Moving Beyond the Annual Cultural Competency Training - How You Can Empower Your Employees
Embedding Cultural Humility Within Your Organization’s Competency
New to these concepts? Check out this 6 minute video.
As the newbie to The Spark Mill team, I was excited by a client’s recent request for a Cultural Competency facilitation to supplement their professional development for Direct Support Specialists. Cultural competency workshops can happen annually, but that begs the question - how are the trainings helping the employees to diversify their definition of culture and encourage practicing strategies to contribute to a thriving organizational culture?
The unattainable goal of cultural competency.
Grasping the fluidity of culture can be frustrating. Start by letting your employees off the hook of feeling like they have to be the experts of culture. This cognitive shift can be better digested by reframing how we define competency within the topic of culture. Secrets out! No one can claim to score 100% on their competency of any culture, and claiming to can cause harm with community members. Redirecting your organization from aiming to be culturally competent, to embedding cultural humility, creates space for an authentic cultural curiosity rather than the pressure to be all-knowing as the word “competent” would suggest.
Competency is incomplete without cultural humility.
Cultural competency amplifies awareness to knowledge and skills that are missing for successful collaboration, so exploring cultural humility will help to bridge that cultural gap for improved client relations. “Cultural humility” is a term coined by Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1998 to describe a way of infiltrating multiculturalism into their work as healthcare professionals. Cultural humility is defined as a life-long process of self-evaluation that focuses on how our culture influences our perceptions of other communities and the impact that has on our ability to participate in successful cultural exchanges.
Cultural humility creates positive culture change.
The secret of embedding humility within an organization's culture is the commitment to employee self-reflection and challenging awareness of personal biases and assumptions about people with different values. As each employee takes inventory of the values that shape their perspective, there are opportunities for personal growth and innovative skill-building that can be felt throughout the agency. Creating space for individual and organizational group processing is one step towards shaping a more equitable lens within the org culture.