Meet your Mentor
Christa Uehlinger is passionate about helping people leverage cultural differences with openness and curiosity. Over the course of her distinguished career, she has identified clear patterns and breakdowns as her clients confront cultural diversity at work. Drawing from these experiences, she pioneered the linking people® method, an actionable framework to help leaders build more effective cross-cultural teams and develop individually.
"Working across cultures requires real human-to-human interaction. It’s heart-to-heart, not a check-the-box activity, asking us to look more closely at ourselves and at others. The gift of foreignness lies in togetherness."
Dr. Uehlinger has worked at a senior level in consultancy and communications for diverse industries ranging from blue-chip companies like ABB and Novartis, to health care, education, public administration, and protective services. In her role as European Head of Corporate Communications at AXA/Winterthur, she oversaw mergers & acquisitions, startups, joint ventures, and expansion into new markets, often in charge of up to 12 different countries from one day to the next.
A profound interest in people led her to pursue advanced studies in law, communications and intercultural competence. She holds a PhD from the University of Zurich, is certified by Intercultural Communication Institute (ICI), and is a recipient of Robert Morris University's Rooney Scholarship. Today, Christa regularly lectures on Intercultural Communication & People Skills at Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST), and HWZ University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration.
Her coaching and training have resulted in dramatically lowering stress, skyrocketing performance, and saving millions for the organisations and leaders she works with, successfully transforming their "problem of diversity" into a recipe for success.
Dr. Uehlinger is the author of Being Different Together and co-authored the handbook How to be Human (2024). In 2023, she presented her talk The Gift of Foreignness at TEDxGlarus, garnering more than 100.000 views in its first two months.
Presented at TEDxGlarus in February 2023
Throughout my career I have watched leaders look at cultural, gender, and generational differences as a "problem" that needs to be solved. I would argue that this limiting mindset hinders effective cross-cultural interaction. Instead, what if we could view our differences as a "gift"? As an opportunity to tap into the potential of human interaction? Cooperating from this mindset will bring us innovative results we couldn't have imagined before.
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"Christa taught me how to apply intercultural tools and methods myself to develop my own solutions. She is constructively positive and an expert in her field. Working with her was empowering."
"Dr. Uehlinger makes the broad and complex topic of intercultural communication fascinating, fun, and easy to understand. She clearly has a wealth of experience and lives what she says!"
"Christa lifts people up and meets them where they are, without prejudice. She thinks creatively out-of-the-box, and coaches in an effective and personable way."