In 2018 I wrote an article called “Digitizing Your Intercultural Coaching Practice – Ten Steps to a Digital, Global Coaching Practice” which was published in in the SIETAR Europa Journal. Since the publication, I have made further progress and hope to be able to answer your questions on how to deliver digital, intercultural coaching and what it actually means for your business model as a coach, trainer or consultant. Many of the lessons learned work for consulting as well. You probably don’t know this but I spend a large junk of my week working as a Global Mobility Project Manager inside companies. Due to the Pandemic I currently work from home and only go to the client when it is absolutely necessary. Our living room has been converted into a spaceship that could easily compete with the Millenium Falcon. We divided the space in three sections: Eat, Work, Play. Who would have thought that I could convert my “practice” into a fully digital operation in just two years. The only issue I am still struggling with today is that I am using the printer too much.
Most executive and business coaches I know prefer to work face-to-face with their clients. This is usually possible because classical coaching happens within the same city and like with a therapist a client builds a relationship with a coach over a relatively short period of time to follow certain goals. However, a lot of coaches are passed on between clients based on good old word of mouth. It’s not really a topic you openly write a review about on LinkedIn. Hence, I find it hard to ask my clients to write an honest review. I feel it breaches our confidentiality agreement.
Digital Intercultural Coaching still is new in the Swiss market. I’ve been running a coaching practice since 2012. My clients are all international and they are all busy global people.
In the early days of my business, I used to travel to a client in Basel for two hours for a 1.5-hour coaching session. I sometimes coached up to 15 clients in one week. That was the maximum I could manage with a good distribution of hours, without exhausting myself completely and with a good quality for the clients. Despite having a 60-hour workweek my income had dropped to one-third of what I had made as a Global Mobility Leader earlier. I know that you have to accept a loss of income in your first two years as a founder but I was not making enough money to survive. I am the breadwinner in the family and Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world. The cost of running a physical practice was eating up a lot of the earnings so in 2018 together with my wise accountant we decided to digitalize as much as possible.
In addition to corporate seminars, I offer a job search support group through HireMeExpress and the one-week RockMeRetreat. (Before Corona this was all possible offline, now we needed to reconsider and we offer many programs online via Zoom as well.)
If you want to build a coaching model with potential to scale you need to adopt digital practices in order to serve more clients in a shorter time frame. I had experimented with Skype coaching and other online methods already and I figured out that a lot of my methods would work online too.
The 10-Step Plan to a sustainable Digital, Global Coaching Practice
Step 1: Understand Your Ideal Client
You are not in business for yourself. If you don’t work with a client as in a person who is willing to pay for your services you probably have a hobby. Before you think about your positioning in the market, you should know what your ideal client looks like and how she or he lives and works. It’s a good idea to write a story about your ideal client.
Step 2: Have a Profile on LinkedIn
You need to have an authentic online presence. Even if you work as a freelancer you need to be able to show your qualification and approach online, you need to be able to connect with clients and potential colleagues online. At a minimum you should have a good and solid LinkedIn profile. We have several articles on how to improve this and LinkedIn has courses on it as well.
Step 3: Own a Mobile-Friendly Website
If your website dates back to 1990 and is not mobile-friendly you should invest in making it mobile friendly. You could easily have a WordPress or google site without investing a lot of money.
Step 4: Work from Home
One advantage of a digital coaching practice is that your practice becomes location-independent. If you now think that you can work from coffee shops and the beach I would say that yes, in principle that is possible. You will still want to take calls from clients but you might be able to have those during specific hours of the day when you are in a disturbance-free area.
If you can work from home without feeling distracted this is your chance to move to the mountain hut you had dreamed about. However, in my experience, you can get lonely quite easily. I prefer to work in the city of Zurich so I can engage in offline networking and still offer physical meetings with my clients when they are close to my office.
You will need a reliable Internet connection in order to hold Skype or Zoom calls. It’s worthwhile to invest in good headsets and a comfortable office chair.
