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Cultural agility is a leadership skill many executives, managers and entrepreneurs don’t typically think about.
But the ability to work effectively with people from different cultures is increasingly important as domestic workplaces become more diversified and as more businesses expand their markets overseas.
It can be challenging, but Prof. Paula Caligiuri, a Distinguished Professor of International Business at Northeastern University offers guidance for more success.
What You’ll Discover About Cultural Agility:
- Why cultural agility matters
- How cultural agility is a combination of nature and nurture
- The self-assessment tool to help you identify your own stereotypes that limit your cultural agility
- The three categories of competencies that can improve your cultural agility
- PLUS so much more!
Guest: Prof. Paula Caligiuri
Paula Caligiuri is a Distinguished Professor of International Business at Northeastern University. She researches and consults in the areas of expatriate management, global leadership development, and cultural agility.
She has served as an Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies and as a Senior Editor for the Journal of World Business.
Paula has also been a frequent expert guest on CNN and CNN International and is an instructor for LinkedIn Learning courses.
She was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Forbes “50 over 50” for co-founding a public benefit corporation, Skiilify, to help foster cross-cultural understanding.
Paula holds a Ph.D. from Penn State in Organizational Psychology and is a Fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of International Business.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Corporate Governance and Culture episodes.
Contact Prof. Caligiuri and connect with her on LinkedIn.
Check out her book, Build Your Cultural Agility: The Nine Competencies of Successful Global Professionals
Learn more about Skiilify, her public benefit corporation that helps foster cross-cultural understanding
Take a self-assessment and learn more about MyGuiide
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A LEADERSHIP GUIDE TO MORE CULTURAL AGILITY WITH PROF. PAULA CALIGIURI
Cultural agility is a leadership skill many executives, managers and entrepreneurs typically don’t think about, but the ability to work effectively in and with people from other cultures is increasingly important.
As domestic workplaces become more diversified and as more businesses expand their markets overseas. It can be challenging, but today’s guest offers some guidance for more success.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now. The weekly podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line.
I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner and I have a super guest for you today. She is Paula Caligiuri, a distinguished professor of international business at Northeastern University. She researches and consults in the areas of expatriate management, global leadership, development and cultural agility. And she’s the author of Build Your Cultural Agility Nine Competencies of Successful Global Professionals.
Paula has been a frequent expert guest on CNN and CNN International and is an instructor for LinkedIn Learning Courses. She was a semifinalist for the 2021 Forbes 50 over 50 for co-founding a public benefit corporation Skiilify to help foster cross-cultural understanding.
So, it’s a real honor and privilege to have her here with us today. Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Paula.
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here, Hanna.
Well, it’s really interesting this term, “cultural agility.” People talk about diversity and the need for that and the value that goes with that, but I’d really appreciate it if you could help us understand what you mean by cultural agility.
Absolutely. So, cultural agility is just a basic ability to work comfortably and effectively in different cultures, places that are new, contexts that are new to us and with people from different cultural backgrounds, people who are demographically different from us.
So, it’s that idea of being both comfortable and effective in different cultural contexts.
Why do you think that’s so important?
Oh, gosh. It’s been critically important. Our cognitive evolution has run faster than our biological evolution. So, we as humans, we’re actually most comfortable, we’re most at ease with kind of our own “tribe,” the people who we’ve been raised with, people who were familiar with.
Yet the world doesn’t work that way anymore. We are, as you noted, we’re multicultural. We work in multicultural environments and our clients are diverse, our vendors are diverse. We need to be comfortable with that. Yet, it’s naturally a little easier to not be, so “Hey, we’re smarter than this, right?”
So, we just have to gain some skills in order to be good working with people who are different from us.
Well, that’s a great segue to my next question. How do you go about developing cultural agility? Because I would imagine that if you grew up in an ethnic neighborhood or had immersive foreign travel experience, that you’d be more sensitive towards certain cultures and certain customs.
But not everybody has those experiences and even the people that do, they’re limited experiences. So, how do we fill in the gaps?
Yeah, it’s so interesting. Your question sort of reflects, sort of a fundamental understanding of what we all believe cultural agility to be and that is people with lots of passport stamps must be good at cultural agility or people who have studied abroad or lived abroad or living in a multicultural neighborhood must be good at this.
And actually, what we’re finding both in research and in practice, is that it’s not exactly that. It’s a nurture nature combination. So, the nature being that some of us are just naturally predisposed based on the way our bodies handle serotonin and dopamine, and then that kind of bubbles up to our personality.
