But it wasn’t always so easy. Back in 2007, Erin was working in a remote village in Latin America enjoying her work as a teacher but living an insecure economic situation, paid in beans and rice – and not advancing up any career or business ladders.

A self-imposed intercultural challenge

The bridge between these two contrasting situations was intercultural. Erin set herself an intercultural challenge to immerse herself completely in a culture and a language very, very different from her own. Erin’s chosen country was Jordan, a relatively conservative Islamic kingdom with borders to Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and more. Soon, with her close friend Jennifer, a new goal to build a business was set into motion.

Mission impossible?

The business challenge seemed to embrace the impossible. The mission appeared to ignore the realities. How could two Americans create a business of a kind which had never before scaled in Jordan, where people are openly suspicious of your motivations and earnestly question the soundness of your business idea, where personal connections are everything, and where some familiar bedrock concepts of American business, such as a generally dependable and transparent legal system, were simply not present?

Imported ideas won’t work

Erin’s response to this challenge was a combination of her own methodology and a voracious appetite for insights and approaches from the intercultural field. Within a short time living in Jordan it was obvious that you could not import your home-culture’s model for business success into this country. You’d need a business approach far more rooted in the local culture.

تعلم اللغة العربية

First, Erin invested fully in learning the language at a very deep level. Language skills opened doors and turned acquaintanceships into friendships which in turn opened doors to a world of social connections, a multiplying network of people willing to help a friend or a friend of a friend.

Suspicious activity

Life is rarely so simple, and learning the language aroused suspicion too. In this tense and volatile region of the world, local people may have in mind that there could be foreign spies in the country, and if true, those spies might look and sound like you do. Gaining acceptance here in Jordan would demand so much more than just knowing the language.

Success was not coming easy, but some early wins with her expanding and deepening network of local friends convinced her to continue to strive on the path she had set herself.

Out of the cultural comfort zone

With the help of intercultural literature, Erin trained her eye to see important details of culture in everyday situations. She noticed that other people were not seeing – nor not responding – to those cultural differences.

Erin found a way to stay true to herself while adapting authentically to the culture she was in. As their business grew, Erin began to convert her experience and the collected research from the intercultural field into cultural-competence components at the language centre.

Their Shababeek language centre was gaining a reputation as a forum for facilitating relationships between Arabs and others. The centre’s development model was based on the idea of nurturing students. The service provided support as students gained language skills and passed deeper into authentic intercultural experiences, further out of the comfort zone.

Diversifying the management

Within a year, the business was at a scale and complexity where more local talent was needed in the management. Drawing on famous American entrepreneurial characteristics of hard work, persistence and a “we can figure this out” attitude had taken the founders a long way, but recruiting talented local managers for the business was a game-changer.

Recruitment of staff, which was almost entirely by social media and personal networks could now accelerate and expand access to new sources of talent.

Erin continues to be part of the leadership of the Shababeek language centre and has more recently developed an independent business, CultureDive, which focuses 100% on her intercultural practice.

Stepping back from personal crisis

With the CultureDive brand, Erin is delivering a compassionate service to expatriates who are facing challenges often so intense that their entire expatriate assignment is threatened. “I had seen so many early returns from my expatriate circle of friends” says Erin, “I created CultureDive to ensure that people had a way to step back from crisis when they are hurting on an overseas assignment.”

CultureDive is more than a preventive to expat failure. According to Erin, CultureDive exists to enhance people’s lives as expats. The methodology gives clients cultural lenses, helping them adapt to extreme difference while retaining their own strong sense of self.

“We’re here to help expats thrive”, says Erin. “We know that it is hard to live and work in another culture. When people start working with us, they may feel that they are also surviving on a diet of rice and beans, so to speak. My story, and many other stories like mine are proof that stepping whole-heartedly into a new culture can bring the energy and inspiration which turns your whole life around”.

Erin Reyes is CultureConnector’s Cultural Correspondent for Jordan.

Image credits: Erin Reyes

Looking to the year 2025, Manuela Marquis sees a world where priorities have shifted. New skills are in demand: intercultural competence, virtual collaboration, participative leadership. She founded CrescenTalent to help key individuals and organisations who are already targeting the skills needed in the mid-2020s.

Targeting change in the real world

CrescenTalent is beginning a major initiative to make coaching the trigger to change. Coaching, according to Manuela, goes far beyond skills. “The concept of coaching is fundamentally different to training” says Manuela. “Skills may be activated or developed through training, but the target of coaching is direct change in the real world. This is a solution to the oldest problem of training: transfer from the classroom into work.”

