Transforming Organizations from the Inside Out with Cultural Proficiency: An Interview with Richard Martinez

from Leverage Points Issue 65

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Richard Martinez is an expert in educational leadership and organizational culture, and a coauthor of Culturally Proficient Coaching (in progress, 2005). He has facilitated seminars nationally on the art of leadership, diversity sensitive environments, and transformative approaches to systems change. At the 2005 Pegasus Conference (learn more link), Richard will be co-presenting a session with Delores Lindsey and Randall Lindsey on how to cultivate cultural proficiency in organizations through facilitating courageous conversations around diversity. In the following interview, he discusses some of the steps involved in becoming a culturally proficient organization.

Leverage Points: You've explained that one of the shifts that occur when an organization cultivates cultural proficiency is a movement from "tolerance of diversity" to "transformation for equity." Can you describe that shift?

Richard Martinez: According to my colleagues Randall Lindsey, Kikanza Nuri Robins, and Raymond Terrell, cultural proficiency is "the policies and practices at the organizational level, and values and behaviors at the individual level, that enable effective cross-cultural interactions among employees, clients, and community." Developing this proficiency starts with making a personal shift from "tolerating diversity"—viewing diversity in a stereotypical or even destructive manner—to "transforming for equity"—focusing on how we approach our own personal change. We call this the "inside-out" approach to personal transformation, which ultimately impacts organizational transformation.

A great example is the story of a high school principal Randy worked with who realized that he was not "hearing the voices" in the educational environment. Through participating in workshops around cultural proficiency, he made a big shift from blaming the students for their perceived shortcomings or lack of commitment to asking himself and his staff, "What are we, as educators, going to do to change our system to meet our students' needs?" That is probably one of the biggest shifts any organization can make.

LP: Can you talk more about what you mean by transforming from the inside out?

RM: The inside-out approach refers to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that one's own values and behaviors impact an organization's policies and practices. In our book, we talk about some key questions people need to ask themselves when learning to work across cultures—What is my reaction to people who are culturally different from me? How aware am I of how people who are culturally different from me react to my presence? What do I need to do to be effective in working with people who are culturally different from me? This kind of personal reflection has a powerful impact on the organization from the way we communicate with our coworkers and clients to the structures we put in place for student achievement.

LP: How do you know when you've achieved cultural proficiency in an organization?

RM: One tool we use to assess an organization's development is a six-point continuum. On the low end are three levels of tolerance for diversity described as cultural destructiveness, cultural incapacity, and cultural blindness. As an organization moves toward transformation for equity, we see an emerging self-awareness that we call cultural pre-competence. Moving along the continuum, cultural competence occurs when that awareness becomes a tendency to put new behaviors into action. Cultural proficiency can be described as a kind of unconscious competence—a real commitment to ongoing personal and organizational learning.

Like any learning process, when you first start out, this continuum might seem contrived; but once you start living it, it becomes a way of being. Transformation for equity ultimately means making an ongoing commitment to learning. It means inviting members to become part of this commitment in a cycle of personal and organizational growth, holding a vision that's complete and lived by the whole organization, and establishing a planned process of improvement in which the organization and its members continuously assess their progress toward proficiency. In this way, cultural proficiency is a continuous journey in serving the needs of ever-changing communities.

LP: How do you help people who might be very comfortable simply tolerating diversity to engage in the process of transforming for equity?

RM: There are always resisters in an organization. The leverage point is to nurture courageous conversations that will bring people along in this process or allow them to recognize that they might fit better in another organization. Conversations around cultural proficiency focus not so much on changing other people, but on how people work together. As such, leaders need to continuously advocate an agenda based on the five essential elements of cultural competence. These elements include:
• assessing cultural knowledge,
• valuing diversity,
• managing the dynamics of difference,
• adapting to difference, and
• and institutionalizing cultural knowledge.

They represent the standards of behavior that educators need to adapt to in order to meet the needs of students. A culturally proficient leader uses these elements to facilitate conversations that surface the beliefs and values of individuals that tend to influence the policies and practices of an organization.

One of the hallmarks of cultural proficiency is that it works well in concert with other types of systemic initiatives. For example, the ideas behind it have been greatly influenced by Margaret Wheatley and Peter Senge, whose ideas have focused on the interconnectedness and interdependence within and among systems, and by Rick and Becky DuFour, whose work with professional learning communities emphasizes the importance of implementing ongoing communication structures, such as coaching, to ensure that courageous conversations don't die out. The goal is not to conduct an isolated seminar here or there, but to embed communication practices and ongoing reflection into the environment over time in a way that is continuously reevaluated.

LP: What do you mean by "courageous conversations"?

RM: In my mind, a courageous conversation embodies interaction around difficult issues, in this case, issues arising from diversity. It is a conversation that we could have hesitated in having or could have walked away from, leaving the underlying feelings unspoken and unheard. But the power in having the conversation and working through some initial difficulty or uneasiness is that we can transform ourselves, our organizations, and the global community.

When we engage in an ongoing conversation, one that doesn't end, we have the potential to do great things. We can spark our passions and creativity and understand each other in new ways. Through that interaction, we become something unique and different that we may not have become before. How do we do that? The simplest answer is that we agree to have ongoing courageous conversations among ourselves and throughout our organization. That being said, there are a lot of barriers that stand in the way of open and honest communication.

LP: What are some tools you've used to overcome barriers to courageous conversations?

RM: My colleagues and I have found the most success with an integrated model that blends coaching techniques with the cultural proficiency work that we've been doing with schools. In particular, we're using techniques that come from the work of Suzanne Bailey, a master facilitator and a real mentor of mine, and Bob Garmston, who along with Art Costa authored Cognitive Coaching: A Foundation for Renaissance Schools (Christopher-Gordon Publishers, Inc., 2002). We've incorporated Garmston and Costa's "states of mind" framework—efficacy, flexibility, craftsmanship, consciousness, and interdependence—into our integrated model for cultural proficiency because it presents unique opportunities for developing communication between the coach and the person being coached.

I like to think of this model in terms of the gifts we were born with being braided with the needs of the world. The idea of braiding came to me when I read Dawna Markova's book I Will Not Die an Unlived Life (Red Wheel/Weiser, 2000). She says, "In the thousands of moments that we string together to make up our lives, there are some where time seems to change its shape and a certain light falls across our ordinary path. If we stop searching for purpose, we become it. Looking back, we might describe these moments as times when we were at our best, when the gifts we were born with and the talents we have developed were braided with what we love and the needs of the world."

So you might say we're braiding the coaching conversations and tools with the need for looking at the world through culturally proficient eyes. By looking at the world in a new way, we can become a global community with the communication tools that can provide sustainable solutions to complex issues.