What is cultural intelligence?
Cultural intelligence, also known as cultural quotient or CQ, is the ability to understand, adapt to and work in different cultures or with people from different cultures. If you are trying to build a diverse staff with a variety of perspectives or interacting with clients and customers around the world, having employees with a good understanding of cultural intelligence can help your company thrive.
How CQ is different from IQ and EQ
Companies have long focused on finding employees who have the ability to adapt to unusual circumstances and develop creative ways of dealing with everyone from clients to fellow employees. In addition to standard intelligence, or IQ, companies often look for employees with EQ, otherwise known as emotional intelligence, and many modern employers also search for candidates who demonstrate CQ. While these traits have some things in common, there are some distinct differences as well.
Essentially, EQ is the ability to manage your own emotions and assess the emotional state of others around you. CQ goes a step further and puts the focus on understanding cultural differences. IQ, EQ and CQ complement each other. Success in an inclusive workplace requires employees who can solve problems, relate to others on an emotional level and interact well with people from various cultures.
Why businesses need employees with CQ
Hiring candidates with cultural intelligence puts your business at the forefront of an increasingly global society. From interacting with clients around the world to creating a workforce full of people from different cultures, CQ helps your managers and employees deal effectively with a variety of people. Some major reasons for choosing candidates with cultural intelligence are summarized below.
Easier client interactions
Cultural intelligence helps your employees optimize the decision-making process no matter where they are. Clients from different cultures may have different expectations in terms of where to hold meetings and how negotiations are handled. Cultural competence reduces the likelihood of social gaffes that could make a big business deal fall apart. It can also help you develop a company code of ethics that takes into account cultural differences, so employees know what is expected and how to politely disentangle themselves from potentially compromising situations, such as when a client attempts to offer a bribe in a culture where such interactions are the norm.
Better multicultural marketing
If you’re marketing a product in another country or to people from a different culture, localization includes knowing as much as you can about that culture. CQ can help you determine what things are important to a specific international market so you can focus marketing efforts on the things that local consumers care most about. Cultural intelligence also helps you avoid marketing mistakes that stem from cultural misunderstandings, so you won’t accidentally name products using words that imply negative traits in the target language or put culturally sensitive images in visual ads.
Improved management of a diverse staff
Managers who have cultural intelligence can more easily navigate the challenges of a diverse workplace. From onboarding international hires to handling intercultural miscommunication or conflict resolution in the office, CQ helps you better manage your workforce.
Smooth integration of a global workforce
Companies with offices in multiple locales need employees with cultural intelligence who can smooth over any potential misunderstandings. Managers with CQ can find the most effective ways to encourage a diverse workforce to cooperate toward a common goal. Employees with cultural intelligence also adapt well to international transfers or business travel to other countries, making it easier to move staff members wherever you need them.
Enhanced agility
Employees with cultural intelligence understand that not every tactic or strategy works in every situation. This leads to a more agile workforce that can adapt quickly to changing conditions in any circumstances.
How to screen candidates for cultural intelligence
During the hiring process, candidates with cultural intelligence often stand out. International experience, language skills and coursework with a global focus can all indicate a high CQ. You can also screen candidates for cultural intelligence during the interview by asking specific questions that highlight cultural skills. Here are five specific interview questions and topics that showcase cultural intelligence.
1. Do you have any formal or informal cross-cultural or diversity training?
Formal courses or certificates in international relations, global business ethics, cultural communications or similar topics show a good grounding in the basics of cross-cultural interactions. Informal study, such as familiarity with recent books or news about cultural concerns shows an active interest in the topic, so you know that the candidate is interested in learning more about other cultures even outside of a work context.
2. What kind of research would you do before a business trip or transfer to another country?
This question shows how the interviewee approaches learning about new cultures. Good candidates should demonstrate an understanding that they don’t know everything about the place already and a willingness to engage directly with people from that culture to get first-hand knowledge they cannot get from second-hand sources.
3. Tell me about a time when you worked cross-culturally or on a diverse team.
A candidate who can give specific examples of cross-cultural work has real-world experience dealing with cultural concerns. Listen to how the candidate talks about the specific incident to get a sense of how adaptable and understanding of cultural differences the individual is.
4. Describe a time when you had to adapt your own behavior to make people around you feel more comfortable.
This question lets the potential hire explain the mental and emotional processes behind their actions. You can learn whether the candidate is good at recognizing when someone else is uncomfortable and choosing the right response for a given situation.
5. Have you ever been in a situation where your pre-existing beliefs about a culture or people in that culture was challenged?
Being able to recognize your own underlying biases or preconceived ideas about different cultures is an important part of cultural intelligence. Someone with a high CQ has likely encountered times when new knowledge necessitated a change in viewpoint. Knowing how your potential hire has reacted to scenarios like this in the past helps you understand how they might act in the future.
Cultural intelligence FAQs
What is an example of cultural intelligence?
Cultural intelligence affects multiple areas of business. Some examples of managers or employees showing CQ include:
- An ad production team specifically searching for diverse models and actors to appear in their ads to reflect local populations
- A sales representative understanding that in some cultures an outright no is impolite and working to find other solutions instead of pressing for the client to directly give a yes or no answer
- A manager who sends out official communications in different forms to ensure that different members of a multicultural team feel comfortable getting information in a familiar way
What are the four main dimensions of cultural intelligence?
There are four commonly identified dimensions of cultural intelligence. These include:
- Metacognitive: The ability to adjust personal presumptions about a culture before an encounter and in real-time during an encounter with someone from that culture
- Cognitive: Pre-acquired knowledge about cultures that lets the person compare and contrast cultures on an intellectual level
- Motivational: The combination of curiosity about other cultures and an eagerness to learn about other cultures
- Behavioral: The ability to adjust body language, tone and culturally appropriate phrasing to communicate with people from another culture
How do you develop cultural intelligence?
Cultural intelligence is a skill, which means that existing employees can learn effective CQ. Cultivating cultural intelligence involves the following steps.
- Assess your current cultural knowledge along with your strengths and weaknesses in cultural interactions
- Use targeted learning to address your specific weak areas. For someone with weaknesses in the cognitive dimension of CQ, this might involve reading about the culture to learn more about it. A person who needs to work on the behavioral dimension of CQ might instead take part in role playing scenarios to practice these skills.
- Practice cultural competency in small, controlled situations to start before applying the new skills in an uncontrolled real-world setting.
- Regularly assess your own successes and failures at communicating across cultures and make adjustments or acquire new knowledge and skills as needed. Developing cultural intelligence is a lifelong process, so there is no end point where you stop learning new things.
