How to Build Your Cultural Agility with Paula Caligiuri

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian, and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at A&I we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate, passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Paula, thanks for joining us today.

It's a pleasure to be with you, Kwame.

Yes, it is a pleasure to have you, my friend. I'm excited to get into psychology. But before we do, let's talk about you. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. Happy to. So I study what makes people effective, living and working in different countries and with people from different cultures. I'm a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Boston in the business school. And I also run a company called Skillify, which helps people build the skills necessary in order to be culturally agile. And yeah, I've been at this for a long time, 30 years of research and practice in this space. So I'm just so excited to share what I know.

Fantastic. And let's actually spend a little bit of time going into the terminology that you just used because heard it described so many different ways. Cultural competency, cultural intelligence. And you said culturally agile. Why is that your term of choice?

Right. So I've heard it described. So cultural agility, this is how they differentiate. So cultural agility is like the cup and cultural intelligence is like the coffee. So what I do is I study what are those fundamental human capabilities, characteristics, skills that we need in order to be effective in these, in order to be culturally intelligent, in order to be a good global citizen, in order to kind of get out there and be with people from different cultures. So that's where I differentiate.

That's interesting. Really, really interesting. Well, great. Well, let's talk about culture and cultural agility. And so for the listeners, let's do a quick run of show here. First, we're going to talk about what people misunderstand the most about culture. And then we're going to go into a potentially controversial topic which I love talking about, the limits of bias training. And then last, the cultural competencies that we will need to be successful. And so let's talk about misunderstandings. So what are the things that people misunderstand the most about culture?

Sure. I think fundamentally what it is really, when you think about what is culture, our cultural values, where do they come from?

Right.

We're not born with them, we experience them, we are socialized into them. And everyone thinks, oh, well, because I'm American or Japanese or German or pick the country. Right. Therefore, these values. And that's absolutely not the case. We've been socialized in lots of different ways. It could be our family upbringing, it could be the schools we attended. It could be if we lived in an urban, rural community. It could be if we were part of a military family or not. It could be our religion. It could be generation, it could be gender. They keep layering all of these socializing agents on top of each other, and that forms an individual's cultural values. What tends to happen, though, is that some of those socializing agents within a group, so within a country or a generation or whatever, are similar. And that's where we start talking about cultural differences. So we have to sort of begin realizing that cultural values are personal, they're individual, and that when you kind of aggregate them out, you start to see some trends that enable us to talk about country cultures, generational cultures, professional cultures, and the like. So that's kind of the thing, number one, that everybody misses is what the heck is it?

Yeah, I think that's really important to understand. And so you dropped a few more terms. So we have cultural values. So cultural values. We have cultural values, culture, and then cultural differences. So what are those? Let's get a baseline understanding for the listeners.

Sure, sure. So if you think about a value would be anything that is kind of fundamentally linked to our subjective perceptions. So it's what. When we look at the world, we look at a situation, we judge it to be beautiful or ugly. That's subjective. Fair or unfair. That's subjective. Right or wrong? That's subjective. You know, keep going. Right. Anything that's a subjective norm is linked back to value. Those values were socialized. We learned from all those socializing agents I talked about before, you know, generation, family, school, whatever, how to interpret the world around us. And that would be sort of the imprinting or that socialization that created those values. Culture, though, tends to be viewed as the behaviors that we see. So whether people are smiling or not, whether people hold hands when they are a couple, when they're in public or not, whether they speak very directly or not, you know, those types of things are the behavioral that. Those are the things that we can observe, but it really kind of roots back to those underlying values.

That makes a lot of sense. And now I can start to see the. How these. These cultural differences come into play. Because we have the values. That's our perception. And then we have culture that's like the actual outward manifestation of what's happening internally. And then from there, when other people can perceive the differences in behavior and we talk a little bit more and we start to recognize the differences in cultural values and perceptions, I think that's then when we get to cultural differences. Am I getting that right?

That's exactly it. Thank you. You described that beautifully. Yeah. In fact, it's funny because culture's always described as really interesting things, like an iceberg or an onion or an ocean. The idea is that there's stuff happening on the surface that you can see, but it really is what's happening underneath or deeper in that. That's really where the real challenges lie. So it is kind of an interesting area to discuss because most of us are still kind of skimming along the top of looking at the different behaviors, but then using our own values to interpret them.

That's the problem that makes sense. I forget which book it was that I was reading, but they were. I think, actually, you know, I think it was Jonathan Haidt talking about the moral foundations theory in the Righteous Mind, where it was where people start to believe something is common sense. I don't even need to explain why I believe this or why this is right. Everybody knows this is the way it's supposed to be. And then really interesting conflicts occur when your common sense sense doesn't match up with somebody else, somebody else's common sense. And then we don't really even have the language to describe the difference, other than this person is out of their mind or crazy, they're doing it the wrong way. But if they have the language that you just gave us, recognizing cultural values, recognizing that's perception, those type of things, and recognizing that different places, different communities, different people will perceive things differently and act differently, and it's not right or wrong, it's just different, then once we have that fundamental understanding, we put ourselves in a position where we can learn from each other and connect in different ways.

