Book review: Build Your Cultural Agility

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2021. Book review: Build Your Cultural Agility: the Nine Competencies of Successful Global Professionals. Technical Communication 68(4):108-109.

Build Your Cultural Agility: The Nine Competencies of Successful Global Professionals

Paula Caligiuri. 2021. Kogan Page Limited. [ISBN 978-1-78966-659-5. 200 pages, including index. US$29.95 (softcover).]

If you’ve ever changed your geographic, social, or employment context, you’ve changed cultures. Being able to recognize when the context changes and adapt rapidly (being culturally agile) is increasingly a survival skill. In Build Your Cultural Agility: The Nine Competencies of Successful Global Professionals, Paula Caligiuri provides a concise yet comprehensive summary of what you need to learn based on both broad experience and formal research.

Caligiuri defines eight cultural dimensions we must master to achieve agility: formal vs. informal, egalitarian vs. hierarchical, individualist vs. group, transactional vs. interpersonal, direct vs. indirect communication, fluid vs. time-controlling, external vs. internal control, and balance vs. status. Many of these will be familiar. In the rest of the book, she defines nine competencies required to deal with these orientations. For example, tolerance of ambiguity (of uncertainty about how your context has changed) can be attained by listening, observing, asking questions, inviting feedback, delaying judgment, avoiding stereotyping, and aiming for consensus. The other competencies are curiosity (eagerness to learn), resilience (recovering from failures), humility (judging only once you fully understand), relationship-building, perspective taking, cultural adaptation (adopting new behavioral norms), cultural minimization (enforcing universal norms, such as safety regulations), and cultural integration (achieving consensus on norms among teammates from different cultures).

Rather than just describing agility, Caligiuri provides recommendations in each chapter about how to achieve it and recommends working on a manageable number of things simultaneously to avoid feeling overwhelmed. She provides frequent short self-tests to help you understand yourself and your needs, and correctly emphasizes the need for time, focus, practice, and the need to stretch one’s “muscles” gradually to avoid culture shock. The principles are generally clear, but although Caligiuri begins each chapter with a case study, more short, illustrative examples would have made many points less abstract.

The writing is generally clear, but Caligiuri’s nomenclature isn’t always obvious. She also occasionally falls into jargon like “to onboard a new member” (p. 25); “to pre-mortem” (p. 71); “train on the expectation of subjective norms” (p. 155); and “to exit those who are not behaving (p. 157). She repeatedly mentions one’s genetic characteristics (p. 32), hormones (p. 62), limbic system (p. 148), and prefrontal cortex (p. 149). This seems, at best, misplaced and overly deterministic. There are also curious omissions, such as waiting until pages 38 and 42 to recommend learning the culture’s language and social conventions before entering the culture.

Though there’s no substitute for experiencing a new culture, Building Cultural Agility provides great preparation before you dive in. Though intended primarily for business readers, the book will help in other contexts, including tourism and working in interdisciplinary teams.