Helping you thrive in intercultural relationships
CQ
Cultural Intelligence, or CQ
What is Cultural Intelligence ?
Cultural Intelligence, or CQ, is all about having the motivation, basic knowledge, thoughtful strategy and implemented actions that produce positive results with people across different cultures. It’s hard to imagine a skillset more important than CQ in moving our world toward beauty, mutual wholesomeness, peac.
The CQ Assessment
The CQ Assessment developed by the Cultural Intelligence Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.
The CQ assessment is one of only two assessments that has been academically tested and proven to accurately predict a person’s effective performance relating across cultures.
It comes in a variety of forms–self-rating, 360-degree peer rated, team assessments, and timed assessments that track how a person or a team is progressing.
A Question for Me
Why Cultural Intelligence?
What first interested you in effective intercultural communciations?
When a young, idealistic and impressionable young man I read a mind-blowing account in Reader’s Digest magazine. It told of a family that went to Irian Jaya (now Papua province), Indonesia. They wanted to communicate a message that was very dear to them.
After learning a very challenging language and culture, they taught the locals, only to have them completely misunderstand the point of the message.
The locals were absolutely convinced that the villan in the story was a super-hero, and that the hero was a pitiful, gullible fool.
To make things worse, the way the locals misunderstood the message encouraged them to more betrayal, violence, murder, blood feuds.
This family of intercultural communicators dispaired and made firm plans to give up and leave.
The Locals didn’t want them to leave suddenly because of certain practical benefits they brought to the people.
So, the locals embarked on a rarely performed ritual to create a peace treaty.
While the expat foreigner witnessed this fascinating ritual a bell began ringing through the fog in the back of his head. Suddenly, he couldn’t ignore it.
Here, embedded in a culture as radically different from his Canadian culture, was a redemptive analogy that beautifully offered a word picture of the very concept he had been trying to get across.
He revisited his motivation, asked a lot about the ritual to make sure he understood it clearly, rebuilt his communication plan and retold his story–but this time framing it in the analogy of their local customs–their cultural context.
They got it! The locals were powerfully impacted. The murder rate and blood feuds dramatically decreased, and an unprecedented peace came to the people.
See the story in the book Peace Child by Don Richardson.
First steps to effectively getting into another culture
It’s all about bonding.
A Noble Peace Prize winning naturalist, Konrad Lorenz discovered that when hatchling ducklings emerge from their shells, the first animal they see gets so imprinted on them that they default assume it is their mother. Lorenz had whole brood of ducklings compliantly following him around in single file, as if he was the mother duck.
What’s the point of this in intercultural living?
First impressions are uncannily potent. So, if you want to get into a culture, pre-design–with the help of people on the ground–your first experiences in the culture.
If you go from the airport to the home of some expat from your passport country and lives mostly like they’re still where they came from, your intro to this new culture will get off on the wrong foot.
While your adrenaline to learn culture and initial language is robust, get yourself placed in a home with a family of locals. Better yet, choose a family where at most one person speaks your mother tongue–and even then–only when they absolutely need to help you with a real problem.
In that way you’ll have a shot at getting that duckling bonding experience–creating your way of being in that culture according to your “mother duck” host’s emic patterns. Language will stick faster, and you’ll be likely to sound much more like locals when you eventually speak, because you’re listening only to authentic, native-speaker language. Your pronunciation will not be contaminated by what you heard from expats.
But how do I not “go native?!” That is a valid enough concern. Before you delve into any radically new situation, you’ll do well to reflect on your real central, wholesome identity. Clearly this will be an outgrowth of your worldview, most central beliefs about right and wrong, and values. It’s important to stay true to your best self.
If your central beliefs are valid, adopting a second or third culture won’t necessarily change them. Your values–as culturally influenced expressions of your beliefs–though, are likely to get quite a work over.
As one expat once said, “I’m concerned that when we return home our third-culture kids (TCKs) won’t fit in with their generation there. But maybe that’s more of a good thing.” You probably won’t have the same level of opportunity as TCKs to bond with the culture, but upon return, you won’t completely fit in either. But you’ll likely come to see that as an advantage.
If you can spend your first three weeks embeded with a local family before considering other accomodation, you will have an enormous advantage over most expats moving into the culture.
Admittedly, if your trip involves heavy jet lag, perhaps you’ll need the first two or three nights in a hotel before diving into bonding with the culture. But in the interest of your growth, don’t go overly easy on yourself!
You may become so enamoured by your opportunity to bond in the culture that you prefer to spend your first year living with a family while gaining language fluency.
People we know who’ve dared to bond have achieved amazing fluency and ease in living in cultures radically different than anything they came from.
Some have returned home and then returned for a visit 15 years later and found, to their utter surprise, that they’re ease and fluency had not even erroded 10%!
Give attention to how you land, and you can be like an Olympic sprinter who gets off the starting block ahead of the herd and wins gold–in CQ.
How to Develop a Culturally Intelligent Organization
You may not prefer to hear this, but your company will never become a high CQ organization without being staffed–at most all levels–by people from very different backgrounds.
Clearly you can’t hire and promote people simply because they’re different. But way too often this concern becomes an embarrassing excuse for laziness creating cultural ignorance.
As Dr. Sandra Upton has observed, in order to get your team equipped with CQ, when hiring you’re somewhere, somehow going to first need to go get involved in communities different from your kind of people. Build your relational network and then (admittedly–this will take some time) find the talented people there whom you can recruit into your team.
Secondly, you need to keep that “someone who thinks differently than most of us here” criteria in play when vetting candidates.
Thirdly, you’ll need to relfect on and question a myriad of assumptions you tend to instinctively employ when reviewing candidates.
And, fourthly, make it a top priority in hiring and granting promotions to play it fair!
That’s the sampler dose. To get the fuller treatment, see Upton’s article at the link above.