Trusted, Effective, Accurate

Which one is missing? Introducing the RISE Cultural Fluency Model

Between two cultures

For more than a decade, I sat in the space between two cultures. On one side was a headquarters with its own way of making decisions and giving feedback. On the other was the West and Central African market I served, where decisions were made and feedback was given very differently. My hybrid roles meant translating between them every week: not the language, the meaning. What headquarters called “direct,” the market heard as rude. What the market called “respect,” headquarters read as slow. Later, my doctoral research on cultural competence in communication gave me names for what I had been living.

And here is what both taught me: the professionals who struggle across cultures are rarely the careless ones. They’re often the most conscientious people in the room. They care. They prepare. They try hard to fit in.

They’re just strong in one layer and missing another.

Cultural fluency has three layers. When one is missing, the failure looks completely different, so the fix has to be different too.

Introducing the RISE Cultural Fluency Model 

If you’ve ever looked into working across cultures, you’ve probably met three ideas, usually presented as rivals.

Cultural competence is the oldest of the three. It grew out of nursing and healthcare, where misreading a patient’s culture has real consequences. Josepha Campinha-Bacote’s widely taught model names five elements (cultural awareness, knowledge, skill, encounters and desire) and makes one idea central: cultural competence is a process, not an event. You don’t arrive. You keep becoming.

Cultural intelligence, or CQ, came later. Researchers P. Christopher Earley and Soon Ang developed it as a capability you can measure and build, with four parts: drive (your motivation to engage across difference), knowledge (what you know about how cultures differ), strategy (how you plan, notice and check your assumptions) and action (whether you actually adjust what you say and do).

The Culture Map, from Erin Meyer, is the most practical of the three. It charts eight scales on which working cultures differ: communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling.

Most people pick one and argue for it. After years of practice and my doctoral research, I think that’s the mistake. They aren’t competing theories. They’re three layers of one capability, and they stack. So I built a model to show how they fit together. I call it the RISE Cultural Fluency Model.

Cultural competence is the foundation, the person you are becoming. It works over time, and it makes you trusted.

Cultural intelligence is the engine, the skill of reading a room and adjusting in the moment: one meeting, one email, one call. It makes you effective.

The Culture Map is the terrain, the eight ways working cultures differ. It helps you read the situation, and it makes you accurate.

“Competence makes you trusted over time. Intelligence makes you effective in the moment. The map makes you accurate in the situation.”

Dr Betty Eziakor

How the layers connect 

The layers are related, but they aren’t the same thing, and it matters to keep them distinct. Cultural competence and cultural intelligence come from different research traditions, and each has its own assessment. Cultural intelligence doesn’t measure cultural competence, and the Culture Map doesn’t replace either of them.

But they do line up in a revealing way. When you set the five elements of cultural competence beside the four capabilities of cultural intelligence, the older, developmental language has an operational counterpart in the newer one. This correspondence is the interpretive core of the RISE model:

• Cultural awareness feeds strategy (the self-monitoring). The mirror you hold up to your own assumptions, used during the conversation, not only after it.
• Cultural knowledge feeds knowledge (the cognition). Understanding how other groups see the world, and your own culture as one among many.
• Cultural skill and cultural encounters feed action (the doing). Both the ability and the real contact land in how you actually adjust your behaviour.
• Cultural desire feeds drive (the motivation). The same fuel, seen as a disposition you cultivate and as a motivation you can measure.

The two frameworks were built independently, so this is a well-reasoned correspondence, not an identity. That’s why the model says “feeds”, not “is the same as”. Competence is where the capacity is grown. Intelligence is where it becomes performable in the moment.

It also works in reverse. Every interaction you handle in the moment is itself a cultural encounter, and it adds back to who you are becoming. That’s why competence keeps growing for as long as you keep showing up.

What the model does is show how they work together. The foundation is who you are across difference: curious, respectful, committed to learning. The engine is what you can do in the moment: notice, check and adjust. The terrain is what you’re adjusting to: the specific way this team, this market or this headquarters communicates, decides and builds trust.

Think of it like driving in a new city. Competence is being a careful, considerate driver. Intelligence is the skill of handling the car well under pressure. The map is knowing which side of the road they drive on. You need all three to arrive, and the city doesn’t care which one you’re missing.

Now look at what happens when one layer is missing.

When competence is missing: effective, but not trusted 

She reads the room brilliantly. She adjusts her tone, mirrors the meeting style and says the right things. But over time, people start to feel they never quite know where she stands.

That’s because adjusting is only the surface. Josepha Campinha-Bacote’s model of cultural competence describes five elements underneath it, and colleagues feel them, or feel their absence, long before they could name them.

When those elements are missing, adjusting looks like performance. Colleagues sense the skill but not the person, and trust stays shallow. This is why Campinha-Bacote calls cultural competence a process, not an event: it isn’t a course you complete or a box you tick. It’s a commitment people feel in how you show up, week after week, not just in how well you adapt in the meeting.

The signal: praised, but never called. You’re “great in meetings”, but rarely the person people confide in or champion.

