What cross cultural competencies would you say are essential to effective coaching? Why? What is the connection between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and effective cross-cultural coaching? Is there risk involved in working from the premise that all people are the same? Do you agree with position given or what would you do different?

Since part of being an effective coach involves building a strong connection and develop trust and awareness to understand the need of their coachees and have an open dialogue, then it is important that coaches develop social and emotional competence, where emotional intelligence is a key factor. Van Oosten et al. (2019) found that when coaches demonstrate behaviors that indicate awareness of emotions and self-regulation then the quality of the coaching relationship improved along with the drive and vision of the coachee to succeed. Since emotional intelligence relies on these competencies along with empathy and the social skills to connect with others (Goleman, 2013), then a coach would benefit from applying these skills to learn to recognize differences and similarities between individuals of different cultures and talents. A coach, much like a leader, can use the knowledge to assess how to best approach a situation since it is understood that leaders do not practice a universal style or silver bullet that solves all problems. Yukl (2013) presented that the individual, the environment, and other individuals involved are factors that would influence how a response plays out, and it can be said that the same is true for coaching, where the relationship between coach and coachee can be impacted by the degree the coach is able to adequately manage the observations and inferences about the coachee, given that Ting & Scisco (2006) presented that culture impacts how coachees define good leadership and what qualities or attributes they are trying or wanting to emulate, and that by having a good knowledge of cultural prototypes then coaches would be able to better understand their coachees’ actions and reasonings. If coaches failed to account for these differences and assumed all coachees idealized the same attributes, then leadership would be compromised along with morale and performance. The coaches must always remember that their end goal is to support the needs of their coachees and address the areas that the coachees identify as needing development, so the coach cannot impose a preset agenda into their coachee and expect to succeed no matter what.