Introducing Cultural Intelligence - with Sarah Black

Introducing Cultural Intelligence - with Sarah Black

Hello, welcome to the new Athrú Communