Fluency can mean more than speaking a language well.
It can also mean cultural fluency, when business leaders become knowledgeable and immersed in the experiences of their employees and customers, according to Joycelyn David, owner and CEO of Canadian advertising agency AV Communications and author of The Multicultural Mindset: Driving Business Growth in a Borderless Era.
David sat down with HR Brew to chat about her book and how her experience growing up in Canada led her to teach leaders globally to embrace multiculturalism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You started writing the book in 2023, and published it earlier this year. Did the direction of the book change over the course of those years?
The more I looked around and the more I realized cultural fluency wasn’t necessarily something that was being talked about in boardrooms and executive circles in the same way that I had seen growing up here in Canada…What we’ve tried to do in the book is give people a practical framework in which to have these conversations, whether you’re an employer who hires people who hail from different parts of the world, or whether you’re a professional looking to grow and thrive in your career…The need hasn’t changed from 2023 to 2025, but the way that we talk about that need and the way that we talk about very sensitive topics today…is the challenging part.
Did any of your personal experiences shape the book?
Working and growing up in Canada, this was my normal, like growing up in a society that values multicultural policy at a federal level. Growing up in a community where hyphenated identity and race-based data was always the norm. It was only when I started looking outside of Canada that I realized how much maybe the world could learn.
What does cultural fluency mean?
Cultural knowledge and information is only the surface level of building cultural fluency. What’s actually needed requires us as humans to slow down and immerse deeper than the surface level…Immersion means you can’t just learn about something by reading and absorbing content…I can learn about Turkey by reading about it and looking at it online, or I can go there and immerse myself in all of the senses…But of course, not everybody has access to travel, not everybody has that luxury. So, what are other ways that people can do that in your own neighborhood, in your own workplace?
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It really starts with adopting a mindset that [is outside] your own cultural sphere…so it’s a conscious effort to seek and understand cultures that are not your own…Let’s say, I need to go seek out and then better understand what is it like to grow up and live in the deep south of the United States…I can read about it through headlines and news…or I can really take time to have a conversation with somebody who lives there, or to debate across the aisle, or to go and immerse myself, travel, visit, work in that community. Cultural fluency requires more than information.
Do you have advice for HR pros navigating the current political threats to DEI in the US?
Discussions about drawing lines in the sand and having all the debates that are happening in the world today are given by “us and them,” and my perspective is, “It’s both. There is no ‘us and them.’ It’s just we.” We are all multicultural, and we are all, in many ways, descendants of immigrants from somewhere…In workplaces where a multicultural mindset is front and center, you are reminded that your customers are multicultural, because many of them, especially in the US, may not speak English as a first language. So, you need to make sure that your frontline staff, and your recruiting, and your training is reflective of making sure that people understand how to deal with diverse people at the front line.
I always say that diversity is good for business, and that means all kinds of diversity, not just race-based diversity…If companies don’t pay attention to this, that diversity is good for business, they will lose touch with their customers, and they will lose touch with the communities that want to see themselves represented…If you don’t have that diversity representative of your customers who are the mainstream today, you’re going to quickly become irrelevant or out of touch.