Professional Development
Cultural Background card, MethodKit for Professional Development
Card 10 of 66 · MethodKit for Professional Development
  • ThemeIdentity & Self
  • CardCard 10 of 66
  • Questions5 to explore
Identity & Self

Cultural Background

How your upbringing has shaped you

Where you come from shapes how you work, what you notice, and what you assume is normal.

Your cultural background is not a box to check on a form. It is a set of lenses you picked up growing up: ideas about what counts as success, how to handle authority, when to speak and when to stay quiet, what it means to be professional, what you owe to other people. Most of these were absorbed before you had words for them.

In a working life, this background shows up in small things and large ones. It shapes how you respond to feedback, whether you volunteer your opinions in meetings, how comfortable you are negotiating, what you think of as a reasonable work pace, and how you read relationships with managers and colleagues. These are not fixed traits, but it is hard to examine them if you have never named them.

Understanding your cultural background is not about reducing yourself to a category. It is about seeing which of your automatic assumptions come from upbringing rather than deliberate choice, so you can decide what to keep and what to question.

How to work on it

Practical ways to reflect on and develop this dimension of your working life. How it tends to look at different stages of a career, and where to put your attention.

Early in your career

You are often adapting to a dominant professional culture for the first time. Notice which adjustments feel natural and which feel like a performance, and start building vocabulary for what your background actually brings to the work.

Mid-career

You may have absorbed a professional culture so thoroughly that you no longer see your original lenses clearly. It is worth deliberately revisiting what you left behind, what you gained, and where those two things are in tension.

Later in your career

You are in a position to actively shape team culture and norms. Your own background is an asset here, both as a perspective to offer and as a reminder that there are many ways to work well, not just the ones that feel obvious to you.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. What did the adults around you when you were growing up believe about work, success, and earning a living?

  2. Which professional norms felt natural to you from the start, and which did you have to learn or adapt to?

  3. Are there things you do at work out of habit that, when you think about it, come from your upbringing rather than deliberate choice?

  4. How does your background shape what you find valuable in colleagues or leaders?

  5. What does your background give you that is genuinely useful, and how well do you make use of it?

Things to notice

  • Treating your cultural background as invisible ('I just have a neutral approach') means the assumptions are still there, just unexamined.
  • The opposite trap is making background explain everything, which can flatten your sense of agency and your individuality.
  • Adapting to a professional culture is not the same as abandoning where you came from; the skill is knowing which parts of the adaptation are genuinely useful.