This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2161 Three Ways to Become Culturally Agile with Paula Caligiuri.
Welcome to the All Ears English podcast, downloaded more than 200 million times.
We believe in connection, not perfection.
With your American host, Lindsay McMahon, and today's featured guest coming to you from Denver Colorado, USA.
To get real-time transcripts right on your phone and create your personalized vocabulary list, try the All Ears English app.
For iOS and Android, start your seven-day free trial at allearsenglish.com forward slash app.
Are you culturally agile?
Find out today and learn why it matters with Distinguished Professor of International Business, Paula Caligiuri from Northeastern University.
Listen in for tips on international business success.
This Black Friday, stop piecing together random TikToks and YouTube videos that don't lead anywhere.
Join our 2026 English Mastery Bundle, a complete nine to 12 month curriculum designed for goal oriented learners like you.
You'll follow a clear, structured path from intermediate to high intermediate and even to advanced fluency, with every course flowing naturally into the next.
No gaps, no guesswork, no searching for extra resources.
Plus you'll get live speaking practice, community and teacher support.
It's a done for you plan.
Everything you need in one place, all unlocked with a single one-time investment.
This Black Friday only.
Build your English for the long term.
Start today.
Go to allersenglish.com slash blackfriday to save 50% off the normal price.
Expires at midnight on Friday. allersenglish.com slash b-l-a-c-k-f-r-i-d-a-y.
Hello, Paula.
Welcome to the show.
How are you today?
I'm well, thanks, Lindsay.
How are you?
I'm excited to have you on the show.
You are a professor at Northeastern University, which is the city I spent 10 years in.
So we have the Boston connection here.
Paula, I'd like to take a minute to introduce you to our audience before we get started.
So guys, today I have Paula Caligiuri on the show.
Paula is a DMSB Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern University and has authored numerous award-winning articles and books on multicultural effectiveness, global careers and fostering cultural ability.
She's the CEO and, with Andy Palmer, co-founder of Skillify, a public benefit corporation which is dedicated to helping people build professional success.
Welcome again, Paula.
That is quite a resume.
Oh, thank you, Lindsay.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Yeah.
What is cultural agility?
Let's just get started right there and ask that direct question.
What is it and why should we worry about it when it comes to our international business skills?
Sure.
Cultural agility is the ability for individuals to be comfortable and effective in in different countries and with people from different cultures.
And frankly, it's needed in every situation where someone needs to build trust communicate, collaborate.
Anytime it's human to human and we're coming from different cultural lenses.
That's where cultural agility is needed.
I love it.
So it's broad.
It's quite broad, but it's a real skill, right?
Kind of a superpower to be able to do business all over the world.
And, as you said, I feel like trust might be the key piece there, because nothing gets done if we don't trust the person we're working with.
Is that correct?
Absolutely.
And it's trust around both sides of it, right?
It's the relationship side of it, but it's also the, you know, showing your competence side of it.
Cultural agility is needed for Both of these.
And it's so, so important.
Real quick example.
We do a lot of work with pharmaceutical companies in the United States.
And so our pharmaceutical sales representatives need to work with a lot of foreign born health care providers to explain and describe pharmaceuticals.
Just that whole interaction around being credible and competent, building the relationship and building trust is a place where cultural agility is needed.
And no one has ever even left their home region, let alone their home country, right?
They're not even outside of their own region.
So cultural agility is needed in a variety of situations.
Right.
It seems like if we don't challenge ourselves to think about this new level of connecting, we can think that our reality, our culture quote unquote is different normal.
And we don't realize there are different ways of doing things, different ways of doing business, different ways of looking at building relationships, depending on where we're from.
And you're right.
It's not just country.
It could be region.
It could be our company culture.
There are a lot of different ways to define culture.
Right, Paula?
Right.
And that's actually how we have to think of culture.
So just because I'm guessing you and I are both American, right?
So as Americans.
Just because we're Americans and we live within the boundaries of a certain country doesn't necessarily mean we both ascribe to the same values.
Every individual has layers of socializing agents that created their own cultural values, their family, their religion, their education, their socioeconomic status, whether they were in a rural community.
You can go on and on and on and it creates how we subjectively see the world, how we see right wrong good bad fair, unfair.
And it's amazing how much of that then changes the conversations that we're in.
So even if we're speaking the same language just what we're seeing and hearing it becomes very, very different depending on our culture.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Did you have a personal travel experience or international business experience that kind of spurred your interest in this academic world?
How did you end up in this world?
Oh, gosh, that goes back to 1987.
I'll give you the short version of the story.
But I was studying abroad in Rome, Italy.
Okay.
And it was.
It was, if you remember, like the Fall of 1987 there was Black Monday and the market crashed.
Oh, right.
Basically, I didn't... My parents, they gave me a choice.
They said, look, either you go get a job because I didn't have any money left.
You get a job or you come home.
