The Role of Cultural Humility in Coaching

Remember the last potluck you attended? Everyone brought a dish, a food representing their tastes, traditions, or favorite family recipes. One person did not create the menu, and there was no “right” or “wrong” item to bring.

The magic of a potluck is in the experience: the curiosity to try new flavors and hear the stories behind them. Through curious conversation, relationships deepen.

Cultivating that same open, curious mindset — one in which you arrive ready to learn rather than to perform as the expert — is the foundation of cultural humility, a powerful framework for coaching. Cultural humility shifts us away from trying to “master” cultures, reminds us that there is no single “correct way to be,” and moves us toward meeting people exactly where they are.

The cultural humility framework asks us to show up with vulnerability, acknowledge our biases, and honor the client as the authority of their own lived experience.

In today’s increasingly global connectedness, it’s an essential mindset to cultivate, as coaching is not a hyper-local experience. You may be supporting executives in different time zones, remote teams on opposite sides of the planet, or clients whose cultural experiences diverge significantly from your own, even when you live in the same city.

Cultural humility in coaching helps you adjust your communication style and language to serve your clients best. And if you’re looking for a way to deepen trust across cultural differences, or to engage in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) work without performative checklists, cultural humility offers a meaningful path forward.

Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competency

To fully understand cultural humility, it’s important to understand the nuances of key terms. Here is an explanation of the differences between culture, cultural competency, and cultural humility, and why these concepts are important for coaches.

Culture

Culture is a set of shared characteristics, learned tendencies, and patterns of a group of people that can evolve but are passed from one generation to the next.

Culture is like an onion; it has layers. The outer layers are what we can easily see — the food, music, language, and clothing. The next layer reveals more context: how people interact, relate to time, greet one another, and make meaning out of daily life. Peel away more layers, and you get to the core, the most meaningful elements: communication styles, family and gender roles, boundaries, values, beliefs, and the ways relationships are formed and maintained.

Cultural Competency

Competency is the ability to do something well. Cultural competency is the ability to understand and navigate another culture effectively. It is the knowledge, awareness, and mindset that coaches need to understand their clients’ diverse identities. It is valuable, but has limitations and implies that with enough skills, you can become proficient in someone else’s culture. While basic competency or understanding can be an important starting point, cultural humility offers a significant shift, fostering awareness and sensitivity to cultural differences.

Cultural Humility

What does cultural humility focus on? It focuses on acknowledging limits of lived cultural experience and a commitment to learning and valuing differences and identities.

Coaches and researchers Pooja Jetho Khatija, Maria V. Feddeck, and Erica M. Johnson define cultural humility this way. They say it is, “An ethical stance rooted in self-reflection, openness to learning, and acknowledgement of bias and incomplete knowledge, requiring coaches to engage in continued learning and self-critique while recognizing the limits of their own cultural understanding.”

Practicing cultural humility shifts us away from trying to “master” cultures and toward meeting people where they are. For coaches, that means being willing to adjust our language, approach, and even our communication norms to match the client’s needs.

The idea of cultural humility has been around in the U.S. since the 1980s, but it’s only recently been gaining traction. For many people, it still feels new. One of the most common misconceptions is the belief that if you study a culture deeply enough, you can become fully proficient in it.

There’s also an assumption that proximity, whether through marriage, friendship, or raising children from a particular culture, automatically makes someone an expert. But cultural humility reminds us that no matter how close we are to another culture, it will never be our own, and we have more we could learn. It asks us to approach each interaction with openness, curiosity, and humility rather than certainty.

Cultural Humility Strengthens Coaching Skills

Practicing cultural humility encourages us to move from awareness to action by intentionally fostering equity and inclusion. As a result, coaches can deliver truly transformative experiences that change a person’s life.

When we use the cultural humility framework, we:

• Develop deeper self-awareness.
• Establish a strong ethical grounding.
• Understand our impact on others.
• Strengthen trust with clients.
• Create a sense of psychological safety in our coaching sessions.

6 Tips for Cultivating Cultural Humility

Practicing cultural humility is a lifelong journey that can be more challenging for some people than others. When we look at cultural humility through a global lens, it’s often easier for people who grew up in the Global South to practice it because the concept has existed in various forms for generations.

In contrast, many people raised in the Global North struggle with it, mainly because of mindsets shaped by colonization. Colonial cultures promoted the idea that other cultures could be easily observed, defined, and understood without context. That legacy still influences how people approach cultural differences today.

Bringing cultural humility into your coaching ensures that a client’s lived experiences and culture remain at the center of the coaching process. To cultivate cultural humility in coaching:

1. Reflect on your positionality. Ask yourself, “How do my race, gender, class, or nationality shape how I show up as a coach?​”
2. Practice self-awareness. Be aware of your potential biases.
3. Listen with interest and curiosity and be willing to learn from your clients.
4. Recognize when your coaching client may feel less agency or safety to share openly.​
5. Center your client’s lived experience.  Allow their voice, language, and priorities to guide the coaching agenda.​
6. Share power. Create space for a more collaborative experience by making the client’s lived experience central to the conversation.

Honoring Culture for Greater Impact

Cultural humility is a lifelong practice that requires continuous reflection, active participation, and a commitment to true inclusion. When we honor identity and difference, meaningful connection becomes possible.

Interested in developing a deeper understanding of cultural competency, its global roots, and how you deliver equity-centered coaching? Register for the monthly class, taught by Renuu Tandon.