How Effective is Your Organisation at Working Across Cultures?
Power struggles in the boardroom? A divide in your multicultural team? A disconnect with the global consumer? If any of this sounds all too familiar it may be time to build Cultural Intelligence in your organisation.
As businesses continue to expand across borders, multinational and multi-cultural teams are becoming more common. Additionally, with an increasingly international customer profile, teams are confronted with new challenges.
The good news is that whether you are managing a diverse team in Australia, strategizing entry into new markets in Asia or reporting to shareholders in Europe, you don’t have to master the complexities of each culture. Developing Cultural Intelligence, CQ, can help you navigate varying cultural contexts including nationality, ethnicity, gender and generation.
Essentially, CQ picks up where EQ, Emotional Intelligence leaves off. Knowing the difference and how to apply CQ is the differentiator between creating cultural cohesion or allowing diversity to divide.
HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE CROSS CULTURAL EFFECTIVENESS IN
YOUR ORGANISATION?
Understanding cultural values is the first step towards developing cultural sensitivity. All of us have cultural preferences that are mostly shaped in childhood. These are not good nor bad, or right or wrong, but rather determine the way that we prefer to work and live. By understanding your individual and/or team orientations, you can develop insights that can help increase your interpersonal effectiveness and bridge gaps with cultural strangers.
The Cultural Values Profile designed by the CQ Center in the US is a simplistic, academically validated, assessment that works to identify orientation on ten dimensions.
WHAT ARE THE 10 CULTURAL VALUES?
Individualism versus Collectivism – do you think of yourself primarily as an individual or primarily as a member of a specific group?
Power Distance – do you prefer a flat, egalitarian approach to leadership or a more top-down, hierarchical leadership style?
Uncertainty avoidance – are you flexible and adaptable to change or do you avoid uncertainty?
Cooperative versus Competitive – do you prefer to achieve results collaboratively or are you more competitive?
Time orientation – do you tend to focus on immediate results or are you a longer-term thinker?
Context- do you prefer communication that is explicit, direct, and clear or is your communication style more indirect, emphasizing harmony, and saving face
Being versus Doing – do you prefer quality of life or do you find yourself proactively working toward goals
Universalism versus Particularism – do you apply the same standards to everyone or make exceptions for friends and family?
Expressiveness – do you tend to hide your emotions or show them?
Focus – do you tackle one thing at a time or are you generally a multitasker?
Interested to know your profile? Contact us to arrange an assessment.
With the accreditation of the Cultural Intelligence Center in the US, Rabbani Collective offers a range of CQ Assessments and Workshops from Cultural Values Profiling to Managing Unconscious Bias that can be tailored to specific business needs.
The CQ Model provides a coherent framework to measure individual and/or team capability to relate and work effectively in culturally diverse situations.
It’s a form of intelligence that has been tested by academic researchers
in over 98 countries for nearly two decades.
‘Most of us tend to underestimate the degree to which we ourselves are a product of culture.
It's much easier to see it in others.’
Dr David Livermore, Leading with Cultural Intelligence 