Some of us are just naturally predisposed to being more open, more curious, more resilient when things go wrong, more humble, being able to say, “I don’t know what the situation holds” or being able to linger longer in situations that are new and different to us without needing to sort of fill in the gaps and believe we know the answer. So, there’s very much a nature side to building cultural agility or to understanding cultural agility.
But then what happens is our nature interacts with the nurture, the things you described; working abroad, living overseas, having a multicultural community, working in a multicultural workforce, having multicultural team members. Having those opportunities to interact more.
And what we see is that it’s that combined effects. So, that’s our long, long answer. But it’s that idea that if you have the awareness of where you start point is sort of that what gives you a little bit of anxiety and then little by little put yourself into situations of greater novelty, you eventually start to move the needle from your start point.
So, to move the needle on cultural agility by not putting yourself in too much novelty, but also by giving yourself some of those challenges.
Well, I appreciate that on an intellectual level, but as you mentioned before, people are tribal and getting more so it seems like, they like to be in their own chambers. But besides that because we did grow up in tribes, right? As we were younger. We probably have certain stereotypes. So, how do we overcome that?
Gosh. I do a lot of executive education certainly through Skiilify, as you named, but also, I’m a university professor, as you noted, so there’s a lot of time doing some very basic exercises to overcome stereotypes.
And one of the ones that by far has the most profound effect is I have students take a tool called myGiide. So, it’s M-Y-G-I-I-D-E. It’s free tool. They can go on to mygiide.com and take the tool.
So, the first question is you do an assessment of your own cultural values. The first thing I have my students do is compare themselves – instead of comparing themselves to what their values to another country.
I have them compare themselves to their home country and right away, they can start seeing that they are not exactly the values of their home country, which is a great exercise and saying, “Look it, if you’re not the exact values of your home country, why would anyone else be?” And then we do the next step.
So, if we have a multicultural team or a multicultural workplace or a multicultural group, we start sharing cultural values. And what very quickly students or executives will see is that they share more values than they have that are different.
So, it helps to basically tear down the stereotypes by saying, “Look it, we share socializing agents.” We are either of the same generation or we’re from the same – we have the same major or we’re from the same socioeconomic background or of the same gender. Whatever it might be that give us something in common and that’s reflected in in our values.
So, some of the best ways to teach is – we too often say, “Don’t stereotype. That’s bad,” but this kind of helps us understand it from the inside out.
What a wonderful tool. I’m going to put a link on that with your episode information on the website, so that people can go and do this in their own privacy.
Because I’m sure some people are going to be, “Oh, well, yeah – I’m curious. How biased am I? Let me understand this better.” But they might be reluctant to do it out in the open. So, we’ll keep that link out there.
Now, your book, Build Your Cultural Agility. Part of the subtitle is that there are nine competencies that help leaders be more successful and I would imagine not just leaders, but employees to be able to interact with their coworkers and like you said perhaps their vendors or their customers. So, there’s this tremendous cross section out there.
Now, I appreciate we don’t have time to talk about all of them and I wouldn’t want to give your whole book away, but I am curious about which ones you feel someone should start with when working to improve their cultural agility. What are your thoughts?
Wow, it’s like asking which one is your favorite child.
Exactly.
Which one is nicer? No. No, I’m just teasing. So, I would say if there was one to start with.
So, if you think about these competencies, they actually bucket into three categories. There’s the idea of how you manage yourself. So, self-management competencies in a new and novel situation that’s new to you or around people who are demographically different from you.
So, self-management, then there’s relationship management. How do you manage the relationships that you’re in with people who are demographically different from you? And then there’s task management. How do you manage the tasks that you’re in, that you’re doing in those new contexts?
So, from the self-management bucket, I would say probably tolerance from ambiguity would be the best one. So, that’s the idea that your brain is able to comfortably move into situations of novelty, something that’s new to you, something that gives you pause and it could make you happy, like it could be first day of a new job or a first time with a new team or first time meeting a new client. It’s something new, right?
And right away, our bodies are naturally triggering the new is challenging, new as a concern, right? And so, our brains need some time to develop that skill – tolerance from ambiguity – to be able to say, “Look it, I’m not going to try to explain this. I’m just going to try to observe it, to try to understand it. I’m going to ask questions. I’m going to try to get to know people.”
I’m going to try to understand the situation versus trying to explain it because we’ll always use our old scripts to explain something new and that almost always is wrong.
