RECRUITING FOR INTERNATIONAL ASSIGNMENTS
Grace is recruiting for a lead project manager role. The successful candidate will manage a global group involved in a firm-wide payment systems upgrade. She has shortlisted two possible internal candidates.
- Sarah has excellent technical skills and has been heavily involved in the design specifications for the upgrade. Earlier this year, she successfully led a systems implementation in her home country, but she hasn’t had any experience managing multicultural work groups. Sarah has never lived abroad and does not have foreign language skills. Grace would describe Sarah’s personality as conscientious and systematic—qualities that have helped her meet deadlines and come in below budget on previous projects.
- Jonathon’s technical skills are weaker than Sarah’s but he has worked in a number of the firm’s offices globally and is fluent in Spanish, French and Mandarin. As a third-culture kid (see explanation below), Jonathon has an easiness interacting with culturally diverse others and is enthusiastic about working with diverse groups. He isn’t as methodological as Sarah, but his group members like and respect him.
More than 40 per cent of international leadership assignments fail. Who should Grace hire to lead the global project?
CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE
Individuals with high Cultural Intelligence (CQ) display four main competencies:
CQ Drive is your willingness to work with diverse others. This involves your ability to overcome explicit or unconscious bias and your capacity to persist in challenging interactions—even when confused, frustrated, or burnt out.
CQ Knowledge is your understanding of culture and cultural differences. This involves more than awareness of variations in language, customs, and appearance. Core cultural differences like values, assumptions, and beliefs are often invisible but cause the most problems—and are frequently overlooked.
CQ Strategy is your ability to flex mentally. With high CQ Strategy, you are not confined to a single worldview. You are open to new or integrative ideas.
CQ Action is your ability to flex verbal and non-verbal behaviour. This decreases the risk of miscommunication and helps you to respond to diverse others in a manner that conveys respect and builds trust and rapport.
The four competencies that form Cultural Intelligence are not abstract ideas. Social scientists have demonstrated they that in fact map to particular regions of the brain. Studies show that they predict important measures of performance in diverse cultural settings, including enhanced problem solving and decision making, improved well-being, better task performance, improved collaboration and teamwork, trust, the formation of diverse networks and increased innovation and creativity.
Companies with leaders and workers who have high Cultural Intelligence are more agile. These organisations can quickly adapt processes, products, and services to capture new opportunities and respond to change across diverse markets.
Cultural Intelligence also promotes successful intercultural relations, both inside and outside the organisation. This improves business performance via enhanced innovation, increased workforce engagement, and more effective partnering.
In fact, Cultural Intelligence is a better predictor of success in diverse settings than cognitive ability, emotional intelligence (EQ), personality, demographics, and international experience. However, the latter criteria are typically used when recruiting for global roles as well as technical expertise, knowledge of internal company systems and practices, and domestic experience and management performance.
RECRUITING FOR CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE
Researchers have identified four factors that contribute to high cultural intelligence:
Personality
Anyone can develop cultural intelligence with training and experience. Some individuals, however, have an enhanced capacity for working in culturally diverse settings. Research shows cultural intelligence is related to four main personality traits:
- Individuals who are open to new experiences are inquisitive. They are willing to try new behaviours and consider the perspective of others.
- Extroverts seek and enjoy social interactions, including exchanges with diverse others.
- Individuals who do not seek to control their environments may profit more from their international and multicultural experiences because they have fewer preconceived ideas, are more tolerant of ambiguity and are more willing to experiment with new approaches and consider other worldviews.
- Emotionally stable individuals are more comfortable in unfamiliar situations and are more confident taking risks and stepping outside their comfort zones.
Cultural Capital
Cultural capital refers to intrinsic resources for diversity competence that accumulate from a child’s home environment. These resources include values, knowledge and mindsets that develop from an international education or the parents’ positive orientation to diversity. Individuals with higher levels of cultural capital naturally develop higher levels of cultural intelligence. Research involving ‘third culture kids’—individuals who live outside their country of citizenship as a child—highlights the important role of early experience with cultural diversity for intercultural competence.
International and Multicultural Experiences
Individuals who travel abroad for education, leisure, volunteerism or employment have higher cultural intelligence than non-travellers. Similarly, studies show that membership in multicultural groups is associated with increased cultural intelligence. The processes of resolving ethical and cultural paradoxes, developing self-awareness, considering new perspectives and making sense of emotions experienced in novel cultural settings all contribute to the development of cultural intelligence.
