Increase Your Cultural Agility with Paula Caligiuri Paula Caligiuri is a Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at North-eastern University. Paula has authored award-winning articles and books – including her most recent book Build Your Cultural Agility:

1. Diversity and Inclusion EDI Speaker
Increase Your Cultural Agility with Paula Caligiuri
Paula Caligiuri is a Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at North-
eastern University. Paula has authored award-winning articles and books – including her
most recent book Build Your Cultural Agility: The Nine Competencies of Successful Global
Professionals. She has been a frequent expert guest on CNN and is an instructor for a
LinkedIn Learning course entitled Managing Globally. Paula co-founded a public benefit
corporation, Skiilify, to help foster cultural understanding, and she holds a Ph.D. from Penn
State University in Organizational Psychology.
Cultural agility is the antidote to ineffective EDI programs. Unconscious bias training may be
the most popular form of EDI program, but it is often not successful and may exacerbate
failings in intercultural understanding. What’s new? Fortune 1000 companies now average
about $1.5 million annually on EDI programs. Globally, companies’ budgets for EDI training
have increased six fold in the past few years, with 20% of companies increasing these
budgets while cutting budgets in other areas. Unfortunately, mounting evidence now shows
many well-meaning EDI training programs produce no change in employees’ openness and
acceptance of diversity. A waste of corporate resources is the good news, in some
companies these programs produce the opposite of their stated goal, increasing
stereotyping and the like. To make a positive change in EDI companies need to focus on
proven methods, not fads. Based on my research, HR needs to focus less on diversity and
unconscious bias training and more on cultural agility training. The competencies for
improving EDI can be developed within organizational initiatives.
Key findings almost every c-suite executive I have spoken to names improving EDI as one of
their top priorities. This is a popular stance as about 80% of their employees want to see
their senior executives condemn racial inequity and prioritize D&I in the workplace. It is a
laudable goal with far-reaching benefits. The problem is how the goal is being executed. To
appear action-oriented, many companies are offering unconscious bias training. This
training however, might be considered an ill-advised fad having the opposite effect on
fostering EDI. When offered in isolation from broader cultural agility initiatives, unconscious
bias training might be lowering not increasing cultural agility in the workforce.
Here are three reasons why:
1. Reducing prejudice and discrimination requires demographically different people to
communicate with and feel connected to one another. To achieve this, employees
need, for example, to sense each other as similar, interconnected and working
collaboratively toward a shared purpose. A focus on bias, conscious or unconscious,
places the focus on differences.

2. 2. Everyone with a functioning brain forms split-second subjective judgements based
on their lifetime of stored data. While it is helpful to be aware of unconscious
processing, we need to remember that most people interact consciously, not
unconsciously. Scoring poorly on an implicit bias test does not mean a person is
xenophobic, racist, sexist, ageist, etc. Unfortunately, many who have gone through
the unconscious bias training are now nervous that their so-called ‘bias’ will be
visible to others, priming them to withhold having authentic conversations with
people who are demographically different.
3. Training resources, both time and money, are limited. Unconscious bias training uses
the resources that could be used to build cultural agility. Benchmarking has made
matters worse. The fact that other companies are engaging in unconscious bias
training has become the rationale for investing in it, devoid of the ultimate effect on
fostering long term EDI.
Only about 30% of professionals have cultural agility, which is the ability to interact
comfortably and effectively with people from different cultures, whether those differences
are based on gender, race, profession, generation or nationality. Cultural agility remains one
of the most underdeveloped competencies in the workforce and yet it is also one of the
most critical in organizations becoming increasingly more diverse. While it is natural for
people to cling to familiarity when under stress (for example, when the need for cultural
agility has never been higher. Companies are trying to improve equity, diversity and
inclusion (EDI). At the same time, the stress of the pandemic and the need to work from
home has made their employees’ circle of trust tighten, making a spirit of openness feel
more elusive to many. To add to the challenge, ill-advised unconscious bias training, now
ubiquitous, is likely making matters worse. Those who have learned to sense their own
‘biases’ avoid natural conversations with people who are demographically different, the
very activity that promotes cultural agility.
Building your Cultural Agility will help you train on how to find similarities, cultivate an
appreciation for context, create a cultural agile workforce. You can expect to see higher
levels of engagement and productivity. Learning to interact comfortably and effectively with
people from different cultures.
When you work with our diversity and Inclusion speakers, you will increase the success of
your business by introducing cultural agility as the antidote to ineffective EDI programs. Our
core job is to help our clients run their businesses with confidence.
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