter more.
What is Cross-Cultural Coaching?
Cross-cultural coaching is coaching that pays attention to the cultural contexts affecting the client and the coaching relationship. A coach may need to think more carefully about:
- The goal: Who is affected by it? Who has a say in it? How comfortable is the client stating it directly?
- The questions: Does a direct question help the client think, or does another approach work better?
- The feedback: How does the client prefer feedback to be given and discussed?
- The coaching agreement: How should confidentiality, expectations, feedback, and ways of working be agreed?
You do not need to predict these differences before the session. Ask enough to understand how the client sees the situation and adapt where it helps.
Cross-cultural coaching is also different from cross-cultural training. Training may teach cultural frameworks, workplace practices, or information about working in another cultural setting. Coaching works with a specific client’s goals, decisions, relationships, and experiences while taking culture into account.
Why Do Organizations Use Cross-Cultural Coaching?
Organizations may use cross cultural coaching when leaders and teams work across countries, markets, or culturally diverse workplaces. Differences in communication, authority, trust, feedback, and decision making can affect how people work together.
Wider research on workplace diversity also shows why organizations pay attention to how people from different backgrounds work together. InformationWeek, citing McKinsey’s 2023 research, reported a 27% financial outperformance figure for companies with greater ethnic diversity in their leadership teams.
This research is not a measure of cross cultural coaching. It provides wider business context for why organizations may pay attention to cultural differences in leadership and teamwork.
In a coaching engagement, the focus is more specific. The coach can explore how differences around communication, trust, feedback, leadership, or decision making are affecting the client’s situation.
Which Cultural Frameworks Can Coaches Use?
The four frameworks below look at culture from different levels. They can help you decide what to explore, but the client’s own experience should determine whether a pattern is relevant.
| Framework | What it looks at | Level | What it can help you explore | What to keep in mind |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hofstede’s cultural dimensions | Six dimensions of culture | Countries and societies | Broad differences in values and expectations | Country-level patterns do not describe one person |
| GLOBE | Cultural practices, values, and leadership expectations | Societies and cultural clusters | Leadership expectations across cultures | Society-level findings can hide individual and local differences |
| The Culture Map | Eight behavioral scales | Cultures, with individual and team tools also available | Communication, feedback, trust, decisions, and other workplace behaviors | Positions are relative rather than fixed personal traits |
| The Cultural Orientations Framework | Cultural orientations across 17 dimensions | Individuals, teams and organizations | Coaching, leadership development, and team or organizational work | The client’s context can change how an orientation shows up |
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions
Hofstede developed his model from research involving IBM employees across more than 50 countries. The original model had four dimensions and later expanded to six through subsequent work associated with Michael Bond and Michael Minkov.
The framework can give you a broad sense of cultural differences worth exploring. A country score should not be used to predict what a client will think or do. People within the same country can have very different experiences, values, personalities, workplaces, and family backgrounds.
The GLOBE Study
GLOBE looks separately at cultural practices and cultural values: what people experience in their society and what they believe should happen. The project established nine dimensions of societal culture. Its official account reports that more than 17,000 middle managers across 62 cultures took part in the research.
This can be useful in leadership coaching because a client may work within one set of expectations while personally believing leadership should work differently.
GLOBE also studied leadership expectations across cultural clusters. Use those findings to explore the client’s experience rather than to infer their personality from their location.
The Culture Map
Erin Meyer’s Culture Map uses eight scales to compare workplace behaviors such as communication, feedback, trust, leadership, and decision-making.
The comparisons are relative. A communication style may feel direct when compared with one culture and less direct when compared with another.
That makes the framework useful for identifying differences that might affect a working relationship. It still does not tell you how every individual from a culture will behave.
Meyer’s tools also include personal, team, and corporate profiles, so the framework can be used for more than comparisons between national cultures.
The Cultural Orientations Framework
Philippe Rosinski’s Cultural Orientations Framework looks at 17 cultural dimensions and can be used with individuals, teams, and organizations.
Its view of culture goes beyond nationality. It includes influences such as family, generation, profession, organization, and country.
That can be useful when a client’s situation cannot be understood through nationality alone. Two people from the same country may have very different experiences because they work in different professions, organizations, or communities.
The provider recommends certification for coaches using the COF assessment with individual clients and requires it for team and organizational use.
How Does a Cross-Cultural Coaching Session Change?
1. Agree on How Feedback Will Work
Ask during contracting how the client prefers feedback to be given and discussed. You may usually give direct feedback, but another client may respond better when there is more context or time to think. You do not need to guess. Ask what helps them work with feedback.
2. Ask Who Else Is Connected to the Goal
Start with what the client wants, then ask who else is affected by the outcome or has a say in it. This can come up in career coaching, where conversations may include the client’s ambitions, values, strengths, and career goals.
A career decision may also involve family responsibilities, team expectations, or the client’s organization. Asking who else is affected can give you a clearer understanding of what the goal means to that client.
3. Give Silence Time Before Interpreting It
Silence can mean several things. The client may be thinking, choosing their words carefully, waiting for you to continue, or feeling uncomfortable with the question. Give them time. If you need to understand what happened, ask rather than deciding what the silence means.
4. Reflect Before Adding Your Interpretation
Reflect back what you heard before explaining what you think it means. This gives the client a chance to correct your understanding. It can also help you notice when your own assumptions are shaping the way you interpret their words.
What Can Go Wrong in Cross-Cultural Coaching?
