Cultural humility: A leadership virtue

A business case for cultural humility: Moving the metrics on diversity, equity, and inclusion

Institutions, companies, and teams are acknowledging the inequities that exist in many team-based experiences and recognising how they limit outcomes. However, people in these organisations still lack clarity about how to address those inequities. Women and minorities remain underrepresented in positions of leadership and governance and in pay equity. In short, the workplace is not a just environment for them.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts over the past 50 years have focused on activity as a proxy for outcome: providing training, ensuring minorities are in the pool of finalists for jobs, providing mentorship and networking opportunities. But the numbers have not moved. The facts remain.

This paper identifies competencies and offers approaches for developing a practice known as cultural humility. This practice was initially developed in the medical field, and is defined as "having an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused, characterised by respect and lack of superiority toward an individual's cultural background and experiences."

A shift was made in the 1990s from considering cultural competence as a singular skill to thinking of cultural humility as a mindset based in lifelong learning. As early as 1994, health practitioners were observing, "Cultural competence in a clinical practice is best defined not by a discrete endpoint but as a commitment and active engagement in a lifelong process that individuals enter into on an ongoing basis with patients, communities, colleagues, and with themselves."

By the end of that decade, the approach was gaining support and reflected in the competencies outlined in reports or organisations like the Pew Health Professions Commission and in community-based research.

"This training outcome, perhaps better described as cultural humility versus cultural competence, actually dovetails several educational initiatives in US physician workforce training as we approach the 21st century. It is a process that requires humility as individuals continually engage in self-reflection and self-critique as lifelong learners and reflective practitioners."