Cultural Intelligence
Culture plays a major role when it comes to foreign business settings since it can enable or restrain communication and therefore cooperation. In fact, one of the first things that you will hear when taking an international negotiation course, is that knowing the culture of your counterparty is the starting point for setting your communication style and overall negotiation strategy. That is why most corporate trainings focus on learning about the beliefs, customs and taboos of foreign cultures. This approach will never prepare a person for every situation that arises, nor will it prevent terrible cross-cultural misunderstanding. The only key to cross-cultural success is to develop respect for cultural differences.
However, some people have a seemingly natural ability to interpret someone’s unfamiliar and ambiguous gestures in just the way that person’s compatriots and colleagues would. We call this cultural intelligence or CQ.
There are three elements of cultural intelligence: cognitive, physical and emotional or motivational intelligence. The first element of CQ is related to a person’s ability to learn about a foreign culture – not only through reading books and internet research – but through the everyday interaction with that culture. Trying to understand a foreign culture is still not enough; your actions must prove that you have entered their world and that is what physical CQ is about. If you have a high physical CQ, you have no problems with adopting other people’s habits and gestures which prove that you esteem them well enough to want to be like them. These can be simple gestures like the way you order your coffee but even through mirroring most elementary actions you can truly be ‘accepted’ into a foreign culture. However, obstacles and incomprehension are always present even after entering and, thus, only a confident and motivated person, or in other words, an emotionally intelligent person can be able to cope with such difficulties.
Empirical studies show that companies get a lot of benefits from increased employee CQ levels.
A recent study showed that out of 100 companies that adopted CQ assessment and training 92 per cent of them had increased revenues within 18 months. Executives at every one of these companies credited cultural intelligence as a significant contributor to the increased revenues. In addition, companies that worked to enhance their leader’s cultural intelligence expanded faster to foreign markets and became more successful at attracting and retaining top talent. Talent also became culturally more diversified, which, as research has shown, fosters more ideas and innovation.
Do you want to know what your CQ is and where your weaknesses and strengths lie regarding cultural intelligence? Then, this test, developed by Harvard Business School, can help you assess the three elements of your cultural intelligence. Remember, attaining a high absolute score is not the objective – learning about your CQ in order to improve it is!
Further reading
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/06/cq-cultural-intelligence-leadership-managing-globalization.html
Sources
https://hbr.org/2004/10/cultural-intelligence
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Thank you ever so for you blog article.Thanks Again. Great.