Research-based intercultural coaching

Manuela follows published research on business competences. “The World Economic Forum in 2016 was a particular turning point in my thinking,” she reflects. “Since then, the WEF and other organisations have produced important trend data on current developments and predictions about business skills. We are starting to face the realities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is why I am in collaboration with other intercultural coaches and consultants who want to offer a constructive response to that challenge.”

IMC-coaching, Ceran, ICF, SIETAR, CrescenTalent, ICF and SIETAR

Manuela’s connections to several leading networks mean that she can exchange and develop ideas with fellow professionals from the widest variety of cultures and industries.

IMC, or Intercultural Mobility Coaching is the network of professional coaches with expertise in communication and international management. Ceran is a large training organisation providing intercultural training and consultancy services, with a particularly large community of intercultural consultants. CrescenTalent is a consultancy founded by Manuela. The term crescent originates in the Latin word crescere, which means “to grow”. CrescenTalent focus on developing talent, creating bridges of understanding between humans to boost performance and thus increase competence in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous VUCA world. CrescenTalent help businesses to adapt to organisational and technological change in an international environment. The International Coach Federation (ICF) is the world’s largest organization of professionally trained coaches, where Manuela is actively engaged in organising international events for the members in Paris. Finally SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research), an association for interculturalists, is another inspiration for Manuela.

“Teamwork and collaboration come naturally after working in an American corporate environment” says Manuela “and independence and agility are essential to my business. As the founder of a specialised consultancy firm, we need to be agile in order to conduct change-management fast and effectively”.

Serious intercultural business at Disney

Manuela’s intercultural journey began when she left her native Germany at the age of 20. After some time in hotel and event management in London, Cannes and Luxembourg, she took a role at Disneyland Paris, in their giant conventions business. “Opened in 1992, Disneyland Paris was at first known for its theme parks but not for the convention business. An internal training was organised to explain the difference to the employees as the clients’ expectations were totally different. ”

From her position in Disney’s business event management, Manuela soon found herself managing multi-lingual, multi-cultural teams with similarly diverse clients where all the normal challenges of international business are heightened: integration and diversity, high-profile, quality-conscious, on-schedule delivery of complex projects, layers of national and organisational culture, fast-paced formation of new teams, and a focus on recruiting and developing talent locally and internationally.

Training for a multi-cultural business environment

“Disneyland Paris was a good school for me” says Manuela, considering her ten years in the business-convention field. “With guests from all over the world, we dealt with every possible kind of intercultural interaction. But in our business, hierarchy was the cultural difference we experienced most sharply. I moved into training and became fascinated by the concepts and the pedagogy. Training methodology has a big impact on success.”

In harmony with changes in technology

After leaving Disneyland Paris, Manuela trained as a professional coach, got an ICF Certification and dived deeper into the blending of skills and technology. “Today there is less expatriation, more virtual collaboration. This often divides the generations and different individuals on a team. A personalised approach is important to achieve results.” Manuela enjoys getting hands-on with technology and works creatively with teams to implement new tech and establish successful working practices for online collaboration. “These are becoming essential intercultural skills” she suggests.

Measuring the impact of coaching

“My clients, who are often executives, Directors, VPs or HR people, have always had a clear view of what to expect from intercultural coaching”, claims Manuela. These clients often want their employees to listen to outside views, to get a new perspective through a non-judgemental coaching dialogue. “They want increased self-awareness, to find bridges to other people and work better together. In short, intercultural collaboration skills.”

“With technology, today diagnostics can be done very easily. We can very efficiently do “before- and after” -studies.” Many HR departments among Manuela’s clients need help converting their goals into metrics. “There is much more interest now in measurability, but it is surprising how many top leaders recognise the importance of soft-skills and do not demand a data-driven approach to coaching.”

In a typical 5-10 session coaching series, Manuela targets business transformation. She concludes “During one coaching series we can find the strengths and weaknesses in the team and put them on a path towards solving the challenges of international business they decided to address.”

The biggest tip we can give you is to start practising mindfulness yourself. Mindfulness is a tool that cannot be captured by explaining; its essence can only be grasped once you try it out for yourself and observe its benefits first-hand.

This is easy to understand why when we reconsider the fact that intercultural trainings that focus overly on concepts and ideas are doomed to fail, because these do not address the often visceral component of intercultural conflict.

Teaching our clients through engaging, hands-on activities like simulations and role-plays is a big improvement on theory-driven trainings for this reason, that our clients are able to “try out” different behaviours which allow them to become aware of cultural differences at a physical and emotional level and not merely an abstract intellectual level.

However, these activities are doomed to be partially effective at best unless we prepare the ground for them by raising their awareness of their own inner states in the first place. For example, some clients may hold strong opinions about something or have a stubborn or dismissive attitude towards the training. At the extreme, they may be stuck in the “denial” phase of for example.