Step 5: Work with an Email Marketing Provider
It took me a long time to figure out the best tools and media for sharing my messages with my clients and readers. I read a lot of blogs and reports and I curate content and events for my readers. They spend time reading interesting posts or watching relevant videos instead of digging through the social media circus. I always enjoyed sharing interesting content and now I use this skill professionally.
It’s important to understand that despite social media marketing you still need to build an email list with your own clients and prospects. I recommend a two-list approach. One list is for everyone who is vaguely interested in what you do. This is the where you let people join when they sign up on your website for free. In my view, it is mandatory that you have such a sign-up option. In WordPress, you could start with Magic Action Box for example.
You should also have a list of paying clients. This list is important for your targeted marketing campaigns. It’s also possible to “segment” lists if you have several programs to advertise.
Step 6: Invest in tech and your user platform
We developed our own web application called RockMeApp so we could run sessions without the use of paper and in parallel to an online session. Clients can enter their coaching targets and I can follow their weekly progress. There are platforms out there offering similar options but you can obviously not influence their layout and design. If you are just starting you might want to work as a sub-provider first and invest in your own technology later, when you have a better understanding what is out there.
Step 7: Focus on Selected Social Media Channels
I could spend all day on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. So, I have hired a DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER to help me. The main reason is that I want to focus on writing content and creating rather than sharing and discussing. With good organization I believe you can spend less than two hours a day on social media.
My advice is that you focus on the channel that speaks to your ideal client the most. I assume that most of my clients hang out on LinkedIn and this platform also serves for connecting clients and contacts with each other. Also, I often find inspiring articles there by following the hashtags I work with.
Step 8: Organize with a Shared Cloud Drive and Master Sheets
One of the challenges of today is that we all share everything. It is more difficult to find what you need especially if the documents are not tagged correctly. I use a system where I try to sort all my work according to event date because I have a lot of events. I also use names and tags on my documents.
As a shared drive, I work with Google Drive because it allows me to share work with my global, virtual team without having to send emails back and forth. It also works with corporate clients if they use Google Drive. In order to keep overviews of projects and tasks, I developed very simple master sheets in Google Sheets. I like to use sheets as I can post a link (URL) to the relevant document or website there.
We are also using SLACK for our team to message each other and keep track of progress. However, for me (probably because I am Gen X) a simple spreadsheet is a lot easier to work with.
Step 9: Clarify your Purpose and Pivot
One of my main enjoyments in having my own company next to working with incredible Expats, Expat Spouses and Global Mobility Managers is the fact that I have the time and capacity to write and edit. I have been pretty good at maintaining a weekly blog called the “Global People Club Sandwich”. I regularly get requests for guest posts and together with collaborators my company has published two workbooks in different formats and editions. A third workbook “The Global Rockstar Workbook” is in the making.
I am considering a pivot for Global People Transitions into a publishing company, which will develop digital tools for global people in intercultural transitions. However, at the moment I still have a lot to do to fulfil my mission to “bring the Human Touch back into Global Mobility”. Hence, the publishing company probably has to remain a side business in 2021 as well.
Step 10: Use Paper as a Strategy
As mentioned my final step to full digitalisation will be to reduce all the paper in the office. In order to do that, I do not allow myself a large quantity of printing paper in the office. I try to have flyers and seminar presentations and folders printed by professional printing companies in order to be more environmentally conscious.
One of the issues is that I seem to need paper to remember information better. So now I use paper as a strategy, for example, to write “morning pages” or “have-done-lists”. I use paper to write my coaching notes.
To avoid printing, I use “print to .pdf” as a default on my printer and I work on a big screen in my home office so I can reduce the necessity to print.
I have noticed that if I cannot read a document online it might be because they were formatted for print. In that case, it helps to go back to the original source and check if the same article has an online version.
Kind regards
Angie Weinberger
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Yesterday, I had lunch with a Professor of “Intercultural Management” and I tried to explain what I am doing for a living out there in the world of Global Mobility. I struggled to explain myself even though I was speaking to a colleague. “Intercultural Coaching ” is not commonly known as a profession. There are different approaches to “intercultural coaching” and the term “interculturalist” is not used in Switzerland a lot.
