The What, Why, and How of Cultural Agility: A Conversation with Dr. Paula Caligiuri

CommLab Podcast with Dr. Paula Caligiuri

Shalini Merugu 2:28
Hi there. Welcome to the eLearning Champions pod. Today I'm very, very thrilled to have a special guest with us, Doctor Paula Caligiuri, who's a distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northwestern University. And she's also the Co-founder and CEO of Skillify. An expert in cultural agility, global leadership, and expatriate management, Paula has been named one of the most prolific authors in international business for her work in the areas of expatriate management, global leadership development, and cultural agility. She has authored or co-authored several articles and books, including Cultural Agility, building a Pipeline of Successful Global Professionals, and Build your Cultural Agility. A fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology and Academy of International Business, she holds a PhD in Industrial and Organisational Psychology from Penn State. With extensive experience working with global organisations, Dr Paula helps professionals and leaders develop the cultural agility needed to thrive in a diverse kind of environment. We are thrilled to have her share with us her insights on building individual's cultural agility. So a very warm welcome to you, Paula. We're thrilled to have you with us today.

Caligiuri, Paula 4:07
Thank you, Shalini. It's a pleasure to be here.

Shalini Merugu 4:10
Right. So let me dive right into the first question. I think it'll be very useful for our listeners to set the stage by defining what exactly is cultural agility.

Caligiuri, Paula 4:23
Sure, sure. Anytime someone is in a situation where they're out of their norm, it could be when you're working in different countries, it could be when you're working with people from different cultures or it could be simply you're working in a situation that's new to you, like changing a job or changing a team or whatever, it's that need to react in a way that allows you to learn in the new situation.

Shalini Merugu 5:00
Right, right. So why is there an increasing focus today, Paula? I was just wondering, the world became a global village long back, but we see this now increasingly being in demand, these kind of skills and this kind of a mindset. So is there any particular reason?

Caligiuri, Paula 5:19
It all comes down to the fact that we are in, you remember, back in the early 90s they coined that phrase VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.

Shalini Merugu 5:20
Oh yes, VUCA world.

Caligiuri, Paula 5:31
I think we are now in more of a VUCA world than ever before. So we have a constant onslaught of novelty and complexity and ambiguity. And our bodies, even though we have cognitively evolved, we're actually still in need of the ability to work within these new and novel situations. So despite the technology, despite how integrated we are in all of it, we actually do need more of this contextual agility in order to be successful. And unfortunately, what's happening is, the way we become really good at it is to get out there and get out of our comfort zones and move into our stretch zones and just continually do that. But think of our world in the past five years since COVID, we've gone smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where some people don't ever need to leave their homes. So it's a crazy confluence of issues that we're becoming worse at developing cultural agility at a time when we need it more than ever.

Shalini Merugu 6:28
Right, right. Yeah, I think that's interesting, the way you defined it. When we think of cultural agility, we tend to think only in terms of multicultural environments. But it's also just getting out of your comfort zone and building relationships with people in your own organisation who may be from the same culture, really.

Caligiuri, Paula 7:05
You said the different organisations, whenever we work with companies, one of the biggest dimensions of cultural challenge has nothing to do with the national culture in which you were socialised. It has its professional culture and generational culture. Those two tend to be the bigger ones. So even in a monocultural organisation, we still see challenges that are pretty profound from just demographic differences.

Shalini Merugu 7:34
Right, right. And I think never has there been a time such as this where you have so many generations working together in an organisation, so I guess that adds to the challenge of being able to develop these, what would you call these skills, Paula? Is it a soft skill? How would you define them?

Caligiuri, Paula 7:55
Even though I'm an organisational psychologist, I tend to slide between calling them competencies and calling them skills. Skills by definition are practised acts and what we found is that within developing this cultural agility, you can help everyone move the needle on these six critical skills. But at the same time, their confidence is in that each of them have a bit of a recipe. So there's some amount of how we're naturally hard wired, some amount of dispositional traits, and some amount of experience and skill. So, yeah, call them soft skills or call them competencies, either way we can build them.

Shalini Merugu 8:41
Right. That's very heartening that these can be developed and built. Because sometimes there's this misconception that it's an innate thing. You either have it or you don't, especially when it comes to, I don't even know how to define it. These are not like hard technical skills, but those kind of skills, you know exactly where you are. You can just keep at it and you're sure to excel in it. Now these are softer ones, where there's a lot of nuance and it's harder to define and harder to capture progress, for instance.