A framework becomes less useful when it starts telling you who you think the client is.
- Using a national score as a description of the client. A country-level score describes a pattern across a group. It cannot tell you how one person thinks, communicates, or makes decisions. Use the framework to form a question, then listen to the answer.
- Changing etiquette without changing the coaching. Knowing common business customs can help, but cultural differences can also affect goals, questions, feedback, authority, trust, and decision-making. Those parts of the coaching may need attention too.
- Treating nationality as the client’s only culture. Profession, organization, family, generation, region, and other communities can all shape expectations. Two people living in the same city can work within very different professional or organizational cultures.
- Ignoring the wider workplace. Sometimes organizational norms, leadership behavior, or team dynamics are contributing to the situation. Individual coaching can help the client work with their own choices and responses, but the engagement should be clear about what it is expected to address.
If the issue involves the way a whole team works together, team coaching changes the focus. Shared goals, relationships, and patterns across the team become part of the coaching work.
How Can Coaches Build Cross-Cultural Skill?
Cross-cultural skill develops through practice, reflection, and feedback. Start by looking at your own habits. The way you ask questions, give feedback, use silence, talk about goals, or respond to authority may feel normal to you because you have used it for years.
Four practices can help:
- Examine your own preferences. Use one framework to notice how you tend to approach communication, feedback, trust, authority, time, or decision-making.
- Ask for feedback. Where appropriate, ask clients from different backgrounds how they experienced your questions, feedback, and way of working.
- Use supervision or professional reflection. Look closely at sessions where you may have made an assumption about what a client meant or needed.
- Learn one framework properly. Understand what it measures, what level it describes, and what it cannot tell you about an individual client.
Training or certification can help you understand a particular framework. You will still need to check what applies to each client.
If you work with senior leaders, it can also help to understand how different coaching roles are defined. Our guide to executive and leadership coaching explains the differences and similarities between these two types of coaching.
Conclusion
Cross-cultural coaching begins with a simple check: does the way you usually coach fit this client and this situation? Hofstede can help you notice broad societal patterns. GLOBE adds cultural practices, values, and leadership expectations. The Culture Map helps compare workplace behaviors. Rosinski’s framework looks at cultural orientations across individuals, teams, and organizations.
The framework gives you somewhere to start. The client tells you what applies. Ask about their experience, notice where your own assumptions may be influencing the conversation, and adapt the coaching when the context calls for it.
Key Takeaways
- Culture can affect the coaching method. Goals, questions, feedback, silence, contracting, and decisions may all be understood differently.
- Use cultural frameworks to identify questions worth asking. They should not be used to define an individual client.
- Different frameworks look at culture in different ways. Hofstede and GLOBE mainly describe patterns across societies. The Culture Map can also be used to compare people and teams, while Rosinski’s Cultural Orientations Framework includes tools for individual, team, and organizational work.
- Ask before you adapt. The client’s own experience tells you whether a cultural pattern is relevant.
- Look beyond nationality. Profession, organization, family, generation, and other cultural influences may matter.
- Include the wider workplace when it affects the issue. Team dynamics, leadership behavior, and organizational expectations can shape what the client is dealing with.
If you want to keep your coaching practice and client work organized in one place, explore Simply.Coach.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Cross-Cultural Coaching?
Cross-cultural coaching is coaching that takes the client’s cultural context into account when working with goals, communication, feedback, decisions, trust, and other parts of the coaching relationship. The coach explores how culture may affect the situation instead of assuming the same approach will work for every client.
What Is the Difference Between Cross-Cultural Coaching and Cross-Cultural Training?
Cross-cultural training usually teaches information, frameworks, workplace practices, or common cultural differences. Cross-cultural coaching works with a client or team on their own goals, decisions, relationships, and experiences while taking cultural context into account. The two approaches can also be used together.
Which Frameworks Are Used in Cross-Cultural Coaching?
Common frameworks include Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, GLOBE, Erin Meyer’s Culture Map, and Philippe Rosinski’s Cultural Orientations Framework. They look at culture from different levels, so choose one that fits what you are trying to understand and use it to guide questions rather than label the client.
How Do Cultural Differences Affect Coaching Questions?
A question can be understood differently depending on the client’s context. A question focused on individual ambition, for example, may miss family, team, or organizational responsibilities that matter to the client. Ask enough to understand how the client sees the goal instead of assuming what it means.
How Can Coaches Avoid Stereotyping Clients?
Use cultural frameworks as prompts for questions rather than conclusions. Ask about the client’s own experience, consider influences beyond nationality, and be willing to change your interpretation when the client’s experience does not match a framework.
How Can I Build My Cross-Cultural Coaching Skills?
Start by examining your own assumptions about communication, feedback, authority, trust, goals, and decision-making. Client feedback, supervision, and a well-understood cultural framework can also help you notice patterns in your own coaching and decide where you may need to adapt.
How Can I Build Trust With Clients From Different Cultural Backgrounds?
Ask early about how the client prefers to communicate, receive feedback, and work with you. Pay attention to what helps them raise questions or disagreement comfortably. A cultural framework can suggest areas to explore, but the client’s own preferences should guide the relationship.
Is Cross-Cultural Coaching Only for International Clients?
No. Cultural differences can also appear within the same country, organization, profession, generation, or team. Cross-cultural coaching can be useful whenever different expectations around communication, authority, feedback, trust, or decision-making affect the client’s situation.