Clients like these are extremely attached to their own thoughts and emotions. They lack awareness of other points of view, but worse than that, they lack the motivation to step outside their frameworks. To them, their reality is the only reality that matters.

With clients like these, simply addressing their resistance with an intellectual argument is ineffective. There will be no traction. Their resistance is at a much deeper level. At this level, relying on tools from the “realm of the mind” is not going to help these clients with the necessary step of getting OUT of their mindsets in the first place.

Mindfulness exercises reduce resistance to positive change

In challenging situations like these, here is where mindfulness works well as a preparatory exercise, by gently guiding their awareness towards the states of their own bodies and breaths. Resistance often takes the form of tension in the muscles and breathing patterns. Getting clients to taste the relief and comfort that mindful relaxation brings can help render them a little more open and receptive.

Mindfulness exercises that focus on breath and body awareness are also very simple. Anyone can follow the instructions, and they do not need any other equipment other than oneself. This simplicity can be very attractive to a client, as it is uncomplicated and approachable. Most importantly, “the proof is in the pudding” – the client should be able to feel the difference within himself or herself. This will help reduce their scepticism, tilling that stony soil for the gradual introduction of ideas to stimulate intercultural adaptability.

However, it is impossible for you as a trainer to be able to teach these mindfulness exercises unless you have tasted for yourself the positive changes that come with training your awareness this way.

Consider the interconnectedness of mind, body and breath we learnt about in How mindfulness can transform intercultural training. We all can sense it when we meet someone who is calm, centred, and grounded. It is a whole-being display, that goes beyond a merely intellectual attempt to “sort out your thoughts” and “think clearly”.

We all know people, including ourselves at times, when we think we are behaving calmly and rationally, when those other people who are with us can see how our angry or nervous body language contradicts that self-belief.

As a trainer, standing in front of your clients leading the intervention, can you imagine how they will respond to you when you are teaching them a mindfulness exercise, when they can sense that you yourself do not know what it feels like to have a calm, clear, and stable mind?

Therefore, embarking on your own personal practice of mindfulness is really an unavoidable step if you are looking to harness the profound power of this tool to boost your intercultural training.

The good thing is that you stand to benefit in multiple ways. Not only will it increase your effectiveness as a trainer, you will experience increased personal wellbeing and effectiveness that will manifest in other parts of your life.

Kickstart your mindfulness practice

Try out a mindfulness or meditation app

Some good ones include

• Headspace
• Insight Timer
• Imagine Clarity
• Calm.

Some apps like Imagine Clarity offer structured courses that you can follow step-by-step to progress yourself. Others like Insight Timer offer a smorgasbord of different meditations, plus the chance to plug into a community.

Join a class or group, or take a course

An increasing number of centres offer mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and other related disciplines. Many of these have introductory offers, such as class passes that allow you to try out different types of mindfulness practice, meditation, or yoga. Take advantage of these to find out which one suits you best.

There may also be informal groups that meet up in your neighbourhood, or longer and more structured courses offered by these centres or other institutions of learning such as community colleges and adult learning schools. Retreats are a fantastic way of immersing yourself in a tailored and nurturing environment designed to provide conducive conditions for mindfulness practice. They range from a day to several weeks and even months. Have some fun exploring what’s on offer near you that suits your budget.

Read up

Three excellent introductions are:

• The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Practical Mindfulness: A Step by Step Guide published by Dorling Kindersley. 

 Get a mentor or teacher.

As you broaden your knowledge of mindfulness taking a course or reading up for example, you may come across individuals in your classes or specific authors whom you really like. Alternatively, within your workplace there may already be leaders or colleagues whom you recognise as being particularly good at applying mindfulness at work. Seek out these individuals as formal or informal mentors or teachers. An individualised relationship like this can be tremendously powerful to your progress.

If these are well-respected teachers, they may have a community of students following their teachings. Being part of this community and sharing its energy, learnings, and mutual support is of tremendous benefit in and of itself.

Try it out!

Let yourself get curious about ways in which you could do your everyday tasks more mindfully. Catch yourself being impatient, learn to notice signs such as gripping the steering wheel more tightly, tapping your pen hard on the table, or noticing your face flushing or your voice rising while in a tough conversation.

Watch the thoughts and emotions fleeting across your mind at times like these. For the next breath, take it slowly, and recentre yourself. Release tension with the outbreath, and inhale relief and nourishment with the next breath. Repeat. See how this changes your inner state and external behaviour.

The problem is that we too often fail to get leaders, organisations, HR colleagues and clients excited by the opportunities from intercultural competence. We are not succeeding in demonstrating the true value of intercultural training. It’s the challenge of selling intercultural training.

Participants in intercultural training may expect to walk away with some answers. Intercultural training provides answers which are sometimes difficult to grasp and seemingly impossible to quantify when transferred into the workplace.

