Cultural Agility

Building a Pipeline of Successful Global Professionals

Paula Caligiuri

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118330548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

CULTURAL AGILITY

Succeeding in today's global economy requires organizations to acquire, develop, and retain professionals who can operate effectively around the world, irrespective of country or culture. More than ever before, organizations need a pipeline of professionals who possess cultural agility—the ability to quickly, comfortably, and successfully work in cross-cultural and international environments.

Filled with illustrative examples from a wide range of organizations, including the Peace Corps, the U.S. military, and many Fortune 500 companies, Cultural Agility offers business leaders and human resource professionals a step-by-step guide for creating and implementing highly effective, cutting-edge talent management practices to increase cross-cultural competence throughout their organizations. Validated through several years of her research and practice, Paula Caligiuri outlines the "Cultural Agility Competency Framework." This framework sets the foundation for the strategic talent management practices organizations need to effectively build a pipeline of culturally agile professionals, such as how to attract, recruit, and select professionals with cultural agility or those with the greatest propensity to readily develop cultural agility.

Cultural Agility also provides guidance for creating organizational cultures and HR systems to support the development of a workforce that is culturally agile. For example, international assignments are commonly enlisted as a means of developing global leaders, but these have proven to be only partially effective for building cultural agility. Caligiuri offers training and development practices that organizations can use in a learning system to continually build professionals' cross-cultural competencies, including specific recommendations for designing truly developmental international assignments.

This book is a must-have resource for human resource professionals and all business leaders who know that the key to their organizations' success in today's complex global economy is their culturally agile human talent.

PART I
INTRODUCTION: THE BASICS OF CULTURAL AGILITY

For the past two decades, I’ve worked with leaders from many global organizations who, without hesitation, can easily identify the global stars among their workforce. Equally without hesitation, they lament the need for more such stars. Business leaders are concerned about a shortage of the human talent required to meet the demands of future global business needs, such as expanding through innovations in mature markets, competing in emerging markets, collaborating with cross-border supply chain partners, integrating offshored support systems, and the like. The platform, if you will, is on fire. There is no time to lose.

CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS CULTURAL AGILITY—AND WHY IS IT SO CRUCIAL TODAY?

Within any global organization, it is the people—the human talent—who are actively engaged in assessing global risk, interacting with government regulators, and responding to unexpected shocks to the market, as well as handling mergers and acquisitions and the day-to-day management of global subsidiaries, teams, joint-venture relationships, and the like. The organization’s human talent is building credibility and trust with foreign partners, vendors, clients, contractors, subordinates, and peers. It is through global professionals that the organization builds its knowledge of customs, norms, languages, legal systems, and other cultural capital. Ultimately, the organization depends on its global professionals to make it increasingly more competitive in the global economy.

With that in mind, take a moment to think about the global professionals in your own organization. Even though they are critical to your organization’s global competitive advantage, they might also be at the heart of your business problems. When over one thousand CEOs in more than fifty countries were surveyed, “managing diverse cultures” was one of the top concerns they cited for the future.¹ A significant number of the CEOs in this survey indicated that their organizations’ ability to be effective in this increasingly complex global environment is challenged by cultural barriers, such as cultural issues and conflicts, conflicting regulatory requirements, unexpected costs, stakeholder opposition, and—most central for this book—inadequate supply of talent to compete. Global business professionals—with responsibilities as diverse as market expansion, product innovation, and postacquisition integration—are technically and functionally gifted, but may lack the cultural agility needed for the task at hand.

Expansion abounds for organizations in every sector as global growth becomes the key to their future success. Across organizations, the time is right for investing in cultural agility. Global business growth is the way to win the future, and this growth depends on the strategic management of human talent. A 2011 survey of more than seven hundred CEOs found that talent management is one of the most critical vehicles for implementing global business growth strategies for the future. ² Business leaders know that they need to invest in their strategies for managing talent if they are to win in more complex global environments, such as emerging markets.³ There is widespread agreement among CEOs and other senior executives that talent management is critically important in formulating successful global growth strategies. It is time to deliver the talent management practices to empower your organization to win the future.

CULTURAL AGILITY: A MEGA-COMPETENCY WITH THREE LEVELS

Cultural agility is the mega-competency that enables professionals to perform successfully in cross-cultural situations. All of us possess some level of cultural agility even before working in another culture or with people from different cultures. The idea of cultural agility follows from the common understanding of physical agility. Fitness experts describe agility as the ability to change the position of one’s body rapidly and accurately without losing balance. Think about the natural differences among beginners in a yoga class: some are more naturally nimble, coordinated, and athletic. Depending on their natural abilities, these individuals will have different experiences in the class—some will feel exhilarated, some encouraged, and others very discouraged. If they continue with subsequent classes, all will improve their agility over time, though they will develop at different rates. Cultural agility works in the same manner. Professionals will develop their cultural agility differently depending on their international career orientation, personality characteristics, bio-data (including nonwork cross-cultural experiences), language skills, and cross-cultural competencies.

