What is Cultural Agility?
As a leader and changemaker at your company, you’re always looking for ways to improve performance or essential processes. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers here–after all, what indicates success like positive numerical change? But how do you actually implement changes that will kick those numbers into gear? What goes into creating and sustaining a level of progress that will push your company forward?
Cultural agility is one important factor to be aware of when it comes to setting your company up for success, and it’s one of the key subjects we keep in mind at Menttium when we build our mentoring programs. The meaning of the term may not seem very obvious at first, but it boils down to the ability to understand and work within various local contexts. We’ve broken it down even further, to help you understand the importance of the skill and how you can best cultivate it within your company.
Breaking Down the Term
Before implementing a plan to improve cultural agility, you need to understand exactly what the term entails. Who needs to develop this skill? Is it something a person needs to learn, or something that involves a company as a whole?
In a way, the answer is both. Cultural agility is a sign of an effective leader as well as an important part of how a company operates. The topic encompasses a range of skills, knowledge, and abilities that allow a business and its leaders to understand, incorporate, and properly navigate different cultures and contexts.
Essentially, the leaders and rising stars of your company need to know how to function and lead within a cross-cultural space. This means that your company and people need to understand their own culture as well as the cultures of other companies and people they may come in contact with doing business. By encouraging cultural agility, you encourage self-awareness, teamwork, open mindedness, and creativity, and contribute directly to the success of your business.
Fostering Cultural Agility Through Mentoring
Improving cultural agility only grows more important as workplaces become increasingly diverse. Luckily, this topic is one that individuals and companies can always improve upon. One effective way to foster cultural agility is through the implementation of a mentoring program.
At Menttium, we offer a wide ranges of mentoring programs covering various topics. While our program focuses vary, one thing that doesn’t change is that essential mentor-mentee relationship. This relationship goes both ways, with the mentee picking up wisdom from the mentor, and the mentor gaining important insight from the mentee. The partnership creates an ideal climate of trust that acts as a safe space for truthful dialogues around topics like diversity, career growth, and life experience.
A mentoring relationship is a fantastic way to grow cultural agility because of the way we structure these relationships. Your high potential people won’t just get a mentor who is exactly like them; in fact, their mentors could be completely different from them in every way. Menttium’s expert human match team will pair mentees with mentors who are uniquely suited to help them reach their goals. This could mean matching a pair that have no background experiences in common, but are on similar career paths.
The points of difference between the mentors and mentees will provide unique talking points as the relationship begins. Beyond that, hearing from a differing viewpoint can increase a person’s understanding of other cultures and ideas. The ideal end result of a mentoring partnership is a successful exchange of information and career growth.
Seeing Return on Mentoring Programs with Menttium
Cultural agility isn’t the only benefit of a mentoring program. Along with those unique perspectives comes accelerated growth and unlocked potential for your mentees. And for your mentors? Improved communication and listening skills.
At Menttium, we don’t stop at helping you set up a mentoring program. We stick around! we provide the tools and resources necessary for your company to support and benefit from a number of effective mentoring programs. The return is substantial; in fact, 97% of mentoring participants report that they would recommend our mentoring programs to their colleagues.
Our reputation precedes us; for over 27 years, we’ve provided exceptional leadership development through programs that improve companies’ employee retention, engagement, and job performance, among others. We’re passionate about what we do and excited to help you cultivate your rising talent. To learn more about our services and what program might be the right fit for your company, feel free to contact us today.