16 March 2026

Cultural Intelligence in aged care

Is your organisation culturally competent — or just culturally diverse?

About 
Robert Bean

Robert Bean (BA, Grad Dip Ed, Cert IV Training) is one of Australia’s foremost interculturalists, specialising in intercultural communication and cultural diversity management. Over a career spanning 45 years, he has worked with hundreds of government, community, and business organisations across Australia, contributing national policy and research expertise and publishing widely in the cultural diversity field.

Bean’s international experience includes work in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Spain, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. He migrated to Australia in 1979 and managed the innovative TAFE South Australia Workplace Education Service for 12 years.

Since establishing his consultancy in 1995, he has designed and facilitated over 1,000 cultural intelligence and cultural competence management workshops. He has managed several national research and development projects, authored papers and articles, and presented at numerous conferences across the sector.

Now semi-retired, Bean is mentoring the next generation of Australian interculturalists — including the team at culturalQ, the intercultural training and consultancy service of the Multicultural Communities Council of South Australia (MCCSA). His current focus is on resource development and advocacy for expanded cultural intelligence training across Australian industries, including aged care.

Introduction

Australia’s aged care workforce is one of the most culturally diverse in any industry. Workers are drawn from dozens of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and so are the residents and clients they serve. At the same time, providers are navigating workforce shortages, rising regulatory expectations around quality and safety, and growing competition for both staff and clients. In this environment, the ability to manage cultural diversity effectively is an operational necessity.

Yet most aged care providers still treat cultural diversity as a human resources checkbox: hire a diverse workforce, provide translation services when needed, and run an occasional awareness session. What’s missing is a structured capability — one that connects individual skill with organisational strategy. Without it, cultural diversity remains an incidental feature of the workforce rather than something the organisation can actually leverage.

For aged care providers, this raises concrete questions. Is your workforce equipped to navigate cultural difference in clinical, personal, and emotional care? Are your systems designed to support culturally competent service delivery, or are they neutral at best and exclusionary at worst? Are you losing staff, clients, or reputation because of cultural friction you haven’t diagnosed? The providers who can answer these questions clearly — and act on the answers — are building a genuine advantage in recruitment, retention, and care quality.

In this interview, Robert Bean explains what cultural intelligence actually means in practice, why diversity alone does not produce inclusion, and how aged care organisations can build cultural competence as a strategic capability.

It’s one thing to notice someone comes from a different background — it’s another to know how to work with them or provide the care they deserve. "Cultural awareness" alone won’t get your staff there.

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Understanding Cultural Intelligence

But first, let’s start with a brief overview of cultural intelligence and why it matters for service industries. Every person carries a set of cultural values, communication styles, and behavioural expectations shaped by their upbringing, language, and life experience. When people from different cultural backgrounds interact — as they do constantly in aged care — these differences can create misunderstandings, friction, or connection, depending on the skills available.

Cultural intelligence (CQ) is the individual’s capacity to recognise, understand, and adapt to these cultural dynamics. It goes beyond knowing facts about different cultures. A person with high CQ can enter an unfamiliar cultural situation, read the cues, adjust their communication, and build trust — even when they have no prior experience with that particular culture. It starts with self-awareness: understanding your own cultural lens before trying to understand someone else’s.

Dimension	Cultural Intelligence (CQ)	Cultural Competence
Scope	Individual	Organisational
Definition	Your personal ability to understand your own and other cultures and communicate effectively in situations characterised by cultural diversity.	The organisation’s ability to ensure services and products are delivered inclusively, equitably, and effectively by culturally intelligent people.
Foundation	Self-awareness of your own cultural values and communication style.	CQ embedded in strategy, systems, leadership, and workforce development.
Key insight	An extension of emotional intelligence (EQ). Often summarised as: “CQ is like EQ with a passport.”	Without commitment from leadership, individual CQ has limited impact on service delivery or organisational culture.