You have probably admired the agility of prima ballerinas, Cirque du Soleil performers, and professional football players making awe-inspiring goals in the final seconds of a game. Watching them in motion, you may be tempted to believe they were born with their godlike bodies and superhuman physical abilities. But you probably also know that years of training and unrelenting hours of practice have blazed clear neural pathways between their minds’ commands and their bodies’ movements. In truth, both nature and nurture play a part: these individuals’ elite level of physical agility is a combination of natural abilities, motivation to succeed, guided training, coaching, and development over time. Cultural agility, as this book describes, is gained in the same manner—by combining individual skills and abilities, motivation, and experience.

Culturally agile professionals succeed in contexts where the successful outcome of their jobs, roles, positions, or tasks depends on dealing with an unfamiliar set of cultural norms—or multiple sets of them. These professionals might be aid workers operating in rural communities in developing nations, or professional athletes playing for teams located in a different country. They might be research scientists working in colocated multicultural research teams, or international assignees living and working in a different culture. They might be call center operators who are speaking with customers located in another part of the world, or professionals who are selling their products or services to clients from different cultures. Although a myriad of technical skills are necessary and will clearly affect performance, those technical skills are oftentimes not sufficient for success given the cross-cultural context of the role. For global professionals, performance depends on not only the content of their jobs but also on their ability to function in the cross-cultural context of their jobs. Cultural agility enables technically competent professionals to be successful irrespective of the multicultural or cross-cultural context.

Cultural agility is a practice, not an achievement, and building it is a process, not an event. For this reason, development is a concept closely related to cultural agility. The one is a route to the other. By ensuring that the cross-cultural experiences your professionals are exposed to are truly developmental, you can increase the cultural agility in your organization’s talent pipeline.

Whatever their job titles or roles, culturally agile professionals are able to accurately read the cross-cultural or multicultural situation; assess the differences in behaviors, attitudes, and values; and respond successfully within the cross-cultural context. Success in a cross-cultural context is the most important indicator of a professional’s cultural agility. Culturally agile professionals achieve success in multicultural, international, and cross-cultural situations by leveraging three different cultural responses:

1. Cultural adaptation
2. Cultural minimization
3. Cultural integration

Cultural adaptation is used at those times when adapting one’s behavior to the norms of the context is critical. Cultural minimization, in contrast, is used at times when one’s own cultural norms need to supersede the cultural expectations of others. Cultural integration is used when finding a compromise is most important and well worth the effort. Successful culturally agile professionals are adept at toggling among these three responses.

The cross-cultural competencies that culturally agile professionals possess facilitate their effectiveness in three important ways:

1. Global professionals are able to manage their own response set in order to quickly, comfortably, and effectively work in different cultures and with people from different cultures.
2. Global professionals are able to connect with others from different cultures—to communicate appropriately, build trust, and gain the necessary credibility to work effectively in cross-cultural jobs, tasks, and roles.
3. Global professionals are able to make appropriate decisions by accurately reading and responding in the cultural context, while accounting for the business strategy and key elements of the cultural context (such as laws and regulations).

Collectively, cross-cultural competencies constitute the first-level indicator of cultural agility (depicted as the base of the pyramid in Figure 1.1), a foundation on which the higher-level competencies are developed.

FIGURE 1.1. The Levels of Cultural Agility

THE NEED FOR SPEED IN BUILDING A PIPELINE OF CULTURALLY AGILE PROFESSIONALS

The demand for culturally agile professionals continues to accelerate in the twenty-first century as many organizations track a substantial increase in the percentage of profits generated outside their home countries. In the United States, despite its large domestic market, emblematic American companies such as Avon, Dow Chemical, and PepsiCo reported that 80 percent, 68 percent, and 45 percent of their revenues, respectively, were generated outside the United States.⁴ This growth in international markets is resulting in an ever-increasing mix of people from different countries and cultures—partners, clients, customers, and colleagues.

A survey of global industry leaders found that expanding global customer reach to new emerging markets and engaging in successful mergers and acquisitions are among organizations’ leading global business strategies.⁵ This enthusiastic pursuit of global expansion, though clear and logical on paper, is not without problems and risks. Paul Clark, Ernst & Young’s insurance sector leader for Asia-Pacific, aptly noted that when operating across countries, especially in emerging markets, business challenges become “compounded by the problems of working in foreign countries, including customs, culture, language, and different regulatory systems and working practices.”⁶ Such problems can also include unexpected changes in foreign government regulations, unstable political or economic conditions, currency fluctuations, insufficient collaborative technology, inadequate managerial control of a joint venture, or a much-needed associate’s refusing a critical international assignment because his or her spouse is unwilling to relocate.

But despite the challenges, risks, and ambiguities of global growth, its opportunities remain a powerful draw for organizations, which continue to expand their operations internationally at an unprecedented rate. To help navigate around or mitigate these potential challenges and risks, organizations rely on successful global professionals who can operate effectively in cross-cultural and international environments. I’ve not met a high-level leader in any industry who doesn’t see cultural agility as a key factor for future success. On the contrary, I’ve found unanimous agreement that their organizations’ global growing pains would ease if they had access to a robust pipeline of culturally agile professionals. The question is how to develop this pipeline—and how to do s...