For a Learning and Development manager, the outcomes of intercultural training may be a hard sell internally.

When participants arrive at a training, they may not be expecting to commit to a new mindfulness task in their already-busy schedule for the coming weeks or months. Like everyone, training participants have the challenge of finding time/space to implement mindfulness.

Fortunately, mindfulness adds to the long list of benefits of intercultural training. Here are some that can help you build your business case for a mindfulness-enhanced intercultural training programme.

Better results in international work

There is now an increasing body of evidence around the cost of mindless business operations:

• Bad decision-making
• Mistakes
• Oversights
• Knee-jerk reactions

Meanwhile, mindful managers are different from their colleagues. Mindful managers are no longer responding inappropriately to the situation because some colleague has triggered them. They are able to avoid more mistakes in intercultural situations and generate a positive result where others are suffering confusion, frustration or conflict.

Business realism

Perhaps most powerful benefit of mindfulness when making the case, is the licence to recognise reality. We do not expect participants to say “diversity is a 100% good thing for me”, and “I love cultural differences and always enjoy working with our foreign clients”. Mindful intercultural training comes at this from a different angle.

The mindful intercultural training session allows the negative as well as the positive responses to come out. Honest negative, positive and mixed emotions are our starting point for getting skilled at dealing with future cross-cultural tensions, and turning emotional flashpoints into an on-going series of insights and tests passed.

Pleasant feelings

The list of benefits includes pleasure. There is a lot of pleasure to be unlocked from cultural difference, if you allow yourself. Imagining a world where diversity really brings fun, fascination, discovery, opportunity, without many of the familiar frustrations is a very attractive idea to many people.

This is not oversell, because mindfulness is not about eliminating the downsides. Instead mindfulness is about accepting and gaining insights and strength from cultural difference. And yes, it promises to unlock more pleasure for people working in globalised environments, leading to more successful international projects and completed expatriate assignments.

Many more personal benefits

People who use mindfulness techniques report a heightened state of involvement, better memory and attention levels and a greater feeling of being present in the moment. The training and the techniques are not cold and calculating.

Mindfulness often brings a greater liking for the task, and by extension, more happiness from intercultural projects. In short, it makes intercultural work more satisfying and fun.

For organisations, mindfulness has been shown to increase employees’ openness to new information and improve problem solving through awareness of multiple perspectives. Applied to intercultural competence training, the list of potential mindfulness-enabled skills is impressive.

Intercultural training is not like most other training. Getting a return on investment is hard. This is because we often need to apply our intercultural knowledge and skills in the most stressful and confusing of situations, when many people fall back into instinctive, familiar responses and actions, not what they learned on a course months or years ago.

A standard aim of cultural training is to “transfer new skills and insights into real workplace situations”. This is a worthy goal. The next level of ambition is for cultural training to begin a personal transformation which returns the investment many times over a long period and overcomes the barriers to successful transfer.

Mindfulness can be the multiplier which turns training into a lasting resource. Mindfulness offers trainers a way help employees break out of the special limitations of intercultural skills transfer.

In short, mindfulness helps participants internalise the learnings in training, removing some blocks which stop cultural training from working.

Ideas alone are not enough

Body, mind and breathing, we all use these a lot. We are all thinking, breathing bodies, but trainers have traditionally reached only for the mind in training. Two thirds of the items on this list are under-used by intercultural trainers.

Experiencing other cultures is very often physical. people get tense, they intuitively sense disconnection or resistance. They may get feelings of comfort or discomfort. Thoughts and emotions are all happening within a thinking and sensing/feeling body. International assignments are stressful. In the most extreme cases there may even be a feeling of violation.

Mindfulness addresses the overwhelming experience of cultural difference directly. It tackles stress reduction.

Incorporate into intercultural pedagogy

An intercultural trainer using mindfulness techniques has a duty to review and prepare for those reactions. How deep is this felt? Where does it come from? In a mindful intercultural training, we review how we’ve locked ourselves into habits and we review the values we’ve been taught.

Stepping out of the safe zone

The trainer may take training participants beyond safety of ideas into a space where training does not traditionally go: into emotion, physical reactions and reflexive responses. It’s more visceral and sensitive than other kinds of training. And the trainer, being mindful him/herself, needs to be entirely present with the other participants, with full attention on the emotional content of the training situation.

A starter exercise

This sounds like a dramatic departure from traditional intellectual forms of intercultural training. But it is possible to start with just small steps. Trainers may sprinkle mindfulness into training, see success and then go further.

