Finding the white whale: What to look for in an intercultural training outfit

Cultural competence education is about building people's capacity to engage in cross cultural settings. Why do so many trainers miss that one crucial point? And what can we do about it?

If you move in not-for-profit or government circles and haven't experienced it for yourself, then you surely know someone who has. It's called cultural training, but you may also know it as a misuse of your time and resources or, worse, a trip through guilt and blame that makes an abyss of every cultural divide you can name. We all know it’s true but, to prove the point, here’s a case study (names withheld to protect the guilty):

A large organisation engaged a well profiled training outfit to deliver long workshop training for more than twenty employees. At $2,400 per head, participants could reasonably expect indications of preparedness like an agenda, learning outcomes and use of evidence. Not so. By workshop’s end, just three of the original twenty learners remained. The others had left in anger, one by one, at being repeatedly told by facilitators to silently listen as accounts of history and blame were laid out over an unstructured two-day format. The organisation was charged the full fee for all registered attendees regardless.

If, like that, the training ends with results opposite to those it was engaged to achieve, we know we’ve found our white whale – that destructive, costly beast that’ll make a ghost ship of your team morale. It’s salty, treacherous waters. Here’s how to navigate them, and beware the white whale.

When we ask - as we always do - what participants are seeking from Cultural Flexibility, the answers tend to round on some familiar themes. We share a few here, in no particular order, to identify some screening questions you might find helpful.

Theme one

'I want to know how to implement our existing best practice approaches, or tailor them, in a way that's sensitive to the needs of the people we support'

Whatever your disciplinary background and whatever your profession, you're likely in the business of knowing the evidence base and implementing best practice. This means you rely on evidence and, more than likely, your practice is the artful compromise between the realities of your environment and the ideas of thought leaders in your industry. Does the cultural trainer seeking to engage with you do the same? Look for:

- Expertise and experience in your disciplinary context - so they know the language your workforce speaks, as well as the broad challenges you encounter in your day to day work. Good working knowledge of your disciplinary context goes a long way to credibility with your workforce, and to the ability to lead the generation of workable solutions.

- Indications the training framework is based on a wide range of authoritative research, and that it articulates the links between evidence and practice in your subject area and theirs. Best practice was never born of amateurish guesswork. Period.

Theme two

‘I want skills development, not guilt or blame’

Let’s face it. Guilt is a low value currency. It’s no ally to successful relationship building because it brings with it fear, which has no place in any productive partnership. Nonetheless, we look to history because learning from the past helps us avoid repeating its mistakes. Understanding, for example, our long history of paternalistic and coercive interaction with First Nation peoples is key to understanding the issues that beset our contemporary relations. Like any oppressed group, denial of our shared history can be perceived by First Nations people as a dominant group intention to continue those oppressive historical relations. Fair enough, too. So, in these matters it’s critical to fearlessly examine, and own, our history - without letting it own us. How do we get this right? Look for:

- A trainer whose ability to respectfully engage in dialogue that outlines our shared histories and (this bit’s critical) relates them to contemporary issues in ways based in evidence, not emotion. This is about engagement with the evidence, and the use of that to clearly mark out pitfalls and opportunities relevant to you.

- A trainer who can qualify their practical and conceptual frameworks by overviewing it for you first. If you don’t get a sneak peek, how do you know it’ll be a fit? And if they can’t explain it to you, how do you think they’ll go explaining it to your colleagues?

Theme three

‘We’ve done cultural training but, if we’re honest, we still struggle to engage across cultures’

The white whale has breached again. A common mistake is the assumption that your organisation’s needs don’t vary from the next, and are equally met by the same off-the-shelf offerings. Worse again is the widespread presence of outdated approaches basing cultural competence on specific knowledge of specific cultures. Cultural competence is much more than that, but if you believe your organisation and its needs stand identical to those of every other organisation the trainer has encountered - and if you believe it’s possible to memorise the characteristics and needs of every culture you encounter - then by all means, set sail. If you think otherwise, and know cultural competence is about more than ticking boxes, look for:

- An educator that is genuinely interested in, and responsive to, your organisation’s needs. This is the real willingness to work with you to tailor your training so the knowledge and skills you’re gaining are relevant to your team and your organisational goals.

- The educator’s fluency in the conceptual and practical language of intercultural competence. This will reflect in their capacity to generate responsive training that your workforce wants.

A key quality all culturally competent people possess is awareness of how they are perceived across cultural divides. Quality intercultural training outfits like Cultural Flexibility know this is arrived at by a conscious process - in our terms, a journey - to build interpersonal communication and relation skills. We have working expertise in public health and human services, and in the health and social sciences that underpin them. So we base the skills we teach on a broad evidence base, and we know how to introduce them to your workforce in a way that ensures we aren’t wasting your most precious commodity – time.

That’s cultural training as it should be.

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