The critical point is that one without the other is incomplete. An organisation can employ dozens of culturally intelligent individuals, but if its systems, policies, and leadership practices don’t support cultural competence, the benefit stays siloed in individual interactions. Conversely, an organisation can write inclusive policies all day, but without a leadership and workforce that has developed genuine CQ, those policies remain aspirational.

In aged care, the stakes are particularly high. A resident’s experience of dignity, comfort, and safety is shaped by every interaction with staff — and those interactions are mediated by culture, whether anyone recognises it or not. The question for providers: are you building both sides of this capability?

According to ABS 2021 Census, more than 51% of Australians were born overseas, or had a parent who was born overseas. (Graph source: culturalQ)

Q&A with Robert Bean

Q1: Let’s start with the basics. What is cultural intelligence, and how is it different from the older concepts — cultural awareness, cultural sensitivity, cross-cultural communication? Why does that distinction matter for aged care?

What’s in a word? In my work, I define cultural intelligence as your personal ability to understand your own and other cultures and to communicate effectively in any situation characterised by cultural diversity. In a population as ethnically and linguistically diverse as Australia’s, that can be every day for service industries such as aged care.

That’s the personal side of the equation. The other half is the organisational ability to manage and benefit from cultural diversity. I define that as cultural competence, which I want to talk about later.

CQ is an evolution of previous approaches such as cultural awareness, cultural sensitivity, cultural responsiveness, cross-cultural communication, and all the other names it’s had over the last 80 years. It goes beyond simple awareness of how cultures differ, beyond checklists and do’s and don’ts. It’s not like a Lonely Planet guide to Australia’s two or three hundred cultures. Cultural intelligence goes deeper. As the famous anthropologist Edward Hall said 60 years ago, “Culture is communication and communication is culture. People cannot act or interact at all in any meaningful way except through the medium of culture.” [The Silent Language, 1966]

CQ is still about respecting differences and treating everyone as equals — one of Australia’s most important values. It is still aimed at supporting intercultural dialogue, social inclusion, and cohesion. The evolving CQ model builds on the lessons of previous models in a broader and deeper approach that recognises the lifelong nature of developing our intelligences and the pervasiveness of culture in everyday life. As Clive James said, “A culture is the whole thing.”

Q2: You describe CQ as an extension of emotional intelligence (EQ). Can you explain that connection?

That’s right, CQ is extension of our EQ. Because we develop our EQ in our first culture, it doesn’t necessarily meet other cultures’ behavioural expectations about how to show respect, manners, or reactions to events.

Just as emotional intelligence starts with self-awareness of your own emotional states, cultural intelligence starts with self-awareness of your own cultural values. What makes me tick? Why do I see the world the way I do? How do I feel about other cultural perspectives? What are my core values? How adaptable am I?

CQ helps us to adapt to any intercultural situation and to recognise the psychological stages of adapting to living in a new culture. Just as EQ includes self-regulation, social skills, and empathy, CQ helps us to adapt and learn from each other so that we can bridge any gaps in understanding and negotiate ways to work and live harmoniously.

CQ is like EQ with a passport.

Q3: So how does a person actually develop their cultural intelligence? Is it something you can train, or does it only come through lived experience?

We gain cultural intelligence through childhood learning, then through travel, learning languages, working with people from different cultures, and having personal relationships.

Because we live in a very multicultural society, we all have varying degrees of cultural intelligence, but my experience has shown that people rarely know what it is, how you develop it, and why it’s important — personally and organisationally. CQ training helps us make sense of our intercultural experiences and preferences. Just a short workshop can prepare you to enter any situation with a mindset of openness based on frameworks for thinking about the world from different perspectives.

We can never fully understand the nuances of other cultures without extensive contact — and even then we can be surprised. Knowing that I don’t know everything about a person’s cultural background, I approach each encounter with confidence and openness in a spirit of what one interculturalist called “informed not knowing.”

720,000+ people aged 65+ spoke a language other than English at home in 2021. 36% of those spoke English not well or not at all. According to CEPAR Research Brief (2024), among Australians aged 65+, non-European and non-English-speaking backgrounds are set to boom over the next three decades.

