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Successful Coaching in the Arab world; Tales from the field
Sunday, July 11, 2010 posted by
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Part 1: Introduction
What are the essential success factors and difficulties of coaching in the Arab world?
This is a challenging and important question. Unfortunately, concepts or models that help us to understand the specificities of this region and the consequences for coaching are still lacking. Commercial concerns and a lack of research in the field make it difficult to find a reasonable answer. The danger for clients is that, given the lack of standards and the newness of coaching to the Arab world, they may be vulnerable to fads and sales pitches without a clear sense of how to evaluate coaches and the coach’s ability to meet their needs. My aim now is to provide an initial framework to coaching in that region. In addition, I also hope to stimulate further research and dialogue on this critically important topic. The features I describe here are based on my own experience and the collective judgement of executive coaches, executives, educators and consumers of executive coaching services whom I interviewed.
From the early 1990s the coaching field grew apace in the West as a result of difficulties associated with increased downsizing, mergers, acquisitions and outplacement. The management leader’s role expanded to deal with increasing levels of uncertainty and pressures to perform in a progressively more corporate world. Globalisation, increased competition and the impact of the financial crisis are creating a highly stressful environment for managers and leaders. For the first time, the Arab world and the wealthy countries of the Middle East in particular are experiencing similar pressure. The need for performance maximisation and a strong competitive environment has also contributed to the upsurge in coaching in the last two years.
Coaching in the Arab world? – a lesson IN Diversity
Each region and each culture has it own way of doing business. To be a successful coach in the Arab world, you need to know and understand its culture.
The first mistake anyone can make is to see the Arab world as a homogeneous entity. To start with a major misconception, there is no such thing as a typical Arab coachee, client or leader. You may meet leaders from Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Morocco is not Egypt, Egypt is not Lebanon and Lebanon is not the UAE. The geographic, political, cultural, economic and social diversity of North African and Middle Eastern countries is huge. We are talking here of some 22 countries with around 300 million people – from Francophone North Africa to the Anglophone Middle East.
The following quantitative data give a flavour of the diversity (a good source of data is http://www.arabstats.org)
1. GDP per capita in Qatar is 70 times higher than that in Yemen.
2. Infant mortality rate (per 1000 live births) goes from 133 in Somalia down to 20 in Tunisia and down to 8 in the UAE.
3. Internet penetration (users as % of population) goes from 0.13 % in Iraq up to 15% in Morocco and up to 35% in the UAE.
4. The year that women received the right to vote ranges from 1946 (Djibouti) to 2005 (Kuwait).
Arabs do, however, share some collective experience: their Islamic collective/authoritarian heritage, the Arabic ethos and language and a history of oppression by the western occupier (Dwairy, 2006). Family is a central value and people’s lives are conducted according to family or tribal norms, values, will and goals. Using through the lens of this collective heritage I will highlight some features that differentiate coaching in the Arab world from coaching in the West.
Layers of culture instead of the traditional ‘how to’ approach
Traditional cross-cultural coaching focuses mainly on the differences between languages or ethnic groups. The traditional guidance on how to hand over a business card or how to greet a counterpart is far too simplistic to fulfil the challenges facing leaders in today’s international environment.
As global coaches we have to consider both the individual and the organisational context. My client, an Arab engineer in a family-owned business in Cairo, had similar challenges to an Austrian engineer in a family-owned business in Vienna. Far more so, for instance, than he had with an Arab marketing executive in a corporation in Cairo.
To take another example, an executive from Syria was struggling with his counterpart in France. What seemed initially to be a cross-cultural miscommunication was revealed after some analysis as a typical head office versus regional office culture challenge. Tenure, social class, educational background, family background and management level are other cultural differentiators that have a big influence in a given context or situation.
The diversity of the Arab world on the one hand and the influence of other cultures on the other impose limitations on any form of generalisation about coaching in the Arab world. There is an inherent cost to generalisation: you can always find features that do not fit individuals and groups or a trait that also fits another nation or cultural group.
Having said that, I still find enough common themes and patterns to justify a conceptualisation in which coaching can successfully be adapted to current Arab business culture.
July 11th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
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