Yeah, and you said that beautifully. Not right or wrong, just. Just different. Not right or wrong, just different. And it's hard for us to turn our brains off to stop seeing those subjective judgments.

No, that makes a lot of sense. And so when we think about now that that's the fundamental under misunderstanding of culture, what do you think is something? Let's say we're starting at a baseline level of zero of cultural intelligence, cultural agility. What would be the first thing somebody needs to do to improve their cultural agility now that they understand these misunderstandings?

Yeah. So I'm going to stretch it to two things. The two things that everyone needs to do is first of all understand how something might be different. So it's, I don't know if you remember the whole selection perception, selective perception video about the moonwalking bear. If your listeners have not seen it, go on to YouTube, type in moonwalking bear and you'll get a very interesting video. You don't see something unless your brain is kind of looking to potentially see it. It may not be there, but you need to know that it could be different. So if there is, if you're working with someone of a different generation, different profession, different, and you're sort of, you have a little bit of pre warning that certain things could be different, you're in a better position, your brain will be in a better position to catch it if it's there and then interpret it as it should be interpreted. Okay, so that's kind of one piece is like know before you go kind of. So like if you're, if you're, I mean I do a lot of work with the international world in terms of those who do global business. And the idea of understanding the cultures in which you're going to be operating is really important before you actually move into them or go into them. So that's number one, you absolutely need to know something about the individuals with whom you're interacting. The other one though is build out those competencies so that when you're in that new and novel situation, when you're in that environment that, that isn't easy for you to interpret or you keep making mistakes in because you're using your brain, your lens, you can have the competencies necessary in order to be effective in that environment. So really understanding, gaining some self awareness about those critical competencies and then building them out, that's actually what the book was about, was actually that second one. That's how do you build those competencies?

Does your company invest in professional development training. If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show. Right. No, this is really, really great and I think it makes sense that that's the focus of the book because I think that's where everybody wants to go. They're just saying, okay Paula, what do I need to do? Tell me what I need to do, what do I need to learn? And that's great. And remind the listeners again because I want to make sure that they know where to get the book. And of course we'll put a link in the description, but tell the listeners again about the book.

Sure. So the book is Build you'd Cultural Agility. And I know it's on Amazon of course, and wherever fine books are sold. So you can look at it, you can find it in a variety of places. Also your listeners might be interested. We have a free app available that enables you to test out both of those sides of the equation. So understand your own cultural values relative to different countries that you may be working in and also the cultural competencies. You can do a self awareness assessment of your own cultural competencies and some guidance on how to build those out. And that's perfectly free on it's a site called myguide.com my G.

Fantastic. And links in the description everybody. I strongly recommend taking that opportunity because the price point is pretty solid and free and self awareness is the key for self development. It's difficult to get to where we want to go if we don't know where we currently are. So take advantage of that opportunity. And I think when we get to the second point here, the limits of bias training, people will probably be saying why in the world are we taking shots at implicit bias right now? Now where it's when we're talking about culture and we had a really, really fun conversation about this in our pre interview. So let's, let's start off by talking about first of all, if people aren't familiar what implicit bias is and what those trainings are and some potential pitfalls.

Right. So what implicit bias training does is it introduces people to their brain's limbic system. Limbic system enables us to gather data throughout our lives to identify whether something is a threat or not, whether something, how something should be interpreted. It's a very adaptive function which enables us to go into a new situation and be able to within a fraction of a second. Judge works exceedingly well when you're in a context that's perfectly predictable. So if you're at home with your family and your mom raises her eyebrow ever so slightly, anyone who's in that family knows exactly what that eyebrow raise means. If you're outside of that, you have no idea. Right? So that idea, and I'm really, I'm kind of oversimplifying it, but the idea is then, because we have this stored data of what the, you know, what is again, one of those subjective norms should be. We tend to apply it to every new situation. So a lot of companies now are offering unconscious bias, implicit bias training to flag help people see that they have flawed brains. Unfortunately, they don't have flawed brains. They have healthy brains. And that's where my rub is with unconscious bias training. Not that we're helping people understand the way their brains work. My fear, Kwame, is that by calling it bias, we are removing the one thing that helps people get comfortable with each other, and that is having authentic conversations. And it doesn't have to be about anything controversial. It could be a shared interest in a sport or, you know, the fact that we both have teenagers or you're both of elderly parents or something, anything that binds us human to human. By calling this, by basically flagging to everyone that you own a bias, that you have a bias, you sort of withhold that desire to have those natural conversations. So I'm really, I'm out there saying, no, no, no, wrong. We're putting our energy in the wrong side spot. Please stop the bias training and start the conversational skill training.

