Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success

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Leading with Cultural Intelligence

you’d best tap into cultural intelligence to determine how to nego-

tiate in a way that will appeal to the values of Chinese businesses.

And when selecting a cross-border partner, you need to identify

the key competitive factors associated with working together, as-

sess the cultural and organizational risks connected with each of

these factors, and draw on these in your corporate decision mak-

ing.

5

Culturally intelligent strategies help us identify, plan for, and

manage risks beforehand as well as on the fly when the unexpected

happens — and it will!

Form CQ Structures

Next, we need to create appropriate structures and mechanisms

for enacting CQ strategies. CQ knowledge helps us form struc-

tures that consider the role of varying cultural systems (e.g., legal

and religious) and values (e.g., time and power distance) for how

we work in different markets. For example, although the system

used for negotiating contracts needs some uniformity through-

out your organization, it also needs to be flexible enough to re-

alistically reach a contract in various cultures. You have to figure

out how to retain legal and fiscal responsibility (e.g., a signed

contract) while also accommodating the informal, unofficial ap-

proaches to negotiation used in many less industrial countries.

The differences in the maturity of legal frameworks for contract

law, property rights, and arbitration procedures are precisely why

culturally intelligent structures are necessary.

6

Refer back to the

leadership implications of the cultural systems and values de-

scribed in Chapters 4 and 5.

Another reason to develop CQ structures is to accommodate

the geographical distance that exists between offices and affiliates

across an organization. This distance often results in time zone dif-

ferences and disparity in telecommunication infrastructures, the

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Recruit Travel Companions: Developing CQ in Your Team

scope of knowledge sources, and the scale of a partner’s business.

A culturally intelligent structure across physical distance might

include a roaming schedule for conference calls among regional

leaders so everyone can share the inconvenient time slots. A simple

adaptation like this one goes a long way to building a culturally

intelligent organization.

Universities that draw large populations of international stu-

dents provide another way to think about the need for culturally

intelligent structures. International students usually come with a

different set of academic and personal needs than home culture

students have. Culturally intelligent structures are needed to help

them succeed. Similar kinds of flexible structures are needed for

the varying religious beliefs and practices held by diverse faculty

and students.

One of the challenges for the culturally intelligent organiza-

tion is to develop malleable structures while not reinventing the

entire process every time you move into a new cultural context.

Customizing and adapting structures is essential, but it’s unsus-

tainable to build a new structure for each situation. And at some

point, completely re-creating your structures and product line

for every context can result in losing your brand identity alto-

gether. McDonald’s fries and shakes taste pretty similar in Chicago

and Delhi. There’s some uniformity to the experience of eating

at McDonald’s most anywhere. But the localized approaches to

menus demonstrate some flexible structures within McDonald’s

international approach. The flavor of shakes available in Chicago

and Delhi restaurants is different. And the basic McDonald’s

product — the hamburger — isn’t available at its Indian stores.

McDonald’s has developed a structure that can demonstrate re-

spect for the Hindu convictions toward eating beef. So instead of

the Big Mac, the McVeggie is at the center of the McDonald’s menu

in India. As flexible structures, services, and products are devel-

oped and morphed, your team is allowed to function in culturally

intelligent and productive ways.