COACHING FOR FEMALE EMPLOYMENT IN THE DIGITAL SECTOR IN ORDER TO PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY IN THE LABOUR MARKET

5.1 Importance and benefits of respecting cultural diversity

When dealing with learners from different cultural backgrounds, it is important for coaches to recognise the importance and benefits of respecting cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is important because our country, workplaces, and schools increasingly consist of various cultural, racial, and ethnic groups. We can learn from one another, but first, we must have a level of understanding about each other. Learning about other cultures helps us understand different perspectives within the world in which we live. It helps dispel negative stereotypes and personal biases about different groups.

In addition, cultural diversity helps us recognize and respect “ways of being” that are not necessarily our own. So that as we interact with others, we can build bridges to trust, respect, and understanding across cultures. Furthermore, this diversity makes our country a more interesting place to live in. As people from diverse cultures contribute language skills, new ways of thinking, new knowledge, and different experiences.

How to support cultural diversity?

• Increase your level of understanding about other cultures by interacting with people outside of your own culture.
• Avoid imposing values on others that may conflict or be inconsistent with other cultures.
• Recognize and understand that concepts within the helping profession, such as family, gender roles, spirituality, and emotional well-being, vary significantly among cultures and influence behaviour.
• Within the workplace, educational setting, advocate for the use of materials that are representative of the various cultural groups within the local community and the society in general.
• Intervene in an appropriate manner when you observe others engaging in behaviours that show cultural insensitivity, bias, or prejudice.
• Be proactive in listening, accepting, and welcoming people and ideas that are different from your own.

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Link for the self-learning

Benefits and challenges of cultural diversity

Benefits:

1. Diverse cultural perspectives can inspire creativity and drive innovation
2. Local market knowledge and insight make a business more competitive and profitable
3. Cultural sensitivity, insight, and local knowledge means higher quality, targeted marketing
4. Drawing from a culturally diverse talent pool allows an organization to attract and retain the best talent
5. A diverse skills base allows an organization to offer a broader and more adaptable range of products and services
6. Diverse teams are more productive and perform better
7. Greater opportunity for personal and professional growth

Challenges:

8. Colleagues from some cultures may be less likely to let their voices be heard
9. Integration across multicultural teams can be difficult in the face of prejudice or negative cultural stereotypes
10. Professional communication can be misinterpreted or difficult to understand across languages and cultures
11. Navigating visa requirements, employment laws, and the cost of accommodating workplace requirements can be difficult
12. Different understandings of professional etiquette
13. Conflicting working styles across teams

 

5.2 Deal in accordance with the cultural background of female learners

Cultural differences can cause immense frustrations and represent a real mystery to many of us. When understood and used constructively however, these differences provide a remarkable source of richness for interactions, learning and growth.

Integrating the cultural dimension into coaching is not only necessary to increase coaching’s validity and applicability in today’s intercultural environment. It is also an opportunity to learn from alternative cultural perspectives about crucial areas such as communication, thinking, time, power, identity, purpose, organization, or territory. Bridging coaching and interculturalism leads to a more creative and global form of coaching.

As global coaches, we need to resist the tendency to judge differences. Traditional coaching has normally promoted self-actualization by reinforcing an individualistic orientation. Hopefully, this is not done at the expense of collectivism. Affiliation to multiple groups can be encouraged.

In the case of team coaching, it is important to adopt an approach that pro-actively seeks to leverage both the individual and the group dimension. A somewhat paradoxical injunction a coach can use with teams is to invite members at times to be selfish. The rationale is that individual commitment to the team is higher to the extent individual needs are met in the team context. The goal is to legitimize individual desires and use them as engines for action. Consciously or unconsciously members need to have good personal reasons to engage in collective action and be fully committed to the team success.

Good coaches also avoid “groupthink” and peer pressure. A skillful facilitator might be tempted to use peer pressure to manipulate. A manipulation is a negative form of influencing where you convince somebody of doing something he does not really want to do. Being committed to serve each individual and the team overall requires avoiding manipulative shortcuts. In an individualistic culture, this takes time. If time is not available, then a different process to coaching can be used. In a collectivistic culture, the notion of individual needs may be less pronounced, and people may more readily come to a consensus. In any event, the art of coaching consists here in exploring and integrating individual and collective needs to the right level.

Leveraging diversity means taking advantage of visible differences as well as alternative viewpoints. In fact, focusing on mindsets and cultural orientations has the advantage of avoiding the stereotyping trap. In the absence of an intercultural approach, people often fail to appreciate the uniqueness of their interlocutor and to build an authentic relationship with them. They overlook the multiplicity of cultures (we belong to several cultural groups at the same time: nation, profession, gender, etc.) and their dynamism (cultures change).

Researches confirm that promoting diversity entails giving learners a chance to evaluate their own cultural orientations and learn to apply different perspectives. Leveraging diversity contributes to effectiveness in the business world.

Trained interculturalists are familiar with cultural differences (unlike many coaches today), but they face the following challenges:

• How to durably extend people’s worldview and foster lasting behavioural changes after the training;

• How to avoid generating opposite, undesired effects by virtue of teaching people about other cultures. Cultural stereotypes rather than mutual understanding could still build (the “Italians”, the “Spanish”, as if all Italians, or all Spanish, could fit the same mould);

• How to relieve people from a sense of being overwhelmed and stressed when confronted, day after day, to the reality of cultural differences, or culture shock.

To conclude, cross-fertilization between the interculturalist and coaching disciplines offers new solutions to these challenges.