Intercultural Communication Competence

Cultivating Intercultural Communication Competence

While building any form of competence requires effort, building intercultural communication competence often requires us to take more risks. Some of these risks require us to leave our comfort zones and adapt to new and uncertain situations. What it means to be competent will vary depending on your physical location, your role (personal, professional, etc.), and your life stage, among other things. Sometimes we will know or be able to figure out what is expected of us in a given situation, but sometimes we may need to act in unexpected ways to meet the needs of a situation. Competence enables us to better cope with the unexpected, adapt to the nonroutine, and connect to uncommon frameworks. How can intercultural communication competence be built and achieved? This is a key question we will address in this section. I have always told my students that intercultural communication competence is less about a list of rules and more about a box of tools. Three ways to cultivate intercultural communication competence are to foster attitudes that motivate us, discover knowledge that informs us, and develop skills that enable us.