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“Michelle Plochu,” a native and resident of France, had been designated a “high potential” by her firm and received an important new assignment. She was portrayed to GROVEWELL as an internationally experienced, gifted marketing professional. GROVEWELL’s coach, “Julia,” invited Michelle to identify her issues. Michelle said she was struggling to wrap her arms around her “messy” project to create internal awareness for a new product; the work entailed coordination of external stakeholders as well as her own supervisor and team members. Her team, which included Americans in France and in the U.S., was not placing a high priority on.... To continue reading, click here |
“Jan Peeters” is from the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium, where for five years he had been a manager with a large corporation headquartered in the U.S. Over the past three years he had served as HR Director in Europe. He had recently arrived in the U.S. on a two-year assignment, for which he had several goals including learning marketing design, understanding HR processes in a global context, implementing HR systems worldwide, and gaining cross-cultural skills. Although Jan believed he had a deep appreciation of organizational culture differences and their impact, and possessed a “Black Belt” in Process Excellence, he had not anticipated the extent of the differences between the American and Belgian.... To continue reading, click here |
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"JAN PEETERS" account, continued - ...ways of getting work done. For example, he was accustomed to building friendships with co-workers that extended beyond the office. The focus of Americans on task over relationship took Jan aback, as did their clear separation between the personal and professional domains. Within a few weeks of arriving in the U.S., Jan’s effectiveness was undermined by acute feelings of distance and loneliness, which he attributed to the “coldness” of his American colleagues. This was the point when GROVEWELL’s executive coach, “Charles,” began working with Jan. During their early sessions, Charles patiently encouraged Jan to step away from faulting the personality of individuals and towards a reframing of his situation as resulting from differences in American and Belgian cultural values and the characteristic behaviors they give rise to. Charles’s examples from his own experiences as a business manager in Europe, and his ability to model appropriate attitudes and ways of dealing with differences, provided Jan with a useful roadmap for addressing his own cross-border challenges. The initial benefit of Charles’s coaching was that Jan developed realistic expectations about how to build relationships with U.S. colleagues, and about the nature and likely outcomes of those relationships. Another barrier to Jan’s effectiveness concerned modes of day-to-day communication. He had quickly noticed the heavy reliance on e-mail in his company's U.S. headquarters, even when sender and receiver were within steps of each other. In Europe, Jan had been accustomed to a balanced mix of e-mail, telephone, and face-to-face communication. Charles led Jan in an exploration of how national culture shapes communication preferences, and coached him on American and company headquarters norms for announcing and managing HR processes. Voicemail norms were explained in terms of local values and then enacted through role-plays in order to give them “velcro.” As Jan’s trust of Charles grew, Jan revealed his deeper concerns about the “strangeness” of the environment in which he’d come to work. He had been dismayed at the extent to which he needed to focus on risk-avoidance and legal issues in the U.S., compared with his employee relations experience in Europe. Guided by the GROVEWELL Global Framework, Charles and Jan delved into the U.S. values of equality, individualism, and competition to grasp the impact these were having on Jan's day-to-day experiences in the U.S. This tool allowed Jan to quickly acquire the facility to compare and contrast American values and behaviors with those he had grown up with or become familiar with while working throughout Europe. He was able to offer his own ideas about how cultural differences helped to shape his expectations about employee relations and other aspects of HR work. He realized how and why employee relations in Belgium is oriented towards creative ways of discovering what works best for the group. He told Charles that this realization would be most useful to him upon his return to Belgium, where he expects to assume a European multi-sector HR role. Another focus of Charles’s work with Jan concerned ways in which he could ensure delivering value to the multiple stakeholders of his assignment and future career. Using GROVEWELL’s Stakeholder Analysis Tool, Jan identified his key stakeholders and assessed his strategic alignment and personal relationships with them. They referred back to the GROVEWELL Global Framework to identify value differences that could create areas of friction and misunderstanding with his international stakeholders. Charles and Jan worked together to clarify objectives for those relationships, formulate culturally appropriate ways to establish credibility and communicate with the stakeholders, and determine how Jan could develop strategically aligned relationships with individual stakeholders. Role-playing a few of these conversations gave their ideas and insights “Velcro.” Jan later reported excellent results. He had been able to establish valuable contacts with several of his American, Asian, and European stakeholders, including several outside his industry. He felt confident that he had laid a good foundation and would continue to cultivate these relationships in support of his company’s goals as well as in the development of a more global perspective and style for himself. As the coaching sessions drew to a close, Jan came to appreciate that one of the dimensions of the GROVEWELL Global Framework was especially useful for insights into new behaviors that could contribute to his on-the-ground global effectiveness. The “High Context / Low Context Dimension” provided him with a fresh understanding of how he could best communicate with colleagues from a variety of backgrounds. Still another dimension helped him recognize the extent to which his own cultural bias of focusing constantly on problems was impeding his ability to work with his generally optimistic American colleagues. With Charles’s guidance, Jan was able to start reframing this aspect of his mindset and learn new ways to express his ideas that sounded, at least to American ears, less pessimistic. Charles and Jan’s final sessions focused on Jan’s action plan, both for the duration of his U.S. assignment and for establishing a long-term global career development strategy. Jan’s mentor in Europe had suggested that Jan’s long-term goal should be a worldwide HR leadership position within the company, so they developed Jan’s action plan in relation to the firm’s Global Leadership Competency Model. They discussed ways to make his qualitative measures more specific and behavioral, with an emphasis on how to measure and track his own global competency development. When GROVEWELL
last heard from Jan Peters, he was meeting with great success in the pursuit
of his action plan goals and objectives, and was exceeding the expectations
of both his home country and host country supervisors.
