For HR, L&D and senior leaders

Getting cultural capability right

Most organisations in the Gulf now invest in some form of cultural or inclusion training, and much of it is warmly received and quietly forgotten. The research on why this happens is unusually clear, and so is the research on what works instead.

The Cambridge Consultancy Group is a team of facilitators and coaches with decades of combined experience in helping organisations work, lead and grow across cultural lines. That experience has shown us where cultural capability programmes most often go wrong, and the published research in cross-cultural management and organisational behaviour explains why. What follows are the six points at which programmes typically fail, what the evidence shows at each of them, and how we work with you at every stage.

Every engagement is led by Dr Victoria Hopkin, who directs it from the first diagnostic conversation to the final review of what has changed and leads the training herself. She is supported by a team of experienced facilitators, so your organisation has the continuity and judgement of one senior lead throughout, with the capacity of a full team behind her.

Victoria leading a session with a senior leadership team

Diagnosing the need

The common mistake. A workshop is commissioned because a senior leader has asked for one, or because a complaint has surfaced, before anyone has established whether the problem is one of skill at all.

What the research shows. Robert Mager and Peter Pipe’s work on performance analysis, still a standard text in the field, shows that many problems attributed to a lack of skill are in fact caused by unclear expectations, conflicting incentives or obstacles in the work itself. Training cannot fix any of these. When Emirati graduates leave a team within their first year, for example, the cause frequently sits in how they are managed and included day to day, rather than in anything an induction course could have taught.

A better course. Establish what is actually happening, and why, before deciding whether training is part of the answer.

How we help

Victoria begins with the Cultural Clarity assessment, a ten-minute instrument completed by each member of your leadership team, which maps how the team reads, bridges and mobilises cultural difference. She then interviews key stakeholders and produces a Cultural Clarity Report that sets your findings against published benchmarks. Sometimes the report concludes that training is not the first priority, and it says so.

Designing the programme

The common mistake. A single mandatory session is scheduled for everyone, delivered once, and recorded as complete.

What the research shows. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev analysed three decades of data from more than eight hundred American firms. They found that mandatory diversity training was often followed by no improvement, and in some cases by a decline, in the representation of under-represented groups in management. Voluntary programmes, mentoring and cross-team working were followed by real gains. Their data come from the United States, but the mechanism they identify travels well: people tend to resist being told what to think, and engage when they choose to take part.

A better course. Design for voluntary, sustained participation, built around the decisions your leaders actually face.

How we help

Victoria designs the programme architecture around your organisation: small leadership cohorts, sessions spaced over several months rather than a single day, and work grounded in live business situations rather than generic case studies.

Choosing what to teach

The common mistake. The programme teaches facts about cultures: country briefings, lists of customs, things to do and avoid.

What the research shows. Soon Ang, Linn Van Dyne and colleagues, whose work defined cultural intelligence as a measurable capability, found that knowledge about cultures improved people’s judgement in cross-cultural situations but did not, on its own, predict how well they performed. What predicted performance was the ability to notice one’s own assumptions in the moment and check them, together with the ability to adapt one’s behaviour. Separately, Shawna O’Grady and Henry Lane showed that organisations often fail precisely where cultures seem similar, because apparent familiarity leads people to stop paying attention.

A better course. Teach people to notice, question and adjust, and give them repeated practice in realistic situations.

How we help

Victoria builds scenarios from real Gulf workplace incidents: an Emirati graduate joining a largely expatriate team, a British director whose directness is read as disrespect, a meeting in which silence is mistaken for agreement. Leaders work through these situations together, with Victoria guiding the discussion, until noticing and adjusting becomes habitual.

Victoria working through a scenario with a multicultural leadership team

Finding the people who already bridge

The common mistake. Cultural capability is treated as something to be installed equally in everyone, and the colleagues who already connect people across cultures go unnoticed.

What the research shows. Sujin Jang’s research on multicultural teams found that cultural brokers, the individuals who help colleagues from different backgrounds understand one another and combine their ideas, improved the creative performance of the team. Strikingly, effective brokers were not always members of the cultures involved; people from outside could play the role well. Dobbin and Kalev’s work points the same way: mentoring relationships were among the most effective interventions they studied.

A better course. Identify the people who already bridge, recognise the role formally, and develop them deliberately.

How we help

The assessment and stakeholder interviews show Victoria who is already doing this work, often without acknowledgement. She coaches these individuals directly and helps you set up structured mentoring, including for Emirati colleagues early in their careers.

Making it stick

The common mistake. Participants return from the session to managers who were not involved, were not briefed, and have no part in what happens next.

What the research shows. A major meta-analysis of training transfer by Brian Blume, Kevin Ford, Timothy Baldwin and Jason Huang found that whether people use what they have learned depends substantially on the environment they return to, and in particular on support from their managers. Good training delivered into an unsupportive team is largely lost.

A better course. Involve line managers before the programme begins, give them a defined role afterwards, and agree specific changes that can be observed.

How we help

Victoria briefs managers in advance and agrees with each leader a small number of specific commitments. She then stays involved through a twelve-month action plan, with quarterly reviews and individual coaching, so that new habits are supported long after the sessions themselves have finished.

Measuring what changed

The common mistake. Success is judged by end-of-session feedback forms: whether participants enjoyed the day and would recommend it.

What the research shows. A meta-analysis by George Alliger and colleagues found that how much people liked a training session bore little relationship to how much they learned or whether they applied it at work. Participants’ judgements of how useful a session was were a slightly better guide, but neither replaces measuring behaviour directly.

A better course. Establish a baseline before the programme, measure again afterwards, and look at behaviour and business indicators as well as self-report.

How we help

Your leadership team repeats the Cultural Clarity assessment at six and twelve months, measured against the original baseline. Victoria combines these results with indicators you already collect, such as retention of Emirati colleagues, relevant staff survey items and observed team practice, and reports plainly on what has changed and what has not. Where self-report cannot show something, the report says so.

Victoria in a one-to-one coaching review with a senior leader

Where every engagement begins

See where your leadership team stands today

The ten-minute Cultural Clarity assessment maps how your leaders currently read, bridge and mobilise cultural difference. It is the first step of stage 01, and the baseline against which everything that follows is measured.

Assess your team’s culture in ten minutes Arrange a conversation with Victoria

Sources

Alliger, G. M., Tannenbaum, S. I., Bennett, W., Traver, H. and Shotland, A. (1997). A meta-analysis of the relations among training criteria. Personnel Psychology, 50(2).
Ang, S., Van Dyne, L., Koh, C., Ng, K. Y., Templer, K. J., Tay, C. and Chandrasekar, N. A. (2007). Cultural intelligence: its measurement and effects on cultural judgment and decision making, cultural adaptation and task performance. Management and Organization Review, 3(3).
Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T. and Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: a meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4).
Dobbin, F. and Kalev, A. (2016). Why diversity programs fail. Harvard Business Review, July to August 2016.
Jang, S. (2017). Cultural brokerage and creative performance in multicultural teams. Organization Science, 28(6).
Mager, R. F. and Pipe, P. (1997). Analyzing Performance Problems, 3rd edition. Center for Effective Performance.
O’Grady, S. and Lane, H. W. (1996). The psychic distance paradox. Journal of International Business Studies, 27(2).