CQ Knowledge 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 Action decreases the risk of miscommunication and helps you to respond to diverse others in a manner that conveys respect and builds trust and rapport.

Individuals with CQ are better able to understand instructions and form effective relationships to achieve work goals.

Leaders and workers with high Cultural Intelligence can establish trust and rapport and build strong collaborative networks both inside and outside the organisation. They can build strong alliances across the globe to help them capture new opportunities. They are better at engaging with suppliers and collaborators and influencing policy makers and other stakeholders external to the organisation.

Cultural intelligence is positively associated with workgroup cohesion, integration, trust and performance in diverse cultural settings. CQ dismantles ‘us vs them’ social categorisations and negative stereotypes and enhances intercultural understanding and respect — workplace incivility, harassment and discrimination are lower. Workers with cultural intelligence experience higher levels of sociocultural adjustment and psychological well-being and lower levels of stress.

Cultural intelligence predicts the formation of diverse networks and the sharing and integration of information and ideas. Cultural Intelligence helps to foster an organisational culture where diverse viewpoints drive new insights. Cultural Intelligence encourages expansive and integrative new ways of thinking. This drives innovation, creativity, and experimentation.

Leaders with cultural intelligence inspire and unite diverse employees with a shared and well-articulated vision.

Workers with cultural intelligence can better understand and respond to the needs of varied customers. As populations become more diverse, through immigration and cultural changes, this factor becomes increasingly important.

A workforce with high Cultural Intelligence possesses the dynamic competencies needed to continuously adapt processes, products, and services to capture new opportunities and respond to changing tastes and needs across diverse markets.

The four competencies that form high cultural intelligence are not abstract ideas. Social scientists have demonstrated that those competencies map to particular regions of the brain. Studies show they predict important measures of performance in diverse cultural settings, including better problem solving and decision-making, improved well-being, and better task performance.

In fact, CQ is a better predictor of effectiveness in diverse settings than cognitive ability, emotional intelligence (EQ), personality, demographic characteristics, language fluency and international experience.

Cultural intelligence is not a personality trait, nor something you are born with. Rather cultural intelligence can be developed with education, training, and experience. This malleability provides companies with an opportunity to create an enviable competitive advantage—a capacity for innovation and agility—that can drive sustainable global growth.

Cultural intelligence is not about becoming an “expert” in any one culture. Rather, CQ is a set of generic competencies that transcend national borders, rigid stereotypes, and particular cultural contexts. Cultural intelligence involves an inclusive mindset and adaptable behavioural repertoire that promotes cultural fluency across varied cultural contexts. By transcending rigid stereotypes, cultural intelligence accommodates for nuanced cultural differences, and that makes CQ a powerful tool for managing the complexity of cultural diversity and unlocking its potential.