Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success

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Chapter 6

TURN OFF THE CRUISE CONTROL: CQ STRATEGY

(STEP 3)

STEP 3: CQ STRATEGY: How should I plan?

Strategizing and making sense of culturally diverse experiences

Profile of a leader

with high CQ

strategy:

Leaders with high CQ strategy develop ways

to use cultural understanding to develop a

plan for new cross-cultural situations. These

leaders are better able to monitor, analyze,

and adjust their behaviors in different cultural

settings. They are conscious of what they need

to know about an unfamiliar culture.

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Leading with Cultural Intelligence

I’m not interested in simply researching and writing about cultural

intelligence. I want to apply it to my own leadership practice. But

there are many times when I still appear culturally ignorant. For ex-

ample, my attempt to find out whether Dr. Jones was a crook (see

Chapter 1) was rooted in my North American orientation toward

direct and explicit communication. I have little tolerance for dodg-

ing the elephant in the room and while I surely value diplomacy, at

the end of the day, my modus operandi is to address conflict directly.

When I arrived at the Monrovia airport, I was able to step back and

see that Tim, the Liberian American visiting for two weeks, and his

porter were missing each other. I could listen to the stories of my

breakfast companions’ mishaps with baby food and medical ship-

ments. But I failed to take the time to think about how my direct

name-the-elephant-in-the-room approach would work in Liberia.

If you had asked me about some of the values found in Liberian

culture, I could have quickly talked to you about the high level of

loyalty and commitment given to relationships. I think I could have

even described the value of saving face for a friend and colleague

above the value of providing accurate information to a stranger

from another country. But I failed to make use of my knowledge

to effectively accomplish what I needed — a clearer understanding

of whether we should partner with Dr. Jones and Madison College.

Only as I stepped back and reflected on what happened, combined

with Moses’s commentary, did I begin to better understand that I

was putting Dr. Harris in an impossible situation. The ability to

connect our cultural understanding with how we actually lead is

what we’re getting at with CQ strategy. This conversation could

have been more helpful if I had spent more time planning how to

approach Dr. Harris with a contentious issue.

The next day, Moses and I were with another Liberian who used

to teach at Madison College and consequently knew Dr. Jones, the

alleged embezzler. Having spent some time thinking through the

previous day’s interaction with Dr. Harris, I used a very different