Caligiuri, Paula 9:17
That is very true. They are a little harder to find, but not impossible to define. And we do track change over time with them. So these competencies, these soft skills are things like tolerance of ambiguity, that ability to linger longer in situations that are new to you without your brain going, “I need comfort. I need comfort’’. So you swing to interpreting too quickly or clinging to something familiar. Things like resilience, you're going to make mistakes, but you've got to be able to be able laugh it off and shrug it off and have that growth mindset. Curiosity, the desire to ask a bunch of questions in this new situation to learn, because that's how we do. Humility, to be able to say, look, I am brilliant in engineering, accounting, finance, medicine, whatever it might be. But I don't know how to do that here. So even though your technical skills may be at the top, you have to learn the context in order to be effective.Relationship building is also very critical, the ability to connect with others and foster a supportive relationship so that people have your interests in mind as you're learning about the new context. And the last one is perspective, taking that idea that you can see the situation through another person's eyes. Even if you don't see it the same way, you can respect the fact that others are seeing it differently. Those six seem to keep coming up as the six most critical. And you know what, Shalini, it's really interesting. We recently did a study with just senior tech leaders, so this had nothing to do with national culture. This was just looking at the wave, the tsunami of difference that's about to happen in the world of work. And we asked them to what extent these soft skills were going to be important. 94% of them said these will be critical for the future of at least tech careers, but certainly all others.

Shalini Merugu 11:34
Right, right. I also recall reading this workplace learning report, something about the future of work where these skills were going to be increasingly in the focus. The top among the top ten skills, some of the ones you mentioned, including learning agility, curiosity, resilience, these took a very prominent place in that report that I had also gone through.
Well, I'm curious, but how did you get interested in this area? I mean, what really triggered it?

Caligiuri, Paula 12:14
Oh gosh, it's an old story. This was 1987, so a very long time ago. I was studying abroad in Rome, and I came into a situation where I really was not financially. I shouldn't have been there.

I didn't have a lot of money. I'd save some money went over to study abroad in Rome. And it was beautiful. Except the market crashed. This was 1987 when my parents said, honey, you've got two choices. You can either get a job while you're in Italy or you can come home. And I didn't want to come home. I was having fun in Italy, so I stayed. But I had a very different experience. So instead of running around with my fellow American students, I was, in fact, working. I was doing some tutoring. And yeah, had an Italian boyfriend and had Italian friends because I couldn't really go anywhere. So anyhow went back to finish up my undergraduate degree in psychology. But I was depressed and sad and mopey and I was working for some psychology professors who said, Paula, what's wrong with you? You just seem not you anymore. And I said I just feel like I'm not me anymore. Ever since my experience abroad, I just feel like even though I'm surrounded by people I love and my friends and my family, I just don't feel the same. And they said, well, if this had such an effect on you, you should study it. OK, I'll bite. Like, what does that mean? And they said, why don't you get a PhD and study it? So, Shalini, in 1989 I graduated, and my application for Graduate School said I want to study what makes people effective living and working internationally and I want to know how they change from deep developmental cross cultural experiences. And I joke that 30 years later, I'm still studying what makes people effective, living and working internationally, and how they change from deep developmental cross cultural experiences. It's just been applied to lots of different contexts. I've worked with the military, I've worked with Fortune 100, and I've worked with students. It's all the same. It's humans in novelty, so it's really a very specific thing. But it happens. It happens all the time. It's not just culture.

Shalini Merugu 14:38
Right, right. Thank you. It's always wonderful to hear the story, the back story behind somebody's passion and motivation.

Caligiuri, Paula 15:02
I always wish mine was like cool. My story. So boring. Like I started when I was a kid.

Shalini Merugu 15:09
But really cool what you've made of it, with your passion in pursuing this. Incidentally, Paula, in India we have more than 20 states. Each state has its own language. So there's this multicultural kind of environment you grow up with if you're studying in a public school, for instance, what we call a Central School. So you have your classmates who don't even speak the same language at home. So very early on, you're exposed to all these. For longest time ever, I used to think that it's only to do with different languages and different art, food, those kind of things. So I really like what you shared about even in our homogeneous kind of an organisation where everybody's from the same place, there are all these other things. And I'm sure your experience living abroad, being an international student really helped you to see what makes a person thrive and not thrive when you're exposed to other environments? So how do you go about Paula, developing? What are your recommendations for companies to build this agility in leadership and in the talent pipeline?