One popular exercise as a first step into mindful intercultural training goes like this:

• with the participants, find the cultural habits and values to which they are most attached
• breathing exercise
• run a realistic simulation where those attachments come under pressure
• repeat the breathing exercise, and discuss the thoughts that come up

Enriching not disrupting the work of interculturalists

Mindfulness is not in conflict with other models in the field of cross-culture. There is a little overlap with ideas of cultural fluency and cultural intelligence, but in general mindfulness is content-neutral. Mindfulness underpins cultural competence. It is not an aspect of cultural competence.

An intercultural trainer may bring in mindfulness techniques, without a wholesale replacement of existing approaches.

One of the great pressures experienced by many intercultural trainers is time: the limited contact time available with training participants. A mindfulness intervention in training may be a just a few minutes. Real change can begin in less time than required by the traditional 1-2 day training.

Studies show that there can be positive impact even with very short interventions, though more research is needed on the impact of different formats of training specifically in the intercultural field.

Drip, drip, drip…

In cultural training, there’s often so much content. A typical format is a full training day plus some online activity in the 1-2 weeks before and after. There’s a lot to absorb in a short time. List of Dos and Don’ts is too long for most people to store in their heads or keep in training handouts.

Mindfulness supports an approach which is about long-term engagement, is shorter bursts of learning and shorter episodes of live connection with the trainer.

Risky business

If a training practitioner can achieve more in ever-shorter training sessions, can we as an industry sustain this? Is there a viable business here? These are good questions and the answers are not yet clear.

However, the ease with which trainers can stay connected with participants today suggests a future direction. Mindfulness gets its power when adopted mindfully yet habitually in everyday life.

Trainers and their clients need to explore new ways of collaborating, where the trainer becomes an on-going resource for people and organisations, sustaining participants’ commitment to mindful practices and offering access to those databases of Dos and Don’ts.

Walking the talk as a mindful, culturally-sensitive trainer

There are other questions for mindful intercultural trainers to answer too. Naturally, as intercultural trainers we must walk the talk. We must be respectful of cultures and beware that mindfulness may be perceived as competing with some religious practices.

According to the hype, mindfulness is for everyone. But it would not be a smart move to require mindfulness of absolutely all personnel who need intercultural training.

Intercultural trainers as students of mindfulness

We’ve provided some downloadable slides which can help intercultural trainers integrate mindfulness into their current training approach. But if mindfulness is entirely new to you, the best place to start is by experimenting on yourself.

How to get started with mindfulness in your intercultural training

Leading clients through a mindfulness exercise as part of intercultural training makes you, as trainer, the model for mindful practice. If you are early in your journey with mindfulness, our best tip is that you become deeply familiar with mindfulness in your own life. We offer five steps for getting started.

Practise patience, catch yourself being impatient, learn to notice signs such as gripping the steering wheel tighter, tapping your pen hard on the table or noticing the literal heat rise inside your clothes when you’re in a tough conversation.

Try some breathing exercises, reflect on situations immediately after, and then increasingly do that reflection when you are in the moment too.

A tool for intercultural trainers

So for intercultural trainers, mindfulness builds the business case, integrates smoothly with existing approaches, enables more impact in ever-shortening training sessions, opens new possibilities for on-going involvement with clients, sends training participants away after a memorable training experience empowered with transferable techniques and good prospects for more satisfying intercultural work.

Now breathe, and imagine using mindfulness in your intercultural training.

Careers are habit forming. Many of us go deep and become specialists. We grow roots into a certain professional field as our everyday ties to our work strengthen. We get paid (reward), we surround ourselves with the people, objects and tools of the work (reminders) and we get good at what we do, in some ways so good that we can do parts of the work automatically (routine).

Rewards, reminders, routines inside the comfort zone

After twenty years in the language-training business in Italy, the rewards, the reminders and the routines had grown very strong for Lara Statham. The easy path, the most likely scenario, was to continue the status quo careerwise.

Seeing a path into something new

Lara Statham
Providing a range of intercultural training and coaching for companies and individual executives, Lara is based in Turin Italy. Her specialist interest is UK-Italian cultural interaction.
More on Lara Statham

For Lara to recognise the real possibility of change, something dramatic was needed. The drama was delivered by the economic disruption of the 2007- global financial crisis, which hit Italy hard. As a chaotic economic situation brewed around her, Lara realised that she had an opportunity to make a dramatic change in her own professional life. Her future would not be the status quo. She needed a new path.

By 2017, Lara’s professional transformation was complete and we in the Argonaut team were delighted that she joined as a Cultural Correspondent for Italy. We heard her story and asked her to share some insights for other people considering a move into the fascinating field of intercultural competence development.

Ramping up the culture

Cultural factors and business advice were already a part of Lara’s work in the language business, but they were not the focus. She worked with senior managers, building their capacity for using the English language. As the years passed, she increasingly taught her clients how to communicate effectively, participate in meetings, write powerful text, and negotiate in English. The goal of the training was analysis and proper use of language.

