Developing Culturally Agile Leaders

Transcript

Paula Caligiuri: [00:12] A multipolar world is really about no single country or region leading anymore. It used to be in years past, we could learn the rules of the playbook and run the plays. Not anymore.

[00:27] What we’re finding is that really great leaders, great global leaders, can go into a situation not knowing what the rules are, read those, respond as needed, and they know which lever to pull. So, sometimes they adapt; sometimes they know how to uphold their standards and do so in a culturally appropriate way; and sometimes they pause and create a completely new set of rules for that specific situation.

[00:54] And the people who are great at that, leaders who are great at that, tend to share competencies. They have resilience, curiosity, humility, perspective-taking, and relationship-building. And they can tolerate ambiguity. It’s a whole different way of training leaders.

[01:11] Global experiences are really the gold standard for building critical leadership competencies, especially for our business students. There are some myths, though, that just because we send students to another country, they do not necessarily build cultural agility. That is a pretty pervasive myth.

Global experiences are really the gold standard for building critical leadership competencies.

[01:35] Likewise, just because someone has a great cultural immersion experience, but doesn’t have a passport, that, too, is a myth that can’t be an important global experience. Cultural agility is easy to spot when a student, a new graduate, or anyone, really, is in a novel situation.

[01:57] You can tell, they enter it, and rather than using their frame of reference to understand the environment, they’re more likely to linger longer in a situation of ambiguity. They’re curious. They ask lots of questions. They build relationships to understand the norms.

[02:17] What we’re finding is that intentional design—making sure the experience, whether it’s international or domestic, is enough of a stretch—a lot of experiences aren’t. They have an opportunity for real peer-to-peer interaction. And they also have an opportunity to persist through a challenge. So, where different norms and different assumptions are really questioned and tested.

[02:48] All of that together, that intentional design is present. The other part we are finding in these great experiences, whether global or national, is an element of microlearning. Students are now able to learn the behaviors necessary for resilience, perspective-taking, curiosity, and on and on. With those two things combined, we’re seeing the needle move tremendously.

What [students] see is that where they’ve practiced the most [competencies], they tend to gain the most.

[03:20] From an assurance of learning perspective, we’re seeing real differences in students’ exit capabilities in cultural agility. For example, what we do with my classes at Northeastern University, I teach an undergrad and an MBA course, and generally they’re both more or less around building cultural agility.

[03:41] We have virtual experiences. With my undergrads, for instance, we have them doing Global Brigades projects where they’re virtual consultants or on consulting teams for indigenous and rural solopreneurs and entrepreneurs in Honduras and in Panama. At the same time, while we’re having this big virtual experience, we also have all these microchallenges.

[04:06] We use a tool called myGiide, where they assess themselves first on resilience, curiosity, humility, perspective-taking, and the like, those six competencies. Then they get the microchallenges, or little behaviors that they can learn by asking two more questions or understanding a coping mechanism, any little microbehavior that they could gain to build a specific competency, and they practice it.

[04:36] So, what they see is that where they’ve practiced the most, they tend to gain the most. Where the experience challenged them the most, and how they can point to a competency, that’s really where the needle starts to move. It’s exciting to see, because they can see it in real time in the course of a semester, about how they’ve built competence.