Caligiuri, Paula 16:39
Yeah, that's a really important question, Shalini. Because when companies approach me on this that they need more leaders with this cultural agility, I always go back to where are you in needing them? If you need them immediately then we move to a selection assessment. We do a really deep dive into making sure we can bring in the people who have this set of competencies. If they say no, we're going to start doing global expansion or we have an acquisition coming up and we've got a little bit of time, then we start to do kind of the pipeline question. So some of it is motivation. Who wants to be a part of this global expansion or international engagement? And then we look at who has the competencies, so we'll do regular benchmarking like figure out who. I'm on the bench with these competencies now, who would kind of be ready now and then it's a combination of motivation and competence. What do people want from their careers, how many of them want to move into this, and that's a big part of it, because, where there's motivation, there's the willingness to learn. And there's also the willingness to build those competencies. And when those start to move or when they are willing to put in a little time to understand, Oh, it might be different in the United States or India, or I've got to pause here my way, I can't just run in and believe I can fix everything or do this. When you are willing to slow down and pause that awareness, that's a big piece of it kicks in and that's wonderful. And then that other part of it, the skills, competencies to be effective as a leader in those situations. So you have the ability to slow down and ask questions or figure out who a good cultural coach would be? Someone who you could trust, who's at your level, who sees things both through your eyes and the local context. Leaders. There's lots of recommendations, but it's really a timing question. It's like when are we needing these individuals?

Shalini Merugu 19:01
Right, right. That's really interesting. As you mentioned, without motivation, as with any other competency without motivation, you really can't build it. But would you say that more and more employees are being increasingly aware of the need for this and hence they are intrinsically motivated? Or is it still something that organisations are struggling to develop in their workforce?

Caligiuri, Paula 19:25
I think we've been lulled into believing that we're all good at this, which is unfortunate. Think about this moment we're in right now, you and I are sitting in two different countries, having a conversation in a shared language. This doesn't feel like a cultural interaction, we're two professionals of the same field, so we share so many similarities that it doesn't feel culturally different. But if I wanted to, I could walk away and say I just had a cultural experience, but we didn't, right?

So what ends up happening is people are lulled into believing they’re good at this because they’ve been meeting people from different cultures. In reality, those underlying competencies aren’t as profound, aren’t as advanced as we believe they are because they haven’t been tested out of a comfort zone into a stretch zone or even into a panic zone. So basically we're having these situations in a way that doesn't push us at all. So they're not developmental. What ended up happening for years and I dare say is still happening in companies and in universities is that we put people in other countries believing that's developmental, so you'd say to someone well, you're a global leadership talent. You should be moving from this market to this market in this other country to get some developmental experience. I don't want to want to sound glib, but it's as though they're going to go to another country, breathe the air of that country, and all of a sudden, fairy dust drops over them, and they become great at this. That's not how this happens. You have to be stretched. You have to have deep, meaningful connection. You have to figure out the limits of your knowledge, the limits of your experience. And then frankly, you've got to be able to process what went right, what went wrong. And that's just not the case. It's like, oh, I'm having this nice little corporate experience here. I just am having a nice corporate experience in another country. I'm eating new foods and that's great. And it’s the same with universities, we're sending students abroad more than ever before. But we're making the experience more and more homogeneous for them. They're taking great Instagram pictures, but they're not really having deep cultural experiences. So there's all these crazy situations where we need it now more than ever. We think we're really good at it. We're getting worse at it and we're doing more and more in the wrong place.

Shalini Merugu 22:17
Yeah, that's interesting, Paula. We may not even be aware of the fact that we are still sitting in our comfort zone, just moving from one country to another. Maybe you're continuing to sit in your comfortable bubble which you were inhabiting back home. You've just geographically moved. But you're carrying all that with you, your comfortable little world. So that's really interesting. So I'm curious, Paula, how do you assess these competencies? You mentioned a couple of areas, like resilience, curiosity, when you try to take people through a developmental programme in this area, there must be some baseline assessment right at the beginning and then towards the end. So do you use some particular frameworks? Are there some popular frameworks out there?

Caligiuri, Paula 23:32
Yeah, I use the one that we've developed through Skillify called My guide. It's spelled in a funny way, it's MYGIIDE. And I'm sharing that only because anyone can use it for free. We're a public benefit corporation, so it's a tool that's publicly available. We have people from 130 countries using it. It's very widely used. And you can go on and take an assessment and understand your baseline for these competencies, but it also gives some hints in ways to develop the competencies and challenges, some behavioural ways to move the needle on those competencies, and they work. We've done a lot of these pre post studies with experiences in between. And an experience can and does shift competency development. Couple little challenges in the competency build is you have to be careful that you give people and you're putting people in a stretch zone and not a panic zone. So what's a stretch for me might be a comfort zone for you. What's a stretch for you might be a panic zone for me. We have to meet people where they are and then move out of comfort into stretch. And the studies that we've done were really fascinating. As long as they're in their stretch zone, the needle moves on the competency development. But if they go to panic or if they're in comfort, nothing. In effect, if they're in panic, sometimes they backslide.

Shalini Merugu 25:06
Right, right. Yeah, that's really interesting. The comfort and the panic zone. So it has to be highly customised to each individual, right? This kind of a programme, if you were to develop these competencies.

Caligiuri, Paula 25:17
Yeah, that's why I'm a huge advocate. I know a lot of people are not excited about self-assessment. I'm actually a huge advocate of self-assessment because as long as it's done anonymously, you're not using the scores for evaluation, this is a very much a self-development tool. They're very powerful because people can own what they've assessed, their self-assessments, and then they can figure out where to work on it, where to move ahead, where to advance their competencies, and they do. Again it's amazing. So they can figure out what's panic and stretch and comfort. So I'm a really big advocate of self-assessments in this regard.

Shalini Merugu 26:04
Yeah, absolutely. I think self-awareness is a starting point. Otherwise, you'll continue to be lulled into that sense of complacency that you mentioned.

Caligiuri, Paula 26:23
And I also spend a lot of time trying to help people sense and feel when they're in each of those zones, which isn't necessarily easy. Because for example, if you walk into a cafeteria at a normal university or school or wherever, and it's like multicultural or multi whatever, you walk in right away, you see people clustered by usually demography. And if you're just kind of anthropologically looking at that, you'd say, oh, you know, people are clustered. But it's not racism, it's not sexism, it's not xenophobia, it's not ageism, what it is, is comfort. When you're in situations of novelty or stress or anytime our bodies, novelty is stress even if we're having a great time, it's a stress on our body. Our bodies move to comfort. So what we sometimes need to do and this is something I do with my own students, it's something as basic as having them talk to people who they would not demographically normally talk with. And that sometimes is enough of a stretch. So they haven't even walked off campus, they're not flying to another country, they're just having a conversation with someone and it’s powerful beyond measure.

Shalini Merugu 27:43
That's a good strategy. So when you develop, in the context of training on these skills, what are your favourite strategies? Do you put people into situations? Is it something like a situational scenario-based kind of a thing? What are the different means through which you make people get out of their comfort zone and not go into the panic zone, but still give them an adequate amount of stretch?

Caligiuri, Paula 28:23
You know, I wish I had one magic, like, oh, do this and everybody will grow. I unfortunately, don't. It depends on the context. For example, if I'm working with an organisation and their goal is to get those who are at the bottom of those competencies unnamed up to the middle. What we'll do is something that's really quite basic. And it could be something like pairing people front with colleagues who are in a different location or of a different generation, or just pairing people and having them do something fairly deep together, like working out a project together, something where they really need each other in order to succeed. They really do need to push against their assumptions, their values. So it can't just be something superficial or technical. It's got to go a bit deeper. What that does is, it's not a stretch at all for the people who are on the front end, but it brings up those who are in the lower end to middle. If the question for organisations is different where they're saying, Nope, we really need people to be like all of these leaders to be great at this, then what we'll do is create a pretty significant programme. Like for example, we did a lot with short term technical volunteering in very diverse contexts. So we had executives from all over and big multinationals going into very challenging situations in Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Thailand, Indonesia. But we put them in situations with NGOs and had them working alongside the NGOs, but they couldn't kind of walk in and say, we know how to do this, even though technically they did, they did have technical skills, but the context was so radically different. They had to stay in that situation of ambiguity far longer than they wanted to, and they were under time pressure. So we actually created this stretch experience. But what we did because there we had variance, so very quickly jumped to panic for some, not panic in that they were actually scared. But it was almost like I can't do this, there's no resources here, I can't like, they were almost shutting it down. So what we did is we coaches embedded with each team, so that someone understood them and understood the context in which they were. And these coaches hung back until they saw the team or individuals moving to the like I'm shutting down. I don't like this, this is unsolvable, or we shouldn't be here. When it got to that, the coaches were great at pulling them back. And some people needed more coaching, others were great. They were like up and running and never needed to talk to a coach. But what that is that upskilled everyone, that wherever they were, they moved everybody at the same time.

Shalini Merugu 31:53
Right, right. So is that a formal kind of a role for our cultural coach? I'm just wondering because we don't see much of it here. So I was just wondering if that's actually in a formal role.

Caligiuri, Paula 32:09
I think they're called different things depending on the company. We call ours cultural coaches, but again, a cultural coach could be just helping people, helping the engineers talk to the marketing people. Cultural coach could be having the senior leaders who are in their 50s and 60s talk to the new generation who's coming up and understand behaviours. So it's basically just helping people see each other and interpret each other a little bit better.