Cultural competence for free

Her clients expected language training and paid for improved language skills. So, as Lara says “for my clients, getting stronger intercultural competence was a nice extra which did not appear on the invoice”.

The first step in Lara’s transformation was recognising that some building blocks of an intercultural career were already present in her language teaching role and her qualifications as an educationalist. She decided to go further in the intercultural business consulting, and took a teaching post at the University of Turin’s Department of Economics. Language was still the focus. The lessons were structured around analysing grammar, but the context for her newer clients was very much about getting new skills for better business results.

Widening the focus

Lara was starting to talk business with business leaders. Her own business as an independent language training provider in Turin continued in parallel, but Lara’s interest in the business impact of cultural competence just grew.

I didn’t wait to be lucky. I worked hard to create every new relationship

You’ve got to love it

A career switch would not be easy. It requires commitment, passion, energy and perseverance. Lara considered her options. It was not hard to see that intercultural consultancy would be a rich source of professional interest.

But intellectual curiosity into cultures is not enough. Lara also considered the format of intercultural coaching, training and consultancy. How would it feel in practice?

“I get so much satisfaction from working on a one-to-one basis with my clients” says Lara. “And small groups too. I am able to stay in contact with my clients, see the impact. It is so enriching to hearing about their successes after our training.”

Testing the idea

Becoming an intercultural coach and consultant felt like the right move to Lara. But what would other people think? She decided to find out. “I sounded people out about the idea, people I knew who knew me. They immediately backed me. Through dozens of conversations with business insiders, my vision crystallised and my ambition solidified. I would do this.”

Lara joined got involved with internations, joined international clubs, expat women’s groups, started to “network like crazy”. In each new scene, her new career path got warm approval.

Beginning a transition

Things seemed to move fast, because Lara was detaching herself from the routines, reminders and increasingly also the rewards of her first career.

But indeed, this was a transition, a gradual shift. The only step change was in ambition and orientation. Practical changes came more slowly.

In her language and communication skills training, Lara rapidly dropped out the grammatical nit-picking. She focused more on the context of communication, extracting insights from different kinds of work situations face by her clients.

The original language-culture balance began to reverse. Increasingly, language came as the bonus for customers (English is usually the language of Lara’s trainings).

Becoming an interculturalist: to do list

While there are successful self-taught interculturalists working in the field, Lara is not one of those. After her firm decision in 2011 to begin a career change, Lara dived into research in the field. Her university base was an excellent place to begin. She feasted on books from the founding fathers and mothers of the field, to latest academic articles. She continued to network into the business and participated in remote learning and as well as classroom training.

“A lot of reading was necessary for the transition. The courses gave me some additional new skills, such as coaching and business analysis. One of the most satisfying parts was my systematic programme to build my own intercultural network. I created contacts in other countries, formed bi-lateral partnerships between Italy and UK, travelled a lot to China. My new connections generated projects, and helped convert my career transition from idea into reality.”

But I didn’t wait to be lucky. I worked hard to create every new relationship and to generate every new intercultural project.

After 20 years inhabiting the same language-teaching role, it was fun to introduce myself in as an interculturalist. It was so refreshing to assume a new professional identity.

7 talents of interculturalists our customers want

When organisations invest in intercultural training, they look for the best people to deliver the experience as trainers, coaches or partners in development programmes. How well do your talents match those which top organisations are seeking? How much do your customers know what you have to offer?

Still outside the comfort zone

The start was energising, and her current work is highly motivating for Lara, but there has been a tough journey in-between.

“The transition was difficult on a personal level, letting go of my background as a language trainer. I had to challenge myself to think and act in new ways. I adopted a different approach, with more business focus. Creating the new habits was tricky. I had to develop a new kind of offering, write different kinds of proposals, change my identity and represent my projects in new ways.”

“For a long time I needed to remind myself every day to drop those old habits. There was financial pressure to reach new customers and allow the old sources of income to dry up. I did the whole thing in a period of economic downturn.”

The rewards of being a cross-cultural coach

Nowadays Lara loves her intercultural work and takes pride in the successes achieved with her clients.

“Of course, people are so much more willing to engage when we are talking culture than previously when we focused on the finer points of English grammar.”

Switching from teacher to coach/consultant has removed the hierarchy from her interactions with clients. Lara notices how her new role has levelled things out. Her clients are more open to discussion. She can sense that people feel they get more value in her intercultural training.

“Now my customers understand that they can be brilliant communicators with somewhat limited language skills. The keys I give them are the insights from the study of culture. What makes an effective communicator or an inspirational leader in a foreign country is very likely different from the qualities expected in your own culture.”

