Coffee with Companies: Wentholt Coaching & Training

By: Together Abroad 07-05-2015

Categories:** HR Company interviews,
Henriëtte Wentholt, owner of Wentholt Coaching & Training says that she offers various coaching programmes and training to help internationals and expat partners become culturally aware to reach their potential in their new environment

Does Wentholt Coaching & Training have a motto? What are the major aims of the company?
My motto is 'My commitment to creating cultural awareness around the world’. By creating this awareness, people will become more understanding and respectful of differences. If they are willing to learn they will evolve and contribute to a world where there is unity through diversity. In a world where diversity is respected, people will work and live in a more connected way.

From my work experiences abroad in Brazil, China and the US, it became clear to me that cultural awareness is the foundation of communication, which involves the ability to stand back and become aware of our cultural values, beliefs and perceptions and how they differ from culture to culture and how to value those differences.

A fish only discovers its need for water when it is no longer in it. Our own culture is how water is for the fish. It sustains us. We live and breathe through it. When internationals start working in unfamiliar cultures, they are like a fish in a new container and even though there is water it is different from the one back home. I support and encourage them to cope with their new environment, so they quickly adapt to their new situation where they can move on.

Wentholt Coaching & Training provides various types of coaching such as personal and expatriate coaching? Could you elaborate?
My focus is on two groups of internationals. The first group is the multilingual international professionals and the second is expat partners.

Multilingual international professionals are individuals wanting to pursue their careers in the Netherlands with an international company or individuals who have been living here and are ready for the next step in their careers.

In all my initial coach meetings we mutually design how we will be working together; the client expresses what works well for them and what to do when they feel stuck or stopped during their process. During the coaching sessions, they will be supported and encouraged in hands-on practicalities such as:
• Highlighting their transferable skills
• (Re)writing their cv and cover letters
• Preparing for interviews
• Receiving feedback and asking questions
• As well as interview techniques (open- and closed questions)

The second type of coaching is for expat partners - the essence of these sessions is usually to help partners find their feet within their new surroundings. You might be able to image how challenging the experience can be when someone is confronted with questions such as:
• How do I re-invent myself here? How do I find meaning and fulfilment in my new country? What are the best next steps to take in maintaining my profession? How do I maintain my credentials while living in a country where I don't speak the language and when I am unsure for how many years I will be living here?
• How would I like to develop myself in this new country?
• What will be the best decision for me and how do I weigh this? Should I go job searching or return to college and get another degree? Will it be more of use to attend a course in my area of expertise?
• How about attending an on-line course in my home country to keep my credentials timely? How about working as a volunteer in order to keep up with my skills and practices?

As a personal coach, I provide for both groups of internationals a place to strengthen their accountability to themselves by supporting their progress. During these coaching sessions, I encourage them to connect with their sense of power, and responsibility of choice, to live consciously and unleash their unique potential, which enables them to achieve meaningful objectives in their lives and contributes to new possibilities for their individual development .

Coaching across cultures is another interesting service that Wentholt Coaching & Training offers. Could you elaborate on what makes this programme unique and how this helps your clients?
With the Coaching across Cultures programme, internationals will not just gain knowledge about the unfamiliar culture, they will also be supported to smoothly adapt to new business environments. They bring in specific situations from life and work and through role-playing, they will interactively learn how to cope adequately in their unfamiliar settings. They will be given tools that enable them to cope with whatever issues they struggle with.

The tailored programme is designed to achieve the desired outcome of either the individual or the group. The time frame is rather flexible and depends on the number of participants. As a result of the Coaching across Cultures program, my clients will:
• Know what are they capable of already and become practiced in areas they can become even more skilled.
• Become aware of how better to navigate effectively and efficiently in an international context.
• Become capable to cope other personal norms, values, attitudes and convictions.
• Learn and practice how to shift from a “My way and their way” perspective to the “Our way” perspective. This perspective creates leverage from both cultures, the best of both worlds.

Some of the tools I use are the COF (Rosinski) – online questionnaires for individuals/teams, Cultural Wizard, Culture GPS and Cultural Detective, all of them highly validated tools and research sources. All of these provide insight on the degree of intercultural awareness my clients have and their capacity to become more skilled at this.

This type of coaching serves those who start working internationally, for example in global multicultural teams and who are overwhelmed by the fact that their way of communicating requires changes. Misinterpretations occur primarily when we lack awareness of our own behavioural rules and project them on others. In absence of better knowledge we tend to assume, instead of finding out what a behaviour means to the person involved, for example, a straight look into your face is regarded as disrespectful in Japan. During cross cultural coaching these kind of issues are addressed.

What kind of client base does Wentholt Coaching & Training have? Are they corporate clients or professionals or managers that need coaching in specific areas?
They are both professionals and managers that benefit from cross cultural coaching and support in landing a job in the Netherlands. They are expat partners finding their feet in this new country and they are children who move to a new destination with their parents.

Wentholt Coaching & Training provides coaching not only face-to-face but also through telephone. How comfortable are your clients with telephone coaching and how do you put them at ease with this form of coaching?
Actually this is a great start of a coaching conversation. Being mindful to their hesitation, I invite my clients to share what causes this feeling of not being at ease so we can explore what is there. In my experience, at some point in the coaching clients ‘forget’ we are talking by phone.

Also, neither of us needs to travel; clients can be coached from a familiar place at their office or even from their living room. Working globally requires adjustments to different time zones at a mutually convenient time. With traveling clients another advantage is that the process is not interrupted as long as we both can make a call.

It's pretty cool to be able to do this cross cultural work from every place on this planet as long as there is a Wi-Fi-connection; this way I am able to work with all my clients from the U.S. to Africa, which to me means walking my talk.

On a regular basis, I attend various webinars in my area of expertise and all of them cover several time zones. This means for attendees it can be either morning, afternoon or evening. Everyone in this field works like this and all this webinars only allow speech so no one is visible, nevertheless deep and very profound experiences are being shared.

Is there anything else you would like to add?
There is the cross cultural trainings for children starting from 6 years old to teens of 18 years old. During my time abroad, I realised how children in transition adapt differently from adults. In order for children and teens to ‘re-root’ in a balanced way in their new environment, it is important to have an understanding of where they come from before they can adapt to the place they have moved to.

In the Netherlands this type of programme is rather unique. I make it lively, interactive and fun by using diverse materials, games and sources of information such as from YouTube. The feedback I get so far from children as well as their parents is that the trainings did not feel like school while they learned a lot.

These trainings are tailor-made because each situation is different and the ages vary. In my programmes, I address a number of fixed issues such as:
• Where do you come from?
• What does your family look like?
• How was the farewell or how will it be? What was the most difficult to leave behind?
• Is the place you come from the same as the place you move to and what will be different?
• What school will the children go to?
• What sports, hobbies, arts and crafts do they love?
• What are they really curious about in their new country?
• What are they really nervous about in their new country?
• What freedom and restrictions – smoking, driving, drinking alcohol, are there for teens when living abroad and how does this impact them

Visit www.wentholt.com  for more details of Wentholt Coaching & Training programmes. You can also visit her blog at www.internationalsatwork.com