Cultural competence refers to our ability to notice, learn about, understand, be judgment neutral and adapt to cultural differences. Team members who have heightened cultural competence are more inclusive in how they work and lead.
Cultural competence is an acumen that must be embedded across an organization’s systems and practices in order to be inclusive. At bci, through our cultural competence training and advisory services, we teach leaders and team members to work more inclusively across cultures, including how to be more adaptive in embracing a range of behavioral differences.
Understanding how your own cultural identities impact your behavioral preferences and your unconscious biases
Learning how to identify your discomfort with differences and how this impacts your interactions with team members whose behavioral preferences are different than yours
Learning to adapt your behavior in order to be more inclusive of other ways of behaving in working across cultural differences
In teaching leaders about cultural competence, it’s critical to focus on the development of their ‘cultural lens’.
When you have a developed cultural lens, you’re better able to identify how your cultural identities impact not just your behavior, but your judgments of how others behave. You’re also able to better adapt your behaviors when working across differences. This is essential for being inclusive.
The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) is the leading tool on the market to measure the cultural competence of an individual leader, a team, or an organization.
At bci, we use the IDI extensively with leadership groups to benchmark and develop their cultural competence. Reach out to us to ask how you can leverage the IDI to develop cultural competence within your organization.
Find out more about our cultural competence-focused e-learning modules, which can help you scale training across employee groups or office locations.
