Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success

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Recruit Travel Companions: Developing CQ in Your Team

rests on a team of senior leaders who can draw on the four-step

cycle of cultural intelligence.

2

Begin by painting a picture for your leaders of what it looks like

to become a more culturally intelligent organization. Some of the

questions I consistently use when talking with senior leaders about

this include the following:

What are your key performance goals?

•

What are the biggest challenges hindering you from reaching

•

those goals?

In what way does culture play a part in your challenges (e.g.,

•

a dispersed workforce, multicultural teams, culturally diverse

markets, expatriate assignments, short-term travel)?

Communicate the ways cultural intelligence can help address

some of the key roadblocks facing your team. Explain the four-step

cycle of the cultural intelligence model and regularly run through

it with cultural situations facing you as a leader. Have each leader

complete a CQ assessment (more information available at http://

www.cq-portal.com).

Next, develop a collaborative plan for making cultural intel-

ligence nonnegotiable in your organizational future. This can’t

simply be relegated to a department like human resources or in-

ternational operations. The senior leaders have to personally forge

the way in leading with cultural intelligence. CQ has to be woven

throughout each part of the organization.

Fill the Organization with CQ Team Members

Although individuals in senior positions of leadership have to lead

the way in embracing and prioritizing cultural intelligence, eventu-

ally most of the personnel throughout an organization need some

measure of cultural intelligence. The greater the degree of cultural

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Leading with Cultural Intelligence

distance encountered by team members in their daily work, the

more important it is for them to understand and grow in cultural

intelligence. Therefore, the most obvious positions where cultural

intelligence should become a required skill set among your team

include international project managers, expatriate assignments,

and representatives who are expected to travel internationally on

your behalf.

Consider how to develop cultural intelligence even among em-

ployees who don’t fill the kinds of positions that have direct respon-

sibility for negotiating and working cross-culturally. The vision and

values of your organization are ultimately whatever experience a

customer has any time she encounters one of your team members.

The support person answering e-mails and returning phone calls

is your organization to the individual on the other end of that e-

mail or phone call. The faculty member behind closed doors in the

classroom is your university to his students. The nurse treating the

immigrant is your hospital to that patient and her family. Reflecting

cultural intelligence in the way you write your mission statement,

market your products, or share your vision is important. However,

it pales in contrast with the role your personnel play in communi-

cating how your organization functions among people of differ-

ence. The way your team behaves cross-culturally reflects as much

on your entire organization as it does on them personally. Begin

by assessing the degree to which cultural intelligence is important

for various functions in the organization. Two roles where CQ is

extremely important are human resource personnel and those who

have to travel and work internationally.

Human Resource Personnel

There are few departments for whom cultural intelligence has

as much direct relevance to their day-to-day work as the human

resource department. Don’t hire a human resource director who

doesn’t have strong CQ! Human resource personnel are going to