Heike Geiling Coaching
Helping Leaders & Expat Women Thrive Across Cultures.
Heike Geiling Coaching
Helping Leaders & Expat Women Thrive Across Cultures.
Lead. Communicate. Belong.
I work as an executive coach and intercultural trainer with two main groups of clients: corporate leaders and expat women.
Inclusive Leadership Alliance
Cultural gaps quietly drain performance — through misread intentions, unspoken friction, and energy lost to frustration rather than focused on the work. I help leaders build the self-awareness and cross-cultural skill to lead diverse teams with clarity, sensitivity, and confidence, so collaboration becomes a strength rather than a source of strain.
Expat Women - Connect & Grow
Relocation often means setting aside a profession, an identity, a sense of direction. I support expat partners in reconnecting with their own values and choosing a path that fits — whether that’s returning to their field, retraining, starting a business, or finding meaningful new work. The goal is the same: a life abroad that feels like yours.
Hi, I'm Heike.
Inclusive Leadership Expert · Intercultural Trainer & Coach · Mentor for Expat Women
Hi, I'm Heike.
Inclusive Leadership Expert · Intercultural Trainer & Coach · Mentor for Expat Women
Seven international relocations. Six of them as the trailing partner. Three children raised in four countries, across two continents.
That’s not a CV line. It’s how I learned that culture shapes everything — how we lead, how we’re heard, and whether the people around us feel they belong.
I’ve lived both sides of the expat experience. I’ve led large international teams and coached leaders across Europe and Asia. And I’ve been the one who packed up a life, again, and rebuilt it somewhere new — with children, without the anchor of my own career waiting on the other side. I know what it takes to hold a team together across cultures. I also know what it costs to keep starting over.
That combination is unusual, and it’s the reason my work holds. My professional grounding is two decades of international leadership, coaching, and training — I’ve led teams of up to 64 people from 27 countries, and my work spans business skills, intercultural competence, and inclusive leadership. I lecture in Business Communication at the FHNW University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland and guest-lecture at Keio University in Tokyo. I work, train, and coach in English, French, and German, and sometimes in Spanish — and having lived in Japan, I speak basic conversational Japanese too, enough to notice how native patterns travel into a shared language.
But credentials only explain part of why people trust me. The rest is lived. When a leader is navigating a team they don’t quite understand, or an expat woman is wondering whether she traded her own direction for someone else’s posting, I’m not reading from a manual. I’ve been in the room, and I’ve been in the move.
My work — across both audiences — rests on one belief: belonging can be built, not just hoped for.
I work with two main groups of clients: corporate leaders and expat women. Please select which website to visit next:
