Cultural Agility: A competitive advantage in the workplace
In October 2025, I delivered a workshop for cultural agility in Hong Kong for the Global Law Firm CMS in partnership with FELIZ Consulting. The audience included 24 Associates and Senior Associates from the Hong Kong and Singapore offices.
The 90-minute session helped participants understand the complexity and nuances underneath culture, using the Cultural Iceberg as a model and provided them with practical strategies and tools to navigate cultural diversity with ease, and confidence and develop stronger interpersonal relationships with various stakeholders, from clients to leads, senior partners and stakeholders.
We looked at the impact culture has in the way teams and individuals lead, communicate, make decisions and give feedback and the importance of adapting to the context, the situation and local culture.
Through group discussions and scenarios, the participants had the chance to exchange experiences and learnings related to different cultures.
We had a session dedicated to unconscious bias and particularly cultural bias, affinity bias and halo and horn effect and went deeper into the impact these biases have on our day-to-day work and what we can proactively do to mitigate them.
I introduced my signature CULTURE framework to help turn the theory into practice and provided specific examples to develop cultural agility:
- C: Connect
- U: Unlearn
- L: Listen
- T: Think different
- U: Understand
- R: Reframe
- E: Educate
Participants had the opportunity to reflect and discuss how cultural agility can benefit them, both personally and professionally and commit to specific actions they want to take to become more culturally-savvy.
If you would like to book a keynote or workshop on cultural agility, you can contact me at veronica@veronicallorcasmith.com