So, tolerance from ambiguity, it’s a skill that we can build. It’s a competency you can build. Some people are just naturally better at it than others and that’s okay. We can all move the needle and that just takes a little bit of just understanding your start point and moving from there.
That’s one of your favorites. Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned it because the novelty of a new experience and just absorbing it all, it’s one thing when you walk into a room and you have all five senses that can help you figure out what’s happening, what’s going on.
But what happens when that encounter is virtual and you really don’t have all five senses working for you? You’re limited as to what you can hear, what you can see and you don’t even have the benefit of all the body language.
Right. Oh, Hanna and that is such an important point now because what I’m seeing a lot ever since COVID started and everybody’s moving meetings to Zoom, which is wonderful and convenient, but sometimes it’s helping us forget that we’re in a multicultural situation.
You think about if you have a business trip in another country, think of all the work you have to do. You have to get your plane ticket and get your passport and you have to get your visa. If you need a visa. And if you have to – you fly over and you get bags and you go to hotel. Like there’s all these things kind of hitting you with, you’re in someplace new and different, reminding you of that fact.
So, you’re already in a state of awareness that something’s different. Well, exactly as you described when now you’re having these meetings but they’re from the comfort of your home office or wherever, right?
And now you’re losing those signals and those cues that someone might be responding to you in a different way or someone might be kind of attending to your attire or your approach or your verbal cues and interpreting those in a way that you don’t intend.
So, it’s basically we’re sort of letting our guard down, if you will, in a way that we cannot shut off our subjective process or the way that we respond to one another through a subjective lens. The best we can do is recognize when we’re in a multicultural situation and to be comfortable with reading the environment and trying to mirror and respond as needed.
How much do you think time pressure contributes to a lack of cultural agility?
Whenever humans are under stress, they cling to familiar. It’s why there’s comfort food in every culture. Just got to use a simple example. Whenever we look, whenever we’re under stress, time pressure is a stressor.
So, if you start putting people under massive deadlines, all of a sudden, we go into situations already with our kind of emotional stress or cognitive – stressors are already dialed up, in which case our brains will really quickly move to cognitive closure.
Like we want to understand the situation quickly and we do this at a subconscious level. It’s not as though we’re doing it in a way to rush the situation or to ignore the culture. It’s just our brains are responding as they do. So, yes, time makes it worse, unfortunately.
Now, for people that are trying to gain more cultural ability, but that are just kind of fumbling, stumbling, whatever, what are the biggest mistakes that you see people make in the area of cultural agility?
That’s a really good question. I think people assume that if they go and study all the do’s and don’ts of a culture, that they’ll “understand it.” And actually, culture is not – it’s not a here’s a list of five things you need to do when you work with a different generation or when you work with someone from this other culture.
Because people we’re human. We’ve all been socialized very differently. And one of the biggest mistakes is adhering too closely to all of those do’s and don’ts. It’s great to understand what they could be unless it’s kind of a selective attention, if you will.
So, if you see something that is consistent with what you learned, you’ll know how to respond. So, those trainings are good but it often can lead us astray and making us respond in ways that are not appropriate for the situation. So, awareness building is really important.
That same tool that I mentioned, that M-Y-G-I-I-D-E, myGiide will also give people lots of advice for free on how to work with people from different cultures. And we did it in such a way that we didn’t over generalize or over stereotype. We just kind of give people things to look for.
So, probably the biggest mistake would be preparing in a way that you believe that now you have the answer. That’s just not true. The answer is you need to go in and read the situation. But then the second one would be you need to read the situation, right? So, you need to give yourself time to actually understand the context.
Understand by talking to people, understanding people who understand your context in a way that they can kind of almost be an ambassador for you or a guide, if you will, to help you understand the situation you’re in. And frankly, just don’t take yourself so seriously.
Like I always laugh, I – my students, I teach both graduate and undergraduate one. Sometimes I’ll say a word that – I’m 55, right? So, a word that makes perfect sense to a 55-year-old will make all my students laugh. And I always joke. I say, “Well, okay, what did I just say? And what does it mean to your generation?
Because here’s what it meant to mine.” It’s a great example of a cultural situation. You have to kind of be able to laugh at it in both directions. Honest. Honest mistake.
Yeah, honest mistakes. I love that example. But keep in mind, you’re the one giving us the grades. So, how much am I going to give you, right?
You have an advantage.
You have an advantage. You got an edge, right? You’ve got some power there.
It’s a teachable moment to laugh about. To be able to laugh at yourself, right? Hey, it’s their culture, not mine. There’s more of them than me.
That’s okay. One day they’ll be 55 and they’ll see what it’s like. It’s okay. These things all come around. It’s kind of funny, but – all right, I’ve read the do’s and don’ts and I hear what you say. Don’t adhere to them strictly.
They’re not a straight-jacket. And I’m going into a situation and I’m trying to be observant, but I screw up, Paula. I screw up.
What’s a good way to sort of come back from that? I mean, I’m not the teacher, so I don’t have that opportunity like you just said. But let’s say I’m in a business meeting and I really did a boo-boo. What do you recommend?
Yeah, that’s a really, really important question because one of those nine critical competencies is resilience. And resilience is a critical competency for culturally agile professionals. For that exact reason. Things will happen, mistakes will happen, missteps will happen.
You don’t know all the rules when you’re outside of your home culture. When you’re outside of the way you’ve been socialized, there’s a much higher chance that something’s going to go wrong, but it’s not ill intended. You didn’t do anything intentionally wrong.
So, some of the best ways to get around it is to be honest and say, “Oh, sorry. For my culture – asking questions this way would have made sense, but I understand now that that was inappropriate and I’m sincerely sorry if I offended” or “I certainly didn’t mean to overstep here” or whatever.
“In my culture this means X or in the way I was brought up. I was always taught to do it this way or the way we did it back at my old organization was this way and I’m sorry. I thought that was what was needed here. I needed to learn more about the context.” So, it’s okay to say, here’s the reason kind of going backwards.
“Here’s the reason why I did what I did.” Explain your behavior in a way that shows that you are acting in a way that would have been appropriate in a different context and then moved forward and say, “Here’s what I should have done to learn the context here and let’s make sure I don’t do that again.” So, how can I learn this?
I mean, I’m sort of using this with a lot of gravity in my voice, but you can do it in a way that’s just very open and sincere. It’s okay to not know.
I appreciate that because I think sometimes people are afraid to fess up when they mess up, that they would lose face or because or they lose respect or power or whatever in the situation. But I agree with you.
If anything, it makes them more trustworthy and more endearing to show that they are vulnerable. They’re human, they’re trying. They’re making an effort to understand and be respectful. And yeah, everybody makes a mistake. I think people recognize that and can forgive. I think that’s a common theme for us all cultures of being able to forgive.
It might be worth mentioning. Well, we’re talking about this, cultural agility isn’t always adapting. So far everything we’ve spoken about is the idea of adapting to the context that you’re in, which is great but there are some situations where there’s different approaches that are needed. It’s why we call it agility, right?
So, the idea that sometimes we absolutely need to adapt to the context that we’re in, but sometimes we need to hold the standard. So, it means that we need to behave in a way and act in a way and reinforce a way that isn’t normal and isn’t accepted and isn’t typical in that cultural context.
So, it could be reinforcing your organization’s safety or ethics or production schedules or something that’s just different in that context. And that’s where – that’s where the diplomacy skills and the persuasion and motivation and a different set of skills start to kick in that you sometimes do have to behave in a way that’s culturally inappropriate because you’re modeling a new behavior and in which case it’s okay.
So, I don’t want to overcomplicate this, but I want to make sure that we realize that sometimes we do need to hold the standard of a situation that we’re in and shape the behaviors of others.
Well, like you said, it’s the power of persuasion and cultural agility, if I understand you correctly, doesn’t mean we’re pushovers, but we’re not bulls in a China shop either.
Right, exactly. And sometimes if you have to be a bull, hopefully not in a China shop, but if you have to be a bull, you’re a very – bull that’s very light on stuff. It’s like you can finesse it in a way that you get done what you need to get done.
That was a really bizarre metaphor. But yeah, you understand what I mean. You want to be able to do things effectively in a new context, but not necessarily always just adapt to the context that you’re in, right? Sometimes you do.
That diplomacy piece that you were talking about.
So, this is great, Paula. I really appreciate your time and all you do to help organizations develop more cultural agility and raise awareness of the need for cultural agility.
So, if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Professor Paula Caligiuri and her book Build Your Cultural Agility, that information, plus the link to that diagnostic tool she mentioned several times is all going to be on the businessconfidentialradio.com show notes for this episode, including a transcript of this interview because sometimes you might want to come back and find a particular point or sometimes it’s just faster to read than to listen.
So, thanks for listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So, until then have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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