Intercultural Competence – The Skill of Encountering and the Core of Leadership

Interculturalism is today’s workplace reality. Work teams are increasingly composed of professionals with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and customers likewise come from many different backgrounds in Finland. This offers vast opportunities: multicultural teams can generate new perspectives, creativity, and innovations. They also help to understand customers better and meet their varied needs.

At the same time, interculturalism brings questions and challenges. For instance, communication styles may differ greatly across cultures, which increases the risk of misunderstandings. Employees and customers may also have varying expectations regarding leadership, collaboration, or customer service.

In my doctoral dissertation, which examines intercultural competence and its management, I have been interested in the perspectives of police supervisors on intercultural competence in police work. For one of my sub-studies, I interviewed eight police supervisors, and my research focuses on interculturalism through the lens of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

The police play a central role in promoting good relations between ethnic groups in Finnish society, and their core duty is to maintain public safety in an increasingly diverse society. For this reason, intercultural competence should be considered a key area of expertise within the police. The growing diversity of society is reflected in the daily work of the police, perhaps more so than in any other sector: an increasing number of officers work with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, and the diversity of personnel has also expanded.

Competence management refers to the systematic development and utilisation of employees’ knowledge, skills, and experiences. Its purpose is to ensure that the right competence is available at the right time to achieve strategic goals. Competence management involves, for example, identifying competence needs, training and supporting learning, sharing and utilising knowledge, and linking competence to the long-term development of the organization. It is a way to ensure that people and their skills support organizational success now and in the future. Supervisors play a key role in directing, providing, and supporting employee development, thereby strengthening the organisation’s required competence. Research (see, e.g., Köykkä et al., 2023) shows that supervisors describe their role as intuitive, network-based, and involving shared competence management, especially in decentralised organisations where team members may not meet daily.

Intercultural competence is closely tied to broader competence management. Mihailovs (2023) has studied intercultural competence needed in police work and describes competence through the ASKED model. Intercultural competence means the ability to interpret different cultures and recognise their languages, symbols, gestures, and practices. This establishes a foundation for culturally sensitive professional activities that value and acknowledge cultural diversity. The model consists of five dimensions:

1. Awareness – recognising one’s own prejudices, attitudes, and cultural background.
2. Skills – the ability to collect and use culture-specific information.
3. Knowledge – acquiring knowledge about different cultural and ethnic groups.
4. Encounter – interaction with diverse groups, which reshapes beliefs and reduces stereotypes.
5. Desire – genuine motivation to learn, accept diversity, and collaborate with people from different cultures.

The supervisors I interviewed reflected on competence management in the police and noted that it primarily means identifying team strengths and weaknesses and developing them. This is not possible unless organisations systematically utilise research-based knowledge and build knowledge leadership to support everyday work. They pointed out that interculturalism is often associated with the idea that organisations should create programs and projects to change attitudes and behaviours. In reality, however, attitudes are shaped by everyday actions and examples. Intercultural competence is therefore not a separate theme, but rather part of a broader whole in which organisations aim to develop competence strategically and over the long term. This requires leadership commitment, resources, and structures that support continuous learning.

Managing intercultural competence is not an easy task, and supervisors recognise the challenges it entails. In their role, what becomes especially important is the ability to create a safe space where diversity can be seen as a resource and issues can be openly discussed as a team. This requires not only leadership skills but also the power of example: how the supervisor approaches diversity communicates and models to the team what is acceptable and valued. One way to strengthen cultural sensitivity and intercultural competence is through training; however, ultimately, what matters is what happens in everyday work. For this reason, enabling open dialogue and building motivating learning experiences within the workplace is crucial. Strengthening competence also requires networking across different professions, where actors can bring together their expertise and perspectives.

The Skill of Encountering Across Cultural Differences

Functioning in today’s society requires strong intercultural competence from the police, as well as the ability to engage with people genuinely and reasonably. The interviewees reflected on whether it is realistic or even reasonable to expect employees to take into account numerous cultures and their subtle nuances. In their view, what matters most is not perfect cultural knowledge, but rather the skill of encountering people, which they meant by emotional intelligence, sensitivity, and presence. When people are genuinely met as individuals, regardless of background, trust and respect are created. This forms the basis for good cooperation both within the team and with customers.

The most emphasised competence areas are communication, social skills, situational awareness, and the ability to cooperate effectively. Safe working requires the ability to engage with people in different situations and from various starting points. This skill of encountering is at the heart of many professions, but according to the interviewees, too little emphasis is placed on practising and reflecting on it.

Toward a More Humane Working Life

Intercultural competence is not only a factor of competitiveness or a goal of competence development. It is more deeply about the kind of working life we want to build. The question is whether people are treated as individuals and whether their unique backgrounds and experiences are valued.

The role of organisations is to create structures that support this learning and leadership. The role of individual supervisors, in turn, is to lead by example through their everyday actions. When these two levels meet, interculturalism can become a resource that enriches both teams and customer relationships.

The importance of managing intercultural competence is constantly growing. When the skill of encountering is combined with organisational structures and competence management, workplaces emerge that not only tolerate diversity but also embrace it as a strength, and can meet customers from different backgrounds equally, fairly, and sensitively.

Katja Köykkä, Doctoral researcher, JATKOT-group

Köykkä, K., Vähäsantanen, K., & Lemmetty, S. (2023). Esihenkilöiden tarinoita ammatillisen osaamisen johtamisesta hajautetuissa organisaatioissa: Intuitiolla mennään ja verkostoissa johdetaan. Aikuiskasvatus, 43(1-2), 26–41. https://doi.org/10.33336/aik.126075

Mihailovs, I. J. (2023). Intercultural competence in the training and dailyprofessional lives of police officers. Socrates, 2(1-26), 91-95. https://doi.org/10.25143/socr.26.2023.2.91-95