Q4: You’ve drawn a distinction between individual CQ and organisational cultural competence. What’s the difference, and why does it matter that providers understand both?

The difference between cultural competence and previous diversity management models is that it builds CQ into a whole-of-organisation development approach rather than attempting to bolt it on to the current system with workshops and policy adjustments. Without direct and demonstrable commitment from the top, any bottom-up approach is bound to have little benefit to the organisation.

It’s fine to have individual people or teams in the workforce who are genuinely culturally intelligent by experience or by training or both, but it’s no guarantee that the organisation is operating with cultural competence, strategically and operationally.

I am tempted to say that if your outfit isn’t consciously culturally competent, it is by definition culturally incompetent, with all the risks associated with that. But people don’t like being told they’re incompetent, do they?

Q5: When an aged care organisation lacks these capabilities, what does that actually look like on the ground?

Not good. A lack of workforce CQ and organisational cultural competence in group interactions is detrimental to organisational culture and effectiveness in many ways: high workforce churn, miscommunication, poor relationships, dysfunctional teams, hidden conflict, accidents, fatalities, stress, poor reputation as an employer, complaints, and even litigation. It’s a long list. Discrimination, grievances, lack of management support for inclusion. It all results in employees’ sense of powerlessness to deal with such issues.

If an HR manager asks, “Can you fix this racist employee?” you know the organisation has a much bigger problem than that one person, despite maybe having a great Diversity and Inclusion policy.

Q6: You’ve worked across sectors for decades. Can you share an example where an organisation got cultural intelligence right? What did they do that others don’t?

Organisations I’ve worked with that have achieved their desired levels of cultural competence have made a commitment to a long-term effort, driven from the top. I’m talking five or six years, minimum. They have embedded the CQ element in standard procedures and return to training in response to workforce turnover. Others have achieved their interim aims, then let the effort slow down or cease.

Others have relied too heavily on the staff who managed the program. If they leave, training and development drop off. The ideal foundation for success and sustainability is recognition that the responsibility to manage cultural competence is on a par with managing workplace health and safety. Small to medium enterprises can achieve real results over shorter time periods.

But typically, people don’t know what CQ actually means or what it can do for teams, clients, and communities. Every CQ training provider I’ve met — and there aren’t that many in Australia — has been asked questions like: Can you do it in 90 minutes? Or three hours? Can you cover China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam or the African Australian community in a day? Can we do it online?

Getting it right means recognising CQ as a valuable individual performance enhancement that delivers value at every level. Getting it right means committing to a long-term effort to reach a critical majority of people who walk the talk, who understand each other better, who know their clients and customers better, who are more relaxed about differences, more open.

Some of the larger organisations I’ve worked with conducted CQ and management training as part of their overarching workforce strategy for several years. CQ training for all staff and cultural competence development programs for their managers and stakeholders created a common language of cultural intelligence that fostered connection and inclusion.

Compared to the Australian median age of 34, Australians of Greek and Italian background now have median ages of 74 and 72 respectively. (Photo by Steshka Croes on Pexels)

Q7: A lot of aged care providers believe that interpreting and translation services, and simply having culturally diverse staff to call upon when needed, is enough. Is it?

Short answer: no. Professional interpreters are not always available when needed. Not all languages are covered. Dialects can be challenging to interpreters. Translated materials are not always accurate or appropriate. Using non-professional bilingual staff or family members to communicate with clients and other staff runs the great risk of misunderstandings, some of which can be fatal.

Another problem with using bilingual staff is that many of them are uncomfortable with the role for various reasons. And of course there is the risk of mistakes of interpretation leading to harm and litigation.

Q8: Cultural intelligence is often treated as a wellbeing initiative, or another training module to tick off alongside manual handling or infection control. Is that the right way to think about it?

