Fluency can mean more than speaking a language well.

It can also mean cultural fluency, when business leaders become knowledgeable and immersed in the experiences of their employees and customers, according to Joycelyn David, owner and CEO of Canadian advertising agency AV Communications and author of The Multicultural Mindset: Driving Business Growth in a Borderless Era.

David sat down with HR Brew to chat about her book and how her experience growing up in Canada led her to teach leaders globally to embrace multiculturalism.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You started writing the book in 2023, and published it earlier this year. Did the direction of the book change over the course of those years?

The more I looked around and the more I realized cultural fluency wasn’t necessarily something that was being talked about in boardrooms and executive circles in the same way that I had seen growing up here in Canada…What we’ve tried to do in the book is give people a practical framework in which to have these conversations, whether you’re an employer who hires people who hail from different parts of the world, or whether you’re a professional looking to grow and thrive in your career…The need hasn’t changed from 2023 to 2025, but the way that we talk about that need and the way that we talk about very sensitive topics today…is the challenging part.

Did any of your personal experiences shape the book?

Working and growing up in Canada, this was my normal, like growing up in a society that values multicultural policy at a federal level. Growing up in a community where hyphenated identity and race-based data was always the norm. It was only when I started looking outside of Canada that I realized how much maybe the world could learn.

What does cultural fluency mean?

Cultural knowledge and information is only the surface level of building cultural fluency. What’s actually needed requires us as humans to slow down and immerse deeper than the surface level…Immersion means you can’t just learn about something by reading and absorbing content…I can learn about Turkey by reading about it and looking at it online, or I can go there and immerse myself in all of the senses…But of course, not everybody has access to travel, not everybody has that luxury. So, what are other ways that people can do that in your own neighborhood, in your own workplace?

Read the full article here.