The zero hour came at an e-learning exhibition in Paris. I have always been professionally curious, but until 2015 I was an outsider to the technologies that are transforming our industry. For a few hours on that day a little over two years ago I had stepped into a foreign culture of geeks, LMS providers, gamifiers, community moderators, MOOC developers, e-mentors and techies.

boring, incomprehensible, technical

My honest reaction was that this e-learning world is boring, technical and incomprehensible. It is also the inevitable future of my profession, so walking out of the exhibition centre I decided that I must understand this revolution. I saw that it had something to offer my intercultural work. I knew that I had to master this new way of training and learning.

Self transformation, year three

So began my two-year transformation. And it continues. I am learning every week, enhancing knowledge and practice, but I am no longer in catch-up mode.

The technologies have become more familiar. The new approaches are still energising and sometimes experimental, but they are now inside my expanded comfort zone.  The world of e-learning is no long boring, technical or incomprehensible to me.

My journey to becoming a blended-learning trainer

Having made my decision to adopt technology into my training, I first wanted to experience online learning myself, in the role of learner.

Walking in the learner’s shoes.

I chose a programme run by the excellent ISTF, the only organisation I found who really train trainers in the new learning technologies, and offer that training 100% remotely.

Getting the concepts clear

I began to understand the culture and the terminology. Basic concepts like synchronous and asynchronous became clear, and their relevance to training design and training delivery.

Acquiring knowledge in a positive cycle

I learned how to design learning scripts for different formats of training, facilite group sessions and structure blended learning courses

I learned how to use my voice, how to move, how to adjust timing, how to set up exercises and much more.

Entering the culture

Nothing was off-limits. I tried every technology and explored every technique. I got to know the terminology and the buzzwords. I joined the e-learning culture that had seemed so foreign at the expo in Paris. I grew a genuine curiosity in anything e-learning.

Open to influences from unexpected directions

I made sure I had not become trapped in an e-learning bubble. I accepted ideas and influences from other directions too. My approach was always interdisciplinary. I absorbed latest ideas and proven models from

• digital learning
• cross-culture
• working styles research
• principles of training
• design
• nature

I established the intercultural afterwork meetings with a few fellow professionals in Paris. Every month or two I got to exchange ideas, approaches, cultural information with my peers, keeping an open mind to other ways of working.

Looking after yourself

All this self-development sounds like too much, right? Well, you can develop a long way in two years, but the road ahead continues. I am not finished yet. I never let the vast world of learning technologies put me under unhealthy pressure. I did not become overloaded. I integrated all my professional self-development into my working days. Saturday and Sunday remained work-free zones.

Looking after your customers

Working with innovative technologies demands an open attitude to experimentation. But I did not want my customers to pay the price of failures resulting from inexperience. I never used a technique or technology I had not used on myself. I was the first to suffer and remove poor-performing elements from the training programme. I became the tester, and more convinced of the value of the approaches with did work well.

Intercultural training goes digital, a trainer’s perspective

Digital learning will not make face-to-face training disappear, says Béatrice Rivas Siedel in this interview with Argonaut. She gives her view as a trainer deep in the digital learning revolution about what we can to do take every advantage. Her insights are relevant for trainers, training providers, client organisations and the learners themselves.

Two breakthrough moments

Two moments stay vividly in my memory, when I recognised that something had changed. I saw that I had progressed to be not only a participant, but a driver of the e-learning revolution.

In France we like to first get the concepts clear, then bring the ideas into practice. In this case, I did the reverse. I built my experience gradually, adjusting my approach, trying new things at a small scale. I was copying, learning, using models, following guidelines.

Now I use a different three words for the e-learning revolution:

Rewarding, flexible, refreshing

Before the first coffee break in an intercultural training session, you may have already covered the main introductory and culture-general ideas, such as stereotypes, culture shock and the iceberg.

Assuming there’s a culture-specific part to the programme, you’ll need to tackle the key differences which make the culture unique, but still understandable from an outside perspective.

Good ways to introduce a specific culture to training participants include some history, some personal stories and some visual, taste or simulated experience. And then how can we take training participants’ instinctive reaction and curiosity and bring transferable understanding?

The 12 key differences represent very practical ways in which a person can improve their confidence, performance and satisfaction working across cultures. For trainers using CultureConnector, there are rich opportunities for giving training participants practical tools for navigating the differences in specific cultural situations yet to be encountered after the training.

Key differences

Everyone who uses CultureConnector gets a cultural profile based on 12 key areas where differences and common ground can mean success or failure in cross-cultural work. Here’s a brief look at the profile you’ll get from CultureConnector.

Resources for trainers

Requiring licence

• Trainer Help – free access to practical information and guides if you have a current Trainer Dashboard licence
• Accredited trainer resources – deeper dive and practical training exercises, with material, based on the 12 key differences. Requires current accredited trainer status.

