Four years ago, the company for which I was working shifted its strategic direction. It had always been an international business but the latest change meant that managers found themselves leading teams formed from what had been separate companies, located on three separate continents and comprising members from different professional backgrounds. Situations like this are no longer unusual and Coaching Across Cultures aims to help managers and team leaders in similar organisations by “offering new tools for leveraging national, corporate and professional differences”.
My company had also invested heavily in coaching support for its senior managers both to help them in their own roles and to develop their skills as coaches with their own people. Philippe Rosinki’s main purpose in writing Coaching Across Cultures is thus to integrate coaching and the inter‐cultural view to provide tools to enable managers and practitioners to bring the cultural dimension into coaching work and coaching skills into cross‐cultural work.
At the outset of the book, he makes what I believe are two important points that are often ignored or underplayed by organisations and practitioners alike. First, coaching, as practised in organisations – whichever model is used, has tended to operate with a western, largely US view of the world. To be truly effective, it needs to reflect the range of ethnic and cultural perspectives. Second, cultural differences arise not just from national differences but also from variations between organisations and professions and the interaction between these three elements. These key themes underpin both the style and structure of the book.
Coaching Across Cultures is divided into three main parts:
- 1
Coaching and culture. This is examines the nature of coaching and then seeks to integrate the cultural dimension.
- 2
Leveraging cultural differences. This introduces a tool to assess and compare cultures. It is divided into dimensions such as a sense of power and responsibility and time management approaches, each of which is explored in an individual chapter.
- 3
Facilitating the high performance and high fulfilment journey. This shows how to put these ideas into practice through a three stage global coaching process and offers tools and techniques to support it.
Coaching Across Cultures is packed with useful tools for coaches to use and examples drawn from Philippe Rosinski’s experience as a coach working in the USA and Europe with a number of major global companies. While intended for managers and cross‐cultural trainers, I believe the book will be of greatest value to experienced coaches, looking for challenge when reflecting on their practice, and OD specialists. The book ends with three useful appendices that cover transactional analysis, neuro‐linguistic programming and soliciting feedback on coaching. There is also a clear glossary.
The author comes over as a man who believes passionately in what he does and this is one of the strengths of the book for me. Paradoxically, it is also one of its weaknesses: sometimes I felt that I was being preached at. After all, whilst cultural differences need to be acknowledged, the search for similarities can be just as important when it comes to working effectively with those from other countries, organisations and professions. I have some other minor criticisms. At 306 pages, the book seemed a little too long and perhaps the second part, which explores each dimension of his cultural orientations framework in turn, might have been shortened. The quotes and case examples are rather overdone and often fog the points that Rosinki is trying to make. At this length it might have accommodated, and certainly needed, an index.
But I do not want to end a negative note. This is a very valuable addition to the range of books on both culture and coaching. It both builds effectively on the work of Gert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaas, etc. in the area of cross‐cultural working and has added a new perspective to the literature on coaching. Support for the managers in the company I mentioned at the beginning built on Rosinski’s insights would have been valuable indeed!