Foreign Language Acquisition
Cultural intelligence is improved with foreign language fluency. As noted in Chapter Eight, language is a source of cultural knowledge, and competency in another language enhances cultural understanding.
The four factors noted that contribute to high cultural intelligence are useful selection criteria for international or multicultural assignments. Individuals who are open to new experiences, extroverted, who are emotionally stable, have a lower need for control and have a history of previous intercultural experience have higher levels of cultural intelligence. So too do individuals with higher levels of cultural capital, and those who exhibit foreign language fluency.
People with those characteristics are likely to perform well in diverse work settings. They also develop greater levels of cultural intelligence at faster rates from their multicultural experiences, compared to individuals who do not have those attributes.
IMPROVING SELECTION WITH CQ ASSESSMENT
Because CQ is a better predictor of effectiveness in culturally diverse settings than personality, prior international experience and language fluency, a more rigorous approach to recruiting for cultural intelligence incorporates CQ Assessment. The CQ Assessment is an online questionnaire administered by consultants and trainers accredited by the Cultural Intelligence Center, led by Dr David Livermore and Dr Linn Van Dyne. CQ Assessment has been rigorously tested across multiple populations, time intervals and varying assessment methods.
CQ Assessment provides organisations with knowledge of an individual’s intercultural strengths and weaknesses by measuring an individual’s capability for each of the four main CQ competencies. Beyond the four main competencies, the assessment measures strengths and weaknesses in 13 sub-competencies.
The CQ Assessment is available in both self-report and multi-rater formats. The CQ Self-Assessment provides individuals with an assessment of how they rate themselves in each of the four components of cultural intelligence relative to the wider population. The CQ MultiRater Assessment includes peer ratings to provide a more objective measure of cultural intelligence.
DEVELOPING CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE
When a low CQ candidate is selected for an international assignment on the basis of their technical skills, there is always room for improvement. Cultural Intelligence is not a personality trait, nor is it something you are born with. Rather, Cultural Intelligence develops through education, training, and experience.
Individuals travel through several stages as they develop their cultural intelligence (CQ).
Can you identify what stage you are at on your CQ journey?
Ignorant
The CQ-Ignorant individual has not identified culture as an issue. People in this stage mindlessly respond according to their own cultural schemas. They may experience culture shock when faced with diversity, which can result in performance failure, interpersonal conflict and tension, anxiety and exhaustion. Individuals in this stage display ethnocentrism and hold negative stereotypes toward diverse others.
Aware
The CQ-Aware individual has identified that culture is an issue. Individuals in this stage want to learn more about cultural differences and how they can overcome cultural problems.
Learner
CQ-Learners seek information, support and resources to help improve their performance in diverse settings. They set development goals and undertake education, training or mentoring in cultural intelligence to acquire the skills, knowledge and abilities needed for intercultural success.
Novice
CQ-Novices begin to apply their new CQ skills to diverse exchanges. Individuals in this stage are more mindful; they consciously try to suspend judgment and take the perspective of diverse others. They begin to practise new verbal and non-verbal behaviours, but with deliberate and conscious effort.
Skilled
CQ-Skilled individuals continue to practise and refine their cultural intelligence. Eventually, with enough experience, they flex appropriately to different cultural contexts without conscious reflection— similar to a bicultural person’s ability to switch effortlessly between cultural frames depending on context.
Developing cultural intelligence is not always linear. A person typically cycles between stages three (CQ-Learner) and four (CQ-Novice) many times before reaching stage five (CQ-Skilled).
There is no limit to cultural intelligence. It is not a defined end goal mastered by following a number of steps. Cultural intelligence is infinite. It grows over our lives as we continue to develop and refine our intercultural capability.
The development of cultural intelligence is best achieved through a combination of formal training and informal learning. Informal learning includes coaching or mentoring and hands-on experiences with other cultures. Critically, cultural intelligence will not develop without intentional effort. It requires a long-term commitment on the part of the individual and should be supported by organisational factors, including leaders who model, encourage and reward the individual’s CQ development.
Learn more about how individuals, managers and organisations can develop their own and other’s cultural intelligence in my recently published business text “A World of Difference: Leading in Global Markets with Cultural Intelligence.” Find out more about the book and order your copy here.
Enjoy your weekend!
Felicity