Exactly. Because the connection that comes from conversation is exactly what we need to, to, to learn from each other and become more comfortable with each other. And by. When you think about the mere exposure effect, for example, just repeated interactions with a stimulus, and in this case the stimulus is a person. It gets, it makes you more familiar and it seems less threatening. And so what we're, what we're saying, listeners, is that it's like knowledge of implicit bias is bad. It's good to know how your Brain works. That's really important.

Very much.

But dwelling on differences and dwelling on the mistakes that you can make is problematic because like you said, Paula, we're focused. The bias comes from the limbic system, which has the amygdala, which triggers that fear response. And so now we're focusing on all the ways that we can make mistakes, which prevents us from meaningfully and authentically engaging with people because we're afraid of offending people. And so when I've. Because I do implicit bias training, I do that. People ask me to do them, but I always include this because it's like I will touch lightly on the psychology. I will let you know what is happening, but then I'm going to talk about how you can use these conversations to create connections and really encourage them to have these conversations. Because if you dwell too much on the negative, it actually could do more harm than good.

Yeah, I wish we would have labeled it unconscious awareness training instead of unconscious bias. It's something about that phrase bias that has. Has stopped people in their tracks in terms of wanting to engage, and that. That's, you know, as, you know, it's problematic. So, yeah, we've got some work to do.

We do. And my. My tenure in psychology is only four years. You are. You far surpass me. So let me run this crazy idea by you. You tell me what you think. The more that I do learn about bias and read great books, like Thinking Fast and Slow, for example. Awesome book. Very dense, but very good. I'm starting to think more like bias is the natural tendency of the brain. Like, you are biased because you don't have a choice. It's how your brain works. It's about recognizing those natural tendencies and then understanding how to overcome them in order to make better decisions and engage in better ways. What do you think about that? And feel free, Paula, to tell me that I am completely wrong.

No, no, you're absolutely right. You think of your brain as kind of a beautiful, amazing couch potato, a beautiful, amazing, lazy thing that, you know, we're always trying to. It's always trying to kind of quickly understand the world around it so that it can go back to kind of, kind of comfort and ease. You know, especially if we're in situations of novelty or stress, our brains, we want to move so quickly to cognitive ease and emotional ease. Let me give you an example. If you ever go into. I'm a university professor, so I'll use a university example. The. If you ever go into a freshman orientation and you look around the students, it will Seem like the group is the most racist, xenophobic group of freshmen you've ever seen. And in fact it's not racism or xenophobia or gender bias or anything. What it is, it's fear. And you cling to familiar. So when you have no information, we start to connect with people who seem to be like us. And then you know, as a result what ends up happening, there's that mere exposure effect. Next thing you know, you become great friends. That's kind of one example. If you've ever heard people say things like, oh, I can't believe my neighbor turned out to be my best friend or my roommate turned out to be my best friend, or my office mate turned up, it's that it's not by accident, right? It's because they become over time familiar. So really what our brains are doing is they're just trying to move to ease. They're trying to file people and things and places and situations in a way that makes that they can make sense, that the brain can make sense of it so that it can kind of move on to being lazy again. And that's what we're really pushing against with the competencies. And that's really what I hope the book will do, is help people move beyond that.

Absolutely. No, that's great. That is great. And let's hit that last point here. Now, talking about those competencies, what are the competencies that we need to be successful in the professional world?

Yeah, so if you think about cultural agility competencies, it's always really good to think about them in these three buckets. So bucket number one is self competencies, self management competencies. Bucket number two is relationship management competencies, and bucket number three is task management competencies. So when you think about self, it's how do, how does one, how do I walk into a situation of novelty, whether different generation, different profession, new organization, new school, new company, you know, pick the it, right? So you walk into a setting where you're now aware because you did the, you know, step one, right, you're now aware that your brain isn't going to be able to interpret things particularly well. So self management competencies enables you to comfortably, enables that couch potato brain to comfortably go into that situation and linger in the ambiguity longer without needing to sort of quickly interpret it and identify it and label it and define it and, you know, whatever. So the idea of that, those self management competencies, things like tolerance of ambiguity, resilience, curiosity, curiosity, the idea that, hey, I'm not exactly sure how, what's going on here. I can't quite fully predict people's behaviors here. So I'm going to start asking questions, I'm going to connect in a way that I can start interpreting it. And the belief that, hey, you're probably going to get it wrong and you need to bounce back from that. So that's self management, relationship management are things like humility, perspective taking, the ability to foster those relationships. So, so critical humility. In particular, the idea that you can walk into a new setting and recognize, hey, you know what, I might be really good at what I do, but I don't know how to do that here and that set that humility. So the relationships will help you build that skill. And the last one is, are those task management competencies. So it's, you know, when do you adapt? When do you try to hold a standard in the face of. Of a difference? And when do you try to create a whole new set of a whole new way of doing things?

