What is The Center for Culturally Fluent Leadership?
The Center for Culturally Fluent Leadership (CCFL) is a multicultural, data-driven consulting practice that helps individuals, teams, and organizations advance their missions by improving their cultural competence: the ability to work with and for diverse cultures.
The Center believes that all individuals have a degree of cultural competence based on their Cultural Awareness, Skills, Knowledge, Encounters, and Desire. (ASKED):
- Awareness— Cultural awareness [self-awareness] is the examination and in-depth exploration of one’s own cultural background.
- Skills— Cultural skills include cross-cultural communication and the ability to lead cross-cultural teams.
- Knowledge— Cultural knowledge is the process of seeking and obtaining a sound educational foundation about diverse cultural groups.
- Encounters— Respectful engagements with persons from culture’s different from one’s own demonstrating a willingness to resolve conflicts.
- Desire— The “want to” become culturally competent vs. the “have to” be culturally competent based on external pressure.
Culturally Fluent Leaders
However, culturally fluent leaders move from ASKED to BASKED by adding Behaviors to their leadership practices. They use their Behaviors, Awareness, Skills, Knowledge, Encounters, and Desire to earn the trust and loyalty of diverse followers.
Culturally fluent leaders demonstrate their commitment to cultural competence and lead by example:
- examining and addressing their own cultural biases,
- forming and leading diverse teams,
- and continually learning about the cultures of their colleagues and customers.
Further, these leaders expect and reward such behaviors in their followers. Culturally fluent leaders embrace servant leadership as central to their work.
Substantial literature on work team diversity indicates that high quality team leadership, emphasizing clear goals, inclusion, and equity, yields high performing teams. Without such leadership, more diverse teams are at risk of fracturing. In other words, more diverse teams are likely to either outperform their more homogenous counterparts or fracture along cultural and/or functional lines.