Free

• More about training with CultureConnector
• How to integrate e-learning into your training
• Training material introducing the 12 key differences in PDF and PPTX format. Use it freely in your coaching and training.

Blending is more than just mixing

Next time you finish a training course with a drink at the conference centre bar, try to find the drink to match the experience you just had. Will it be a half-litre glass of heavy, dark Guinness that seems to steal your energy and your ability to move? Or super sweet liqueur with a magic ingredient that seems to promise instant social success? Or an alcohol-free beer that looks like the real thing but produces an empty feeling of disappointment? Or will you choose as your end-of-training drink a series of shots that leave you with a headache and no memory of the previous few hours?

To symbolise and celebrate the training you just had, I would like to think you’ll choose a blended whisky (or delicious cocktail, if you’re not a drinker). It should have just the right amount of different ingredients to produce the perfect flavour and still beat the luxury drink brands on price.

Your training should work in a similar way as the perfect blended drink. Blended learning is not just about mixing training methods: face-to-face, online, classroom. We need to be more ambitious than that. Let’s make blended learning mean getting the mix right.

Two examples of blended learning

I want to share with you two contrasting ways of doing blended learning successfully for intercultural training and coaching.

These are not fixed designs which must be followed strictly in all relevant cases. These are simplified processes built on the key steps. You can compare or apply these approaches to your own training and coaching scenarios.

The process diagrams are available for download in Powerpoint format, so you can customise for your own situation and brand identity.

Single F2F event intercultural training

A very common scenario is when the trainer meets the participant or group just once during the process. In traditional training without an online element, the trainer has one shot to make an impact, perhaps with just a few hours of contact time. Extending the process by email in advance or follow-up discussion is costly in terms of the trainer’s time, with questionable value.

The solution is to use custom technology to extend the process and deepen the impact in a smart way.

This example shows how we can engage the learner early through the signup and profile-creation stage. We are already answering participant’s questions about the scope, goals and content of the coming training.

This is also a chance for the trainer to efficiently introduce him/herself through the invitation, welcome notes and instructions.

Optional self-study gives self-motivated participants a chance to get online and start researching, preparing thoughts, questions and ideas for the training. They become aware that there are rich resources of information available online and that it is not necessary to wait for the trainer to answer basic practical questions about cultural difference.

Needs analysis and customisation is the first time the trainer needs to commit real resources of time to understand the specific group and their needs. We assume that the trainer already knows or has researched the organisation, business goals, industry and other contextual factors. In blended learning, the online platform makes it efficient for the trainer to get familiar with the group overall and each individual in the group even before they meet.

Live session with the trainer is the key moment in the whole process. This is an opportunity for intensely powerful experiences which drive real change in future behaviour. The trainer may choose to project insights from a laptop generated by the online learning platform to kick-off discussion and to help the group members position themselves among cultures, colleagues, customers and other contacts. But a bold trainer can keep the Powerpoint and browsers closed for much of the session. It’s an ideal chance to simulate or confront participants with real (classroom) situations of cultural difference using interaction, movement, discussion, physical closeness and group exercises.

Before the participants leave the room, the trainer can take a moment to check that the participants know enough about the online tool to continue their learning online.

Continuous learning following the face-to-face event may be sliced in different ways, but tends to include a review/reminder of action points, encouragement to research information and to explore new situations and cultures not covered so far. Keeping the participants engaged in intercultural topics (through alerts, additional advice, new social comparisons, hints and links) helps to reinforce transfer of learning to real work situations.

Intercultural coaching

Another scenario we run into a lot in the Argonaut team is one-to-one intercultural coaching. Like with intercultural training, there are as many real-world variations of coaching programme structure. Coaching is less standardised. Of course, that’s partly the point of coaching.

A coach who uses an online profiling tool in advance can be very focused on specific cultural issues already in the first session, if needed. The client also gets potential action points from the cultural profile early so is able to quickly take ownership of practical changes in working style.

When the number of coaching sessions is limited, online tools can accelerate the speed at which the client is ready to transfer new ideas into work situations. Between coaching sessions, the online tool provides reminders and contextual information for action points which the client committed to.

From here on, the process may repeat, applying the ideas generated during the coaching to new situations and new cultural differences with each cycle. The coach and client may focus their time together on reviewing impact, confronting resistance to change and renewing commitments or agreeing new action points. The coach does not need to provide “information desk” or “country expert” services so much. The coach can instead build the relationship, inspire, support through emotional and practical challenges and celebrate success as real change happens.

Technology-enabled intercultural training: blended learning programme structures

Download these intercultural training and intercultural coaching programme structures in PPTX format.