Training in Cultural Competence is replacing Diversity
Training at many American companies, and it’s long overdue. Diversity Training has
been around for over two decades now, which gave researchers at Harvard ample
data to conduct a meaningful in-depth study of their effectiveness. An article on the findings of that report in
the Harvard Business Review, titled
Why Diversity Programs Fail, concluded that Diversity Training not only shows
dismal results, but also makes conditions inside the company worse. For full details,
the article is available on the internet (HBR, August 2016). https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
Like many other long-term, research-dense studies out of
Harvard, the authors validate conclusions that are self-evident to people on
the ground. Ask any parent of a five-year-old and they’ll tell you that
children don’t like to be told what to do and will push back when you try to do
it. The Harvard study documents the fact that this pushback is part of being
human and doesn’t end at childhood.
Diversity Training focuses on awareness and inclusion,
taking a didactic training approach that seeks to outline a rulebook for
correct thinking and behavior. Efforts
have been mounted to improve DT’s track record of training that shows little
difference in outcomes from its first emergence in the mid-60s, and flat
results in schools and the workplace for promoting fair treatment and hiring. While
the conclusions may seem obvious in hindsight, the study’s significance is that
Harvard documented and detailed this dismal result across a twenty-year timeframe.
Failure here is no fluke, nor a case of technique, but due to a fundamental
flaw in the approach.
As a cultural analyst, I think this is a major achievement
and a step in a positive direction. The Harvard study found that people don’t
appreciate being told how to think about or how to treat others.
What is wanting is a deeper education (as opposed to
training) that informs everyone first, about their own cultural ways of
thinking, and second, about the universe of other mindsets in which they need
to live. The desired outcome is a
liberal studies plan for learning about others and how to understand,
communicate, appreciate, and empathize with people of backgrounds other than
one’s own. This will never be achieved by a forced ruleset about accepting
everyone no matter who they are. There
is just not enough “why” included to satisfy our naturally self-biased
minds. We have a deep need to understand
why we are learning and how this learning can or should be applied.
In fact, the cliché that learning about foreign cultures
(like foreign language) makes it possible to understand one’s own cultural
identity is quite on the mark. Learning
about your own culture as a conscious act then makes it possible to see where
other cultures line up around yours.
Unfortunately, the ground-floor knowledge of where you yourself stand is
tricky to find and recognize.
Cultural Competence
Culture learning has multiple aspects that make it
sophisticated and a lifelong undertaking. Raising your CQ is therefore a
complex undertaking. Using the simplest working definition of Cultural
Competence as the ability to relate and work effectively across cultures--to communicate
effectively and appropriately with people of other backgrounds--bypasses the
difficult work of figuring out the rules, norms, ideals, and expectations
carried by every culture that explain the ways in which they perceive, think,
feel, and act.
However, this is not ever as easy as just asking people the
simple question, “Who are you, and how should I deal with you?” Because culture operates below the surface of
conscious thinking, it requires a close reading of how culture is expressed –
in language, food, music, governance, art, technology, business, and domestic
life—to derive from the way groups dress, for example, their ideas about
appropriate or ideal ways of life and relationships. The connection isn’t clear, but it can, with
some teasing out, be discerned.
The idea is to get beyond conventions of greeting, introductions,
and gift-giving to the values behind those conventions, for example, in the
handling of business cards as differing between American and Japanese business
people. What are the rules of
negotiation and verbal conflict that are observed? Of paying attention, listening, interrupting,
responding to new information, positive or negative? What do these tell us about how issues are
identified and resolved?
The Cultural Question
The cultural question is always this: What are people in any culture trying to do,
and to become, to themselves and each other?
Once you have hold of this core Value principle, it then becomes far
easier to read and understand what people are doing and to relate your own
behavior to theirs in effective and even productive ways. And yes, it is far easier to understand what
you yourself are doing, and how that comes across to others within and outside
your own group, if you can discover what your own culture is about. That’s never easy to do—it requires
breakthrough insight that’s (in my experience) relatively rare. We each see the world through our own
cultural lens and think we understand it.
Only when that vision stops working is it clear that something is off in
our ability to read and navigate the territory.
For example: Muslim culture has for three or more decades
been the focus of world attention in its contest with the West for world
attention. Cultural differences exist
within as well as between cultures. So despite
the headlines of terrorism that make this contest look like East versus West,
the violent upheavals are far more an expression of intra-Moslem faith feuds
than they are outward-directed attacks.
The task of understanding these cross-Islamic conflicts is an arcane and
arduous one, far beyond the grasp or ability of media journalists and reporters
(or even well-versed scholars). The
East-West story is far easier to outline and populate with villains, and that’s
what we get in the Western press. So Cultural
Competence could bring real intelligence to the global conflict between Islamic
v. Christian (Enlightenment) values.
There are other differences to navigate as well: by Gender,
Age, Class, and Context. These cultural
aspects are just as real as national / ethnic friction. Gender is the only
biological factor that directly influences how we perceive the world around us.
This is why males and females perceive stimuli with brains that are configured
differently, influenced by different chemicals, and transmit information to
different arrangements of receptors. The human age-stage development chart
bristles with value changes that occur every four to five years in twenty-year
cycles over a lifetime. Class
differences are the root of racial and ethnic prejudice. And cultures are framed and nurtured--national,
regional, and local--by climate, landscape, agriculture, industry, craft, and
commerce. Culture is an outgrowth of its
physical and psychological ecology and the values engendered by desert, ocean, mountain,
forest, or plains. One reason America
became its own culture was that its temperate character offered such
ridiculously higher opportunity than Europe, where land had been divided up and
locked-in for generations. The US
open-ended frontier offered the chance to think outside history, to value
creativity and enterprise, and to focus on the future potential rather than on frameworks
of the past.
Purpose
Diversity Training has been conducted over the past several
decades by schools and workplaces driven by the need for functional teams that
include diversity in demographics, belief, and hierarchy, expressed as gender,
ethnicity, age, religion, class, and power relations of role and rank. The goal of this endeavor has been to foster regard
for differences and to facilitate strategies targeted to better decision-making
and group performance. This objective
has to take into account the nuances of style, assumptions, communication, and
autonomy needs within social situations.
A very useful theory base for this work can be found in the positive psychology
movement of Self-Determination Theory.
Here at The Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis,
we’ve been studying culture for a quarter-century, always starting from the
perspective of fundamental questions: What is culture for? Why does it exist?
How do we use it? How does it shape our fundamental assumptions? How does it
work? What are its assumptions based on?
And we have found answers to many of these questions. They
are not unknowable. When we started our work we thought we would be explaining
American culture to foreigners. It turned out that we spend our time explaining
American culture to Americans because culture operates below our conscious
horizon. We don’t think about it, we just have it.
Which leaves us with one basic conclusion: You can’t
understand someone else’s culture unless you consciously understand the
cultural assumptions on which your own thinking is based. So we wound up
explaining our own culture to Americans. That’s the basis of cultural
competence.
While groups made up of people who are homogenous find it
easier to arrive at consensus, diverse groups typically come up with more
ingenious solutions to problems. The issue
is that diversity is more challenging to manage, takes longer, and requires
more tools and techniques. There is a
broader horizon beyond the usual diversity mandate. What does it mean to be competent in
culture? Here the aim is applied: to
answer how people of diverse backgrounds and values can work together as
effective teams. What is needed are new forms of social intelligence for the
way we relate to each other Elite
professionals practice this all the time in the arts, sciences, technology, and
business; ways can be found of deriving what they do intuitively to determine
how human differences can be a source of competence wealth rather than
conflict.