Those are your two options because, you know, whatever.
We didn't have the financial resources for them to fund the project.
And I had saved money that was worth pretty much nothing.
So my experience became very different.
I started... hanging around with Italian friends because I couldn't travel with the other Americans.
I had time to spend time down in southern Italy with my relatives because I couldn't travel with the other Americans.
But as a result, the experience was very developmental.
When I returned back to finish up my undergrad degree, I was in the psychology department and some psychology professors said Paula, something's different about you.
What's what's wrong?
Like I was going through what we now know of as repatriation adjustment.
But then we didn't really know a lot about it.
So when I went on to graduate school, my application in 1989 said I want to study what makes people effective, living and working internationally.
And I want to know how they change from a deep development of cultural experience.
And Lizzie, I've been doing this ever since.
Like that's been what I've been working on.
I love this.
That is such a great story.
It's so true that you know your experience.
I imagine just studying abroad, kind of hanging out with other Americans in Italy, versus when you had to actually get a job and really at that point deeply engage with the Italian culture, was where that transformation moment happened.
And I'm sure it happened over multiple moments as you were working and really engaging and building your, your network within Italy.
Fascinating.
I love this.
All right, let's get into the details here for a minute, Paula.
So I bet our listeners, you know, many of our listeners, they are doing exactly that.
They are doing business across cultures, whether they are expats living, let's say, in the US and being from japan, or whether they are just working with a multinational national company and going abroad to london or australia for business trips.
So clearly, we need to build this skill of being culturally agile.
So what would you say would be your first tip on how to start to develop cultural agility, paula?
Okay yeah, there's a bunch of them.
Um, there's a bunch of tips, but first, i think it's a healthy dose of self-awareness because remember, cultural agility It's an individual difference.
It's something that we both have, but also build, right?
So there's a nurture and nature component to it.
I'd say start with understanding your own nature.
We all handle our bodies, all handle serotonin and dopamine differently, which means we have different levels of comfort in situations that are new and novel.
If you're the kind of person who naturally prefers predictability and then it's going to be you have to enter new situations, new cultures in a very different way.
You have to kind of make friends.
You have to sort of have a coach or a buddy or a mentor or somebody.
You have to learn the environment.
Maybe you have to spend a little more time with expat communities versus the person who can handle lots of ambiguity and be very intrepid and go by themselves.
So I'd say a good tip is to begin with some self-care.
You know, it's kind of self-awareness, knowing yourself well enough to know how you, how you enter those new and novel environments.
I think that is so good.
It all starts with self-awareness, right?
And specifically a kind of self-awareness, for I would say, like your change, tolerance is what you're, what you're really talking about, how tolerant, how ready um, What is our tolerance level for change?
Our lives are going to completely change, whether we're flying to New York for a business trip, a conference, let's say.
Your life will be completely different for that weekend.
Or whether we're actually going to become expats in another country.
I love that idea.
And it's important to know that there are different levels of this, right, Paula?
I think on this show we tend to encourage our listeners to dive right in, find that local community, find a language exchange partner.
Cause we've all traveled abroad.
We've done that, but it's true.
Sometimes different people need different amounts of immersion at different times.
Isn't that right?
It steps up.
So, so you know, from from my research, from research and my colleagues this, this level, this comfort with ambiguity, continues to go up.
Right.
But what happens?
What we found in research, is that if you put someone kind of too deep into the deep end before they're ready, It actually they backpedal.
They actually cling to familiar.
Their brains start to rely on their own way of interpreting the world even more.
So we need to sort of step up ambiguity and give people training around curiosity resilience, perspective taking humility, relationship building in those new contexts.
Once you have those, lots of people can gain insight this competency.
I've watched the needle move for everyone, but you have to start in the right place.
Interesting.
So a practical question here, before we go on to number two how can we learn that about ourselves?
Our tolerance for ambiguity?
Is there an assessment?
I'm wondering, of course, what is there?
Yeah.
Is there an actual assessment or a set of questions we can answer or A quiz we can take?
There is.
In fact, it's free.
You know, if your listeners want to go onto the site, it's called myguide.com.
It's M-Y-G-I-I-D-E.
There's no U. So no pun intended, but it's M-Y-G-I-I-D-E.com.
And they can go on and take an assessment of their cultural agility competencies.
It's free and available.
Interesting.
I love that.
So guys, go over and take that quiz.
Take that assessment.
We are gathering data here to understand how comfortable we will be when we are in that new environment and what we'll actually need to do to let ourselves as you said, Paula step up into that complete immersion eventually, if that's the right path.
I love it.
Okay.
What would be your second step then, Paula, for developing that cultural agility?
Sure.
So again, a lot of what I'm a psychologist, my PhD in psychology, so all my work is coming from the lens of a psychologist.
What we know in psychology is that we often need to be primed for what we might not naturally recognize on our own, which most of your listeners will think of as cross-cultural training.
Basically, it's the idea that you might experience something that will have a different explanation from what you're accustomed to.
And with that training, without like signaling to your brain that there could be something different, our brains have a tendency to see what it wants to see.
So we go into every situation believing we can understand it, because our brains that's how our brains, our primitive brains kept us alive is being able to read the lens of the environment, read the environment.
Sure.
Training, super critical.
It doesn't have to be, you know, week long, day long.
In fact, the same tool that my guide is also free for just getting some basic understanding of cultural differences.
It's a great place to start.
Yeah, I love that.
I'm thinking about maybe, for example, if we start working in another culture and we notice that our coworkers are often late to a meeting, for example, we might go and interpret that in one way.
But maybe the reason is something else.
Is that what we're kind of talking about?
It's all of it.
It's when someone is over like I'm very informal, and when I'm around people who are very formal, I often get like kind of put off.
But yet it's a different.
It's actually formality shows respect.
And I have time.
If you're very punctual and you see someone late, that could be your subjective lens could say that's disrespectful.
It's not, it's just fluidity of time.
It could be collectivism, where you're more accustomed to sort of being a lone star and now you're having to work in an environment and your brain might signal this is inefficient, but in reality it's highly efficient because everyone's on board.
It's all of those interpretations that will be affected by how we were individually socialized and how others are socialized.
100%.
I love it.
So important.
So the second tip is make sure you have some level of Cultural training.
It doesn't have to be a formal event necessarily, but start to educate yourself on differences and also kind of assumptions that you might be making based and where that's coming from.
That's probably coming from your culture, right?
I love it.
What would be number three, Paula?
Number three is probably, in my opinion, the most important.
It is have high quality intercultural experiences to build cultural agility and it's not just breathing the air of another country.
You don't just get passport stamps or go on a cruise and all of a sudden be culturally agile.
And it's unfortunate because a lot of the way experiences are set up, it's very much around putting people in countries without necessarily encouraging the quality of the experience.
So quality of the experience is pure level interactions that you're ready for.
So, to whatever extent you're ready for that kind of new and novel environment that you're having peer-level interactions.
It could be with the help of a bicultural friend.
It could be that you're willing to just drop in and immerse yourself.
But those experiences, having those experiences, make the other two pieces work.
So, if you imagine, cultural agility builds when you have some level of those initial competencies, the talent community resilience perspective taking humility, curiosity and the like.
And you add in awareness.
So you see what could potentially be different.
And then you put yourself into those high quality experiences.
That would be number three.
All of those gears start to move and the needle overall does move on cultural agility.
Interesting.
I love this.
This is fantastic.
Here's another question that just came up.
And I'm curious what you think.
In terms of, you know nowadays, when it comes to language learning, which is most of what we do here although we do have the cultural angle, for sure, on our show we can become fluent online.
We can become fluent without physically being in a country.
Do you think that it's possible to develop cultural agility remotely through remote communications?
This is the big question.
Yes.
You know what, Lindsay?
I'm actually conducting a research study right now on two different forms of virtual experiences.
So one is a multicultural team.
So being a member of a multicultural team that has to deal with the time zones and this and that and the language differences, whether that moves the needle on cultural agility.
And I'm doing another one on consulting projects where the client is in one country but the consultant's in another, and it's virtual experiences.
In both cases, we're seeing the cultural agility increase.
Not as quickly as it would be in an immersive setting.
Sure.
But it's definitely showing positive movement.
But the experience has sort of, again, that third suggestion, that third piece of this equation.
Yeah.
Can't just be, you know, going back and forth on email or dropping things into a shared account.
It has to be a high quality, immersive experience.
Interesting.
Well, I would love to have you back with the competencies and the awareness of Okay.
So it kind of depends on the level again, the quality of those experiences and then the things you've done beforehand to set that up, to be ready for those experiences.
I would like to have you back on the show, maybe when these studies are complete and you have some clear data to share with our listeners.
I think many of us would be really curious to see what the final kind of conclusions are there around building remote cultural agility.
Super interesting.
Yeah.
Wonderful.
Great.
Well, thank you so much, Paula, for being on the show.
And it's really great to have someone from this world.
Again, we focus a lot on language, but culture is so incredibly important.
So, so great to have you on the show.
Where can our listeners find you?
Do you have a book out or where can our listeners find you online to learn more?
Yeah, probably the best connection point for me is LinkedIn.
If you can spell my name, which is a little challenging, if you can spell me, you can find me.
I also have Build Your Cultural Agility that's out as a book.
I have some LinkedIn learning courses around how to build cultural agility, but there's lots of resources.
A lot of them are listed at my LinkedIn profile.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Paula, for being on the show again and hope to have you on again soon.
All right.
Sounds great, Lindsay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to all ears English.
Would you like to know your English level?
Take our two minute quiz.
Go to allearsenglish.com forward slash fluency score.
And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything.
See you next time.