Shalini Merugu 32:41
Right. I think the quickest way to develop this competency is to just join a cross functional team. And that's it. It's like being in boot camp. You've got no other choice but to quickly learn these competencies.

Caligiuri, Paula 33:00
Yeah, as long as it's a good. You want to give people just enough of the skills in order to get the most out of the experience. And we want to make sure that, sometimes when I teach MBA students and I put them in these teams, this programme called X Culture, it's fantastic. So every one of my students is with four other students from four other universities around the world. And they've got to work on a project for the whole duration of the semester. So there are people they don't know, a project that they're getting graded on, it's a significant global team. So the worst situation is when on day one, they're on the zoom call and they say, OK, you're going to do part 1, you're going to do Part 2, you're going to do part 3. We'll see you again in 10 weeks, that's not exactly it. So we want to make sure that team that they're working on really does need to collaborate. So the challenge is high enough that the interdependence is there.

Shalini Merugu 34:11
Right, right. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. So I think you did tackle one or two myths around cultural agility, incidentally, as we were speaking, but what would you say are the biggest ones, about even the development of this competency?

Caligiuri, Paula 34:26
I think the biggest one is that travel equals skill. So that if you have lots of passport stamps or have worked in lots of companies or done lots of that, therefore you're good at this. And those are two really different things. Basically what those passport stamps indicate to me is that you had the opportunity to develop this, and you might have and that's great, that's like a win for everyone. But it may be the case that you didn't. So for me it's helping companies understand that myth. It's like, you have a resume in front of you and it has all kinds of international experience. It could be the person just loves to travel, and is happy to travel while staying at something familiar, hotel and eating familiar foods. But they love art, or they love, you know.

Those are different, so that's a pretty significant myth. There's some sub myths like Oh well, technology's making the need for this go away. Not at all. Technology's taking away our ability to build it. So you know, it's kind of a challenge.

Shalini Merugu 35:50
Yeah. I think the technology being an increasingly important role, I think competencies like this are the ones which really differentiate us, which serve as a differentiator, especially with AI are doing so much of our work. It's these competencies which AI cannot replace, which really will become increasingly important in the future from what we see around.

Caligiuri, Paula 36:24
AI will be able to do a lot, it's going to be able to read sentiment, be able to identify emotion, it's going to eventually be able to do all of it in real time. But, to the best of my knowledge, it cannot read the air. Humans can read the air, we can observe and see and hear and we can read those little, tiny micro expressions in context. And maybe eventually AI will get there. I don't know if it will happen in my lifetime. It might happen next year. I don't know. But boy, that's uniquely human, but there's skills associated, those soft skills, those competencies, those six I named, associated with that ability to read the air and I don't think AI is going to be able to do that one.

Shalini Merugu 37:13
Right, right. So Paula, what would you advise somebody who wants to really work on this competency of cultural agility? Are there any recommendations that you would like to share because I'm sure a lot of our listeners would also love to invest in this area? Especially if the organisation they're at does not have a formal programme in place to build this competency.

Caligiuri, Paula 37:49
The most structured way I mentioned that free tool that we have, and it is free. You don't have to contact me to use it. You don't have to contact Skillify to use it.

Shalini Merugu 37:55
I'm sorry, could you just mention the name again?

Caligiuri, Paula 37:58
Sure. It's called myguide.com. It's a web-based tool and it's spelled MYGIIDE. So it's MY. And then the word guide in English is spelled incorrectly, GIIDE and the ID is we're helping people see eye to eye. Myguide.com, you just go there. You can take these assessments, learn about your own competency, but also have a structured way to build them. The other basic situation is understand yourself well enough to know when you're lingering in that comfort zone, when you're in that stretch zone, and when you move to that panic zone. And try to give yourself more opportunities to put yourself into that stretch zone. So it could be doing things as simple as trying a sport that you've never played, or a dance class, or it could be learning anything that gets you comfortably uncomfortable, comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Shalini Merugu 39:10
Right. That's a nice way of putting it, right? Yeah. Thank you so much for now. And it's really been great fun talking to you about this very fascinating topic. It's really fascinating.

Caligiuri, Paula 39:25
Well, thank you. This has been a pleasure.

Shalini Merugu 39:25
And listeners, I hope you enjoyed the session as much as I did talking to Paula. Please do stay tuned and for our future sessions. Thank you once again Paula for graciously accepting our invite.

Caligiuri, Paula 39:39
My pleasure. This was wonderful. Thank you.