The fix: start with desire, because the other four grow from it. Then pick one element to practise this month. Name one assumption you hold about a colleague’s culture and test it (awareness). Ask one person how their culture defines respect at work (knowledge). In your next one-to-one, ask two more questions than you normally would before you respond (skill). Have one conversation across difference that isn’t about a deliverable (encounters). Be consistent in your values across every room, so people see the same you each time.

When intelligence is missing: trusted, but not effective 

She’s warm, respectful and genuinely curious. People like her. But in the moment, under pressure, she defaults to her home style. She knows the other culture prefers consensus, and she still pushes for a decision in the meeting.

This is the gap between knowing and doing. Cultural intelligence research separates knowledge from strategy (noticing your own assumptions mid-conversation) and action (actually adjusting your behaviour). Many of us are strong on the first and weak on the last two.

The signal: afterwards you think, “I knew better than that.”

The fix: plan the adjustment before the moment, not during it. Before an important meeting, decide one thing you will do differently. Afterwards, take two minutes to ask, “Where did I default?” The skill grows in that gap between plan and review.

When the map is missing: well-meaning, but inaccurate 

She’s committed and adaptable, but she adjusts the wrong thing. She softens her feedback for a culture that wanted it direct. She builds the relationship first with a team that trusts results first.

Without the terrain, good intentions aim in the wrong direction. Erin Meyer’s Culture Map lays out eight scales on which working cultures differ. You can’t navigate what you haven’t mapped.

The signal: you tried hard, and it still landed wrong.

The fix: learn the terrain before you adjust. Pick the two scales that matter most in your situation, usually how feedback is given and how decisions are made. Ask someone who knows that culture well, “How would this land here?”, before you act. Use the map as your starting guess, then check it against the person. The map tells you what is likely; the person tells you what is true.

Which layer do you lead with? 

Most of us lean on one layer because of how we learnt to work. If you were raised to read the room and keep the peace, you may be strong in intelligence and quietly short on the map: you adjust quickly, but sometimes to the wrong thing. If you’re known for your integrity and warmth, you may lead with competence and struggle to switch styles under pressure. If you’ve studied culture closely, you may know the map well and still freeze in the moment.

None of these is a weakness to hide. It’s simply your starting point. The goal isn’t to become someone else. It’s to notice which layer carries you, and to build the one that keeps letting you down.

A useful test: think about the feedback you hear most often. “People love working with you, but…” usually points to intelligence or the map. “You’re very capable, but…” often points to competence. The sentence after “but” tells you which layer people are missing in you.

It isn’t only about crossing borders 

Here is the part that surprises people. You don’t need to work for a multinational to need this. Culture operates at every scale: between two colleagues with different feedback styles, between a fast-moving team and a formal one, between sales and finance, between a new manager and a long-standing team, even between two branches of the same company in the same city.

If you’re changing industries, moving into leadership or joining a new organisation, you’re crossing a culture, whether or not you’re crossing a border. The same three layers apply.

Why “just adapt” fails 

None of these gaps means you’re bad at people. Most of us were never taught these layers. Workplaces reward results and rarely teach the skills underneath them, and most cross-cultural advice collapses everything into one instruction: “just adapt.”

That advice fails twice. It can’t tell you which layer you’re missing, so it can’t tell you what to fix. And taken too far, it asks you to change everything about yourself. Research on code-switching, including a widely read Harvard Business Review article by Courtney McCluney and colleagues, describes how constantly adjusting to fit in can carry real personal costs for the people who do it.

Cultural fluency is different. You adjust your delivery: your tone, your directness, your pace. You keep your values and your substance. Fluency, not self-erasure.

One honest caveat. When trust is the missing piece, it isn’t always yours to fix. Trust is earned, but it is also granted, and some workplaces withhold it from people who have already earned it. Knowing the difference saves you years of fixing the wrong thing.

What to do this week 

Think of one cross-cultural or cross-team moment from the last month that didn’t go the way you wanted. Write it down, then work through these three questions.

Most of us have one or two layers. The women who rise across cultures build all three, on purpose.

Rising with you,

Dr Betty

Which layer is missing?

Find out in 7 minutes

My free Cultural Fluency Profile scores you on all three layers, trusted, effective and accurate, and shows you the one to build first. It’s the model you’ve just read, turned into a tool.

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Common questions about cultural fluency

Sources and notes. Research is summarised to explain the model, not promised as an outcome for any individual. Josepha Campinha-Bacote (2002), “The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services: A Model of Care,” Journal of Transcultural Nursing 13(3); P. Christopher Earley and Soon Ang (2003), Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions Across Cultures, Stanford University Press; Erin Meyer (2014), The Culture Map, PublicAffairs; Courtney L. McCluney and colleagues (2019), “The Costs of Code-Switching,” Harvard Business Review. The RISE Cultural Fluency Model is an original synthesis by Dr Betty Eziakor. Cite this model: Eziakor, B. (2026). The RISE Cultural Fluency Model™. RISE with Betty.