Cultural awareness is a form of self-awareness that enables individuals to monitor hidden biases stemming from their personal frames of reference while actively considering the perspectives of others. By fostering inclusivity, connectivity, and cooperation, cultural awareness becomes a crucial element in the success of teamwork. 

Aims and learning outcomes:

• Increased self-awareness: through exploring one’s own cultural identity and by making conscious the boundaries of one’s comfort zone.
• More self-assurance: by understanding one’s vulnerabilities and strengths, one learns how to rely better on the latter. 
•  Intellectual leadership: through increased self-assurance and authenticity 
• More creativity: through solving exercises demanding creativity 
• Enhanced empathy: by learning to consciously turn toward the other with the intention to understand them better

It is a cliche that we live in a small world today where increased geographic and social mobility makes intercultural encounters ever more ordinary. Intercultural diversity creates new challenges to individuals and groups. It is possible and unfortunately frequent to consider these challenges uniquely in a negative way, forgetting that the human race owes its fulgurant evolution to its incredible capacity to adopt to new situations and to its inherent curiosity opening human groups to exchange and communication with others. Building cultural competence can be seen as a technique to train us not to lose our resilience in the face of inevitable change. 

For working teams developing cultural awareness is a means to foster a culture of cooperation, fairness, and inclusivity. These qualities pay not only by nurturing loyalty and engagement, but also because diverse teams allowing participation to have more chance to adapt to new situations and to gain comparative advantage by bolstering creativity and innovation.  

Learning outcomes:

1. Increased self-awareness and capacity to understand the cultural rootedness of our own frame of reference. 
2. The capacity to see taken for granted assumptions with new eyes and question critically the common sense
3. Becoming more flexible and tolerant to ideas and positions radically different from ours, without necessarily giving up our priorities in values and aims.  
4. De-essentialising culture and identity: Understanding culture as frame of reference: an ethnocentric position with some permanent and some more transient culturally rooted assumptions. Understanding identity as a complex interplay between self-understanding and the imposed meanings of an external gaze. 
5. Accepting diversity as a natural human condition and developing respect for it for its capacity to bring dynamism and creativity in human groups diversity game
6. For team leaders: Learning to cherish the potential in being led to question one’s unquestioned basic assumptions. 
7. For team members: Discovering the learning potential in being pushed out of one’s comfort zone. 
8. For both team leaders and team members: Becoming able to recognise and accept the different phases of intercultural problem solving.