Very interesting. And now we're talking about competencies as a skill, right? Something that you can develop.

Sort of.

So.

Each of these competencies, you know, I joke around. It's kind of like I'm Italian American and it's kind of like my mom sauce recipe. My mom gave her same sauce recipe to all five of her children. And if you taste our sauce, it all tastes differently. We have the exact same building blocks, exact same ingredients, but it all comes out a little differently. Competencies work the same way. So in some ways it's kind of a combo. We know what the ingredients are, but that nurture nature mix varies from person to person. So each competency will have. I don't want to make this overly complicated, but each competency has a portion that's a bit hardwired because of the way our bodies handle serotonin and dopamine and the like. Then each competency has a set of skills that can be gained and experiences that can help kind of enhance those skills and some combination effects. So each one of these competencies has a bit of a recipe but very specific ways that they can be built. So at the headline level, yes, it's a skill. Everybody can get out there and practice them and be great at them at the little more granular level, but there's variance.

Okay, that's what I was thinking because I was just reviewing my notes for the book, what your brain wants and why you should do the opposite. And one of the things that the author said was just an example of, of different personality characteristics. They said that different people have different levels of craving, certitude. Right. Some people want certainty more so than others. And the people who want certainty are the people who are less likely to try new things, meet new people, because that's different. I don't like the way that feels. But other people are more intellectually curious, and so then they're going to probably be more adept in acquiring these skills because of that natural personality.

Yeah. So if you think about that, that's linked to the way our bodies handle dopamine. So if you think about, you know, those who. Who are, you know, really thrill seekers, they can bungee jump off of high buildings or whatever. However, one bungee jumps you can go. You can do these crazy travels without a map. You can do all these, like, really insane. And it doesn't even make them nervous or anxious. You can get other people who just very naturally, just trying a new food makes them nervous, nervous, nervous. So that then bubbles up to what they're willing to try and do and what that ends up bubbling up to. If you almost think about this as building blocks, the expressed personality traits of things like extroversion, your comfort being with people who are new, openness to experience, openness to people. So things like that. So again, similar to the competencies in the book, there's these building blocks for dispositional traits as well.

That's great. And this is fantastic. And from your perspective, let's say there's somebody who says, I've never liked new things. I've never gone to another country. I've had plenty of opportunities I never wanted to go to. For people like that who now recognize that we are in a multi generational, multicultural workplace and they still want to be effective and respectful to the people around them, what specific approach would you suggest that they use to start to increase their cultural agility?

You used a pretty loaded word there. And that is, I don't want to. I don't want to be with someone of a different generation. I don't want to be with someone of a different country or culture. That's a loaded word. If you said to me they didn't have experience doing it, that probably would mean to me that they've never sought it out. But it doesn't mean that they couldn't kind of incrementally start to do more and more novel things or interact with individuals that are. So we actually structure experiences that kind of graduate individuals like that into situations of novelty. We've done some wonderful programs. But if you're starting from the position of I don't Want to Wow, wow, wow. The best thing you could do there. Every now and then we run into situations in companies where because of someone's expertise, they absolutely have to be the one that goes into an international situation and they very firmly say, this isn't for me. What we do for those individuals is we structure lots of support around that individual so he or she basically can free up the kind of the brain's bandwidth to technically do what needs to be done. So, you know, we'll just make sure they have a coach involved, we'll make sure that the places where they're staying look familiar, that foods are familiar. It's really, you are kind of working with someone who if you put them in too much novelty, they'll shut down. So you do have to be a little bit careful. But that word want is really important definition.

Absolutely. No, this is great. Really, really helpful. And before you go, can you tell the listeners about the website with the app, the book, and how they could work with you?

Sure, yeah. So we were really fortunate in that we were able to start a company called Skillify with an angel investor who basically believes in cultural agility and really was pushing it out there in terms of wanting to make sure it was available to the public. So this company, skillfi, was set up as a public benefit corporation. The product that I was talking about that I think your listeners would enjoy is called myguide.com my G I, I D E. So if you think about the word guide, but the idea is the double I and we're helping cultures see eye to eye. So myguide.com g is the tool and on there they can get some free assessments about their own cultural values relative to different kind of default ones in different countries. They can do that assessment. They can also do an assessment of their own cultural competencies like the tolerance, ambiguity, resilience, curiosity, and learn a little more on how to build it.

That's fantastic, Paula. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today.

Oh, my pleasure, Kami. This was fun. Thanks.

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