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"MICHELLE PLOCHU" account, continued - ...the project, and her attempts to motivate them were falling flat. On a personal level, Michelle emphasized how exhausted she always felt and mentioned as well her on-going problems with her laidback boyfriend, Philippe. What gradually emerged was that Michelle had been raised as her “father’s daughter”: fiercely independent, proactive, adventurous, and ultimately, successful in all endeavors. One outcome was that Michelle had become a self-described “control-freak”. Without meaning to, she had taken on a directive, caretaker role with her mother as well as with a series of boyfriends who were younger, more “artistic,” and less driven than she was. Near the end of a session, Julia asked Michelle to think about whether there might be a pattern or common thread linking her problems at work with those in her personal life. (Julia’s understanding of the French mindset gave her confidence that Michelle would be inclined to identify patterns before beginning to focus on details.) Michelle announced her insight at the very beginning of the next session: In virtually all of her personal and professional relationships, she tended to seize responsibility to plan, direct, take care of, and be in control. Further, she recognized that she had reached a stage in her life when constantly playing this role had come to exhaust her. With Julia’s guidance, Michelle was now willing to seek ways to judiciously relinquish this role. Over the next couple of sessions, Julia worked with Michelle to identify the roles, or “characters,” she habitually played to her “audience” of family, friends, or colleagues. Michelle grasped that she had been playing the same characters unwittingly for most of her life; these were the roles that everyone had come to expect from her. By playing these roles she was assured a continuous stream of rewards and approval from everyone. What had gotten lost was a clear idea of which characters Michelle herself wanted to take on, in which situations, and under what conditions. If Michelle was going to successfully attain the next stage of her career she would first need to decide which roles she wanted to play. Together they examined Michelle’s entire cast of actual and potential characters. Michelle became deeply engaged in the process of rearranging the roles in her life, retiring those that were exhausting or unproductive, and adopting those likely to yield the quality of relationships, personal and professional, that she now desired. Michelle clearly became excited as she glimpsed new possibilities now within her grasp for the first time. Julia and Michelle co-developed an overall action-plan for Michelle as well as assignments between sessions to move her towards her fresh set of objectives. One of Michelle’s assignments was to keep a journal recording her process. Julia invited Michelle to phone her between face-to-face sessions. With each meeting and call, Julia found Michelle to be increasingly boyant as she reshaped her priorities and commitments. According to Julia, Michelle seemed “like a racehorse at the starting gate” during one of their final sessions. She had reframed her relationship with Philippe and other key friends and family members and now was ready to tackle her difficulties at work. Michelle already had determined which elements of her project she could, and could not, control. This freed her up to think more energetically and creatively about how to make the project a success. To address the barriers to effective communication with her U.S. teammates, Julia introduced the research-based GROVEWELL Global Framework. This tool allows coachees to identify and analyze cross-cultural differences in values and behaviors, and to explore the impact of these differences on their professional and social life Michelle recognized that she tended to communicate in a culturally-shaped manner that was implicit, indirect, non-linear, and narrative. Her U.S. colleagues were accustomed to communication that is explicit, direct, linear, and concise; they almost certainly had been frustrated by trying to extract Michelle’s meaning from the context within which she presented it. In addition, her refusal to delegate authority was aggravating team members. Relying on her own international experience as well as the GROVEWELL Global Framework, Julia delineated the U.S. value system in which Michelle was now functioning as an outcome of working with so many Americans. Together they generated ideas for new ways for Michelle to communicate, manage, and lead. These formed the basis of a culturally-informed action-plan that described specific new “practices” Michelle would try in order to determine which worked best in moving the project forward. Michelle had an opportunity at this time to meet personally with the U.S.-based members of her team, so Julia coached Michelle on effective behavior in terms of both communicating with them and relaxing her need for control. Michelle presented them with a detailed matrix she had developed to provide them with all relevant information regarding the project: Timelines, deadlines, roles and responsibilities, process details, and success measures. With team members far more engaged than before, and with a clear target for transforming her own mindset and behavior in both the private and professional domains of her life, it proved far easier for Michelle to delegate responsibilities to, and motivate, her team members. When GROVEWELL
last heard from Michelle, she had successfully applied and leveraged what
she had learned from her series of coaching sessions. Feedback on
her performance was extremely positive. Her project was successfully
launched, increasing her exposure within the company. She was beginning
to enjoy her newly configured social and professional relationships.
To top it all off, her firm had offered Michelle an excellent position
in the U.S. Suddenly, she has, as the French say, l’embarras du
choix.
Global Executive Coaching Coaching Business Executives Coaching Professional Women Coaching Assignees Abroad Introducing Our Coaches Worldwide Our Quality Assurance Process Testimonials from Coachees Case Studies of Our Coaching Coaching in Various Languages Our Unique "Coaching Conversation" Who Is a Grovewell Coach? - Click here to discover our many strategic GLOBAL LEADERSHIP SOLUTIONS. - Click here to discover our informative PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE CENTER. - Top of Page | Contact Us | Home | Comprehensive Site Map |