What we do is coach professionals (often Expats or Nomads like you through an intercultural transition or we help them build a global virtual team from chaos to perfection. While working on your “Global Competency” can mean enhancing knowledge, changing attitude, developing skills, reflecting experience, or integrating body learning into your repertoire many business leaders still think of “intercultural competence” as etiquette.
I’ve built a brand around consulting, training and coaching global nomads in an intercultural transition, and with that, I am not talking about moving your household goods (even though I understand the stress and importance of an international move well).
I try to integrate developing intercultural intelligence and effectiveness into all our programs as I feel it is a key competence for global leaders, in client service and global team performance. I value cultural diversity and working with people from all over the globe from my home office is amazing.
The Swiss culture in my view tends to value the opposite. It’s based on excluding rather than including. If you look at how “Switzerland” was founded it is very obvious why the people learned through generations to protect each other from the enemies outside. What started with the Ruetlischwur in 1291 is still in the mindset of the culture. (I call this concept “The Circle of Trust” in my best Robert de Niro-Voice).
The other reason is that in my personal life, I spend time with people from different cultural backgrounds. The multitude of experiences and lifestyles sometimes clashes. There are situations in my life where I have to get up and leave a discussion because I cannot handle it emotionally. It often happens when differing religious and political views are at the table. While I consider myself open and tolerant I have a strong value-based attitude that is biased towards “Germanic” logic and values. My approach can get in my way. I get frustrated when clients or friends have a different approach.
As most people, I tend to overestimate my intercultural sensitivity and I am not as great in this topic when I get under pressure. As most of us, I fall back into my “cultural default” (citing Sundae Schneider-Bean, an outstanding intercultural coach, and trainer) when under stress. And while I had to admit this publicly I don’t trust easily. I have had a number of experiences in my personal life and also in work projects that make me more cautious. (And I am not only speaking of the annoying spammers on Instagram…). I have to admit that I lost money, time and my pride so now it takes a while for me to trust someone. People need to show me that they care, that they don’t have a hidden agenda, and that they are not just after my bank account. You might feel the same. Maybe you were also once in your late thirties, ready to start a family, and willing to trust more than you should have. Maybe you uprooted your life, left a great career prospect, or your mother to follow the love of your life to Zimbabwe, Zagreb, or Zurich.
And now what?
What I have learned over the years working across cultures is that we have a lot more potential to be compassionate without judging. We just need to learn to reevaluate our conclusions and judgments. We need to give people a fourth and fifth chance and we need to accept them how they are. Then we are true humans, we are able to forgive and we perform in our global teams. Sometimes it also may be hard to understand when you are born into privilege that others want to be supported mentally, financially, and with education and that we are not living in a world where everyone is equal. It takes time to accept that your passport alone can open or close doors for you and that immigration laws are not made to welcome you but rather to protect the labor market in the host country. And that these laws are often reciprocal so if your passport country decides to break ties with your host country you might be faced with issues you cannot really control.
We also might need to learn that our basic assumptions about life, love, and trust are not necessarily universal and that we cannot trust in a toxic environment or relationship. For example, if you are working for an employer where constant competition for resources, funding, or appreciation is fostered by outdated performance and compensation methods you might be running your legs off like on a treadmill but you can never be satisfied with yourself or the people you work with. Competition does not foster collaboration. Collaboration comes from a place of psychological safety and love. Managers caring for their own benefit and bonus will never create a work environment that feels safe, egomaniacs will never make you feel loved at work and your partner might just not be the right partner for you.
Life is not a Disney movie but you and I, together we can make the world a better place.
We can start in our own circle of influence. We can be role models. We can show an extra level of trust and energy. We can break down organizational silos and work together across levels. We can influence each other to create a safe working environment for immigrants. We can use our privilege to help the less privileged. We can do all that and then we won’t feel “burdened” by our intersectionality. We will feel elated and in tune with our inner voice.
Let’s raise our glasses to love and bring more peace to the world.
Kind regards
Angie
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