HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures (with featured article "Cultural Intelligence" by P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski). Harvard Business Review
an outsider has a seemingly natural ability to interpret someone’s unfamiliar and ambiguous gestures in just the way that person’s compatriots and colleagues would, even to mirror them. We call that cultural intelligence or CQ. In a world where crossing boundaries is routine, CQ becomes a vitally important aptitude and skill, and not just for international bankers and borrowers.
Companies, too, have cultures, often very distinctive; anyone who joins a new company spends the first few weeks deciphering its cultural code. Within any large company there are sparring subcultures as well: The sales force can’t talk to the engineers, and the PR people lose patience with the lawyers. Departments, divisions, professions, geographical regions—each has a constellation of manners, meanings, histories, and values that will confuse the interloper and cause him or her to stumble. Unless, that is, he or she has a high CQ.
Cultural intelligence is related to emotional intelligence, but it picks up where emotional intelligence leaves off. A person with high emotional intelligence grasps what makes us human and at the same time what makes each of us different from one another. A person with high cultural intelligence can somehow tease out of a person’s or group’s behavior those features that would be true of all people and all groups, those peculiar to this person or this group, and those that are neither universal nor idiosyncratic. The vast realm that lies between those two poles is culture.
An American expatriate manager we know had his cultural intelligence tested while serving on a design team that included two German engineers. As other team members floated their ideas, the engineers condemned them repeatedly as stunted or immature or worse. The manager concluded that Germans in general are rude and aggressive.
A modicum of cultural intelligence would have helped the American realize he was mistakenly equating the merit of an idea with the merit of the person presenting it and that the Germans were able to make a sharp distinction between the two. A manager with even subtler powers of discernment might have tried to determine how much of the two Germans’ behavior was arguably German and how much was explained by the fact that they were engineers.
An expatriate manager who was merely emotionally intelligent would probably have empathized with the team members whose ideas were being criticized, modulated his or her spontaneous reaction to the engineers’ conduct, and proposed a new style of discussion that preserved candor but spared feelings, if indeed anyone’s feelings had been hurt. But without being able to tell how much of the engineers’ behavior was idiosyncratic and how much was culturally determined, he or she would not have known how to influence their actions or how easy it would be to do that.
One critical element that cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence do share is, in psychologist Daniel Goleman’s words, “a propensity to suspend judgment—to think before acting.” For someone richly endowed with CQ, the suspension might take hours or days, while someone with low CQ might have to take weeks or months. In either case, it involves using your senses to register all the ways that the personalities interacting in front of you are different from those in your home culture yet similar to one another. Only when conduct you have actually observed begins to settle into patterns can you safely begin to anticipate how these people will react in the next situation. The inferences you draw in this manner will be free of the hazards of stereotyping.
Idea in Brief
In an increasingly diverse business environment, managers must be able to navigate through the thicket of habits, gestures, and assumptions that define their coworkers’ differences. Foreign cultures are everywhere—in other countries, certainly, but also in corporations, vocations, and regions. Interacting with individuals within them demands perceptiveness and adaptability. And the people who have those traits in abundance aren’t necessarily the ones who enjoy the greatest social success in familiar settings. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the ability to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and then blend in. It has three components—the cognitive, the physical, and the emotional/motivational. While it shares many of the properties of emotional intelligence, CQ goes one step further by equipping a person to distinguish behaviors produced by the culture in question from behaviors that are peculiar to particular individuals and those found in all human beings. In their surveys of 2,000 managers in 60 countries, the authors found that most managers are not equally strong in all three of these areas of cultural intelligence. The authors have devised tools that show how to identify one’s strengths, and they have developed training techniques to help people overcome weaknesses. They conclude that anyone reasonably alert, motivated, and poised can attain an acceptable CQ.
The people who are socially the most successful among their peers often have the greatest difficulty making sense of, and then being accepted by, cultural strangers. Those who fully embody the habits and norms of their native culture may be the most alien when they enter a culture not their own. Sometimes, people who are somewhat detached from their own culture can more easily adopt the mores and even the body language of an unfamiliar host. They’re used to being observers and making a conscious effort to fit in.
Although some aspects of cultural intelligence are innate, anyone reasonably alert, motivated, and poised can attain an acceptable level of cultural intelligence, as we have learned from surveying 2,000 managers in 60 countries and training many others. Given the number of cross-functional assignments, job transfers, new employers, and distant postings most corporate managers are likely to experience in the course of a career, low CQ can turn out to be an inherent disadvantage.
The Three Sources of Cultural Intelligence
Can it really be that some managers are socially intelligent in their own settings but ineffective in culturally novel ones? The experience of Peter, a sales manager at a California medical devices group acquired by Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals, is not unusual. At the devices company, the atmosphere had been mercenary and competitive; the best-performing employees could make as much in performance bonuses as in salary. Senior managers hounded unproductive salespeople to perform better.
At Lilly’s Indianapolis headquarters, to which Peter was transferred, the sales staff received bonuses that accounted for only a small percentage of total compensation. Furthermore, criticism was restrained and confrontation kept to a minimum. To motivate people, Lilly management encouraged them. Peter commented, “Back in L.A., I knew how to handle myself and how to manage my sales team. I’d push them and confront them if they weren’t performing, and they’d respond. If you look at my evaluations, you’ll see that I was very successful and people respected me. Here in Indianapolis, they don’t like my style, and they seem to avoid the challenges that I put to them. I just can’t seem to get things done as well here as I did in California.”
Peter’s problem was threefold. First, he didn’t comprehend how much the landscape had changed. Second, he was unable to make his behavior consistent with that of everyone around him. And third, when he recognized that the arrangement wasn’t working, he became disheartened.
Peter’s three difficulties correspond to the three components of cultural intelligence: the cognitive; the physical; and the emotional/motivational. Cultural intelligence resides in the body and the heart, as well as the head. Although most managers are not equally strong in all three areas, each faculty is seriously hampered without the other two.
Head
Rote learning about the beliefs, customs, and taboos of foreign cultures, the approach corporate training programs tend to favor, will never prepare a person for every situation that arises, nor will it prevent terrible gaffes. However, inquiring about the meaning of some custom will often prove unavailing because natives may be reticent about explaining themselves to strangers, or they may have little practice looking at their own culture analytically.
Instead, a newcomer needs to devise what we call learning strategies. Although most people find it difficult to discover a point of entry into alien cultures, whose very coherence can make them seem like separate, parallel worlds, an individual with high cognitive CQ notices clues to a culture’s shared understandings. These can appear in any form and any context but somehow indicate a line of interpretation worth pursuing.
An Irish manager