The only benefit of that approach is that it at least gives CQ training a fixed place on the training calendar, but often as an elective module. A culturally competent approach is to embed CQ issues and training within relevant training, such as customer service or clinical practices.
Another way to think about it is to balance the social justice and wellbeing case for CQ training with the business case. There must be a compelling motivation for addressing intercultural communication issues with a focus on strategic intent and inclusive practices. Relegating CQ training to just one of those two considerations makes it seem unimportant.

Q9: If you were advising an aged care CEO who genuinely wants to build cultural competence as an organisational capability, where would you tell them to start?

The starting point for any CEO, regardless of the size of the provider, is to become familiar with the mutually supportive concepts of cultural intelligence and cultural competence and the competitive advantages they can deliver. Look at whether your strategy would benefit from investing in developing these capabilities in terms of the external drivers the organisation must respond to: labour market trends, competition, demographic trends, and the regulatory environment. Will a culturally intelligent workforce be more inclusive, efficient, and happier in their work? Will culturally competent policies and practices make your organisation more attractive to talent, clients, and their families?

The next steps are to conduct a situation assessment and a training needs analysis to determine the current competence of the workforce and to establish the relevance of cultural competence to your core business strategy. This is usually done by CQ professionals in partnership with HR and OD managers and staff. The actual program design and pilot training plan can then be finalised.

Around 40% of Australia’s care workforce is overseas-born, higher than the national workforce average of 32%.

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Q10: Looking ahead, what does success actually look like when organisations get this right?

At a management level, the results of becoming a more inclusive organisation are dramatic. A recent study by Diversity Council Australia found that inclusive teams are 10x times more likely to be highly effective, 9x times more likely to innovate, and 5x times more likely to provide excellent customer service. Employees working in inclusive teams are 19 times more likely to be satisfied with their job, four times more likely to stay, and seven times less likely to have experienced harassment or discrimination. More than 75% of workers support action to create a diverse and inclusive workplace — only 3% oppose it.

Major studies of CQ and cultural competence training evaluations report numerous tangible and intangible benefits: more effective professional communication, enhanced interpersonal and team relationships, greater confidence, trust and openness, increased engagement and participation, improved performance, reduced stress, respect and collaboration, and improved service quality and reputation.

Then there are all the cost savings from reduced turnover, process faults, low morale, and so on.

Q11: Thank you for your insights, Robert. Any closing comments?

Everyone who lives and works in a multicultural society benefits from expanding their natural emotional intelligence with a culturally intelligent perspective. Cultural intelligence builds on the strengths people already have, helping them communicate, collaborate, and work more effectively across cultures. In that sense, developing your CQ is like gaining a “passport” for working confidently and respectfully in diverse environments.

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→ Work with the team at culturalQ

culturalQ is the intercultural communication and management consultancy service of the Multicultural Communities Council of SA. Built on Robert Bean’s methodology and four decades of applied research, culturalQ delivers tailored training for organisations navigating cultural diversity in their workforce, client base, and service delivery.

culturalQ’s training is facilitated by a diverse team of experienced professionals with lived experience across multiple cultural backgrounds. Participants consistently rate the program at 96% satisfaction or above. The program is customisable, ranging from introductory conference presentations through to comprehensive multi-day workshops and ongoing organisational development partnerships.

culturalQ training covers:

• Cultural Intelligence (CQ) — The Personal: Developing a CQ mindset, strengthening interpersonal communication, fostering mutual understanding and trust, enhancing problem-solving, and building confidence in culturally diverse workplaces and client-facing environments.
• Cultural Competence — Organisational Foundations: Assessing organisational cultural competence, developing strategies for inclusive workplace culture, enhancing innovation and adaptability, meeting legal compliance obligations and service standards, and strengthening employer-of-choice reputation.
• Working with Interpreters and Translators: Understanding the distinct roles of interpreters and translators, implementing best practices for engaging language professionals, and recognising cultural and linguistic barriers to communication.

 
To discuss culturalQ training for your organisation, visit culturalQ or reach the team by email.