Are you looking for an approach best suited for your needs?

We can help you identify the most effective and realistic approach to improve performance and guide your organization to work and thrive within diversity. Take a look at the list below of learning topics. Each topic contributes differently to your growth. Tell us which topic interests you the most, and we will work with you to design the best approach for achieving your goals.

Learning Topics:

Intercultural Competence and Leadership Development
Your goal is to develop your intercultural competence and become an interculturally competent professional/leader. As you develop your own intercultural competence, you will begin to notice how intentional and more effective you are as you work in a diverse workplace. You will begin to see your work environment, client relationships, business operations, and all aspects of your work from an intercultural perspective. Increasing this competence, enables you to be an intercultural leader – one who is not only ready to work effectively yourself but also can help others develop their intercultural competence. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) is used to assess your current place in the process of intercultural development, and this information will be used to design the most meaningful learning programs for you.  

Organizational Intercultural Capacity Building
Your focus is on creating the organizational culture that is interculturally capable of embracing diversity in every job function and inclusive of everyone. The approach you will take is multi-layered. In capacity-building, you will engage in intercultural learning activities at individual, team, division, department, and organizational levels. You will articulate the organizational changes you want to create and work toward realizing them. The IDI can be utilized to assess your organization’s current intercultural capacity, and this information will be used to design the most meaningful capacity building initiative.  

Inclusion and Diversity Strategizing
Your focus is on envisioning and articulating strategies and action plans for becoming an inclusive and diverse organization. In conjunction with use of the IDI, you will be guided through the process of strategy building step-by-step, using a unique Interculturalist, LLC methodology. You will set your Central Goal, identify Strategy Areas, and Action Items. By the end of the process, you will have a visual road map with directions and have all stakeholders accounted for in taking part in implementing new strategies and actions toward inclusion.

Bridging Conflict and Communication Styles
You will learn key communication styles and cultural dimensions that affect those styles. A focus will be on how you approach conflict. In this learning context, conflict is defined broadly as “challenging situations”. When people face a challenging situation, each person reacts differently. This variation of reactions often creates more challenges than the problem itself. Instead of rashly reacting to the situation, you will learn to pay attention to the context and the conflict styles being used. You will become more skilled at thoughtfully responding to each conflict situation, informed by the conflict style(s) present. This skill is particularly crucial for those who are in leadership or management roles.

Emotional Intelligence Development for Individuals and Teams
Emotional intelligence is often called a 'soft' skill and regarded as not as critical as other technical 'hard' skills. Through much research and practice, it is known now that ignoring emotional intelligence not only creates unhappy workers, but also negatively affects the business bottom line. Also, emotional intelligence development is at the core of intercultural competence development. And intercultural competence development is at the core of becoming an inclusive and diverse organization. You will engage in a combination of individual learning activities and group learning activities, guided by an Emotional Intelligence and Diversity (EID) learning methodology.

Cultural Self- and Other- Awareness Building
It is important to understand ourselves as well as others. This awareness-building is most effective, enjoyable, and meaningful when done in a psychologically safe learning environment. You will be guided through various activities to re-focus yourself, discover a new side of yourself, and learn to articulate who you are in creative ways. You will then use the same technique to understand each other. When this happens in a workplace, your working climate will shift. You can build trust and respect one another more holistically, which leads to work (and life!) engagement and satisfaction.

Nurturing Empathy- and Trust- based Teams
The focus is on improving your team cohesion and performance. Often, teams don’t function smoothly because of low emotional intelligence of the team as a whole. You will learn how to nurture empathy in the workplace and build a foundation for stronger trust. Each team member’s trust in the team, as well as attitude toward being a contributing team member, is the ultimate determining factor for a high level of team performance.  

Using a Coaching Approach to Effective Communication
Whether a manager or a leader, you can learn a basic set of coaching skills to improve your communication and relationships in the workplace. Examples of coaching skills you can learn are: how to give constructive feedback, how to give empowering acknowledgment, how to listen more effectively and purposefully, how to set meaningful goals, and how to hold yourself and others accountable. You will also learn how your intercultural competence development intersects with developing coaching skills.

Transforming Barriers into Assets for Challenging Conversations
There are seven key barriers that stand in your way of having effective and positive conversations. When your conversation is about sensitive topics (e.g. race), the barriers are particularly difficult to overcome. You will learn the seven barriers and the various ways you can transform them into assets for transforming challenging conversations into inspiring ones.

Moving from Unconscious Bias to Conscious Decision-Making
You are biased. We are all biased. A key learning is to know that it is natural and normal to have biases. With this in mind, you will learn what types of biases exist and which one(s) seem to be most prominent in your life. Once you become conscious of the biases you hold, you can become informed and empowered to take control of your own decision-making in your personal and professional contexts.

Assessment of Inclusion and Intercultural Development Progress
This assessment can be combined with any of the other learning topics. To assess how much development you as an individual, your team, or your organization as a whole achieved in a given time frame, you can utilize the IDI as a pre- and post- test. This means that the IDI will be administered at the beginning of the learning process and again at the end. By comparing the results, you will have a clear, statistical assessment of how much more inclusive or interculturally competent you have become.

Are you interested in or have a question about any of these learning topics? Let us know. Use the form below and we'll respond within one business day.