Culturally Competent Staff Posted on January 20, 2009 Training your research staff is an important part of management, says Liliane Windsor (bio).

And then the other piece of the puzzle, it's really the staff that you're going to be picking, not only for the program, but also for the research, making sure that you're doing training, cultural awareness trainings, because cultural competence really begins with the individual.

I need to understand my own background. Where did I come from? What are my own biases towards other people? Where did my thinking, was developed? So that once I start understanding my own understanding of the world, I can start being a little less subjective, although I'm always going to be subjective. But I can start understanding a little better, where might I be reading the situation from a bias perspective that might not be so applicable to that population that may be different than mine? Or being careful not to be imposing my own personal experiences on other people, like just because I was able to succeed or I was able to stop using drugs in a certain way, doesn't mean that everybody else is going to stop using it I the same way that I did.

And try to understand and always be in dialogue with other people to try to understand where they are coming from, what their ideas are, how they match, how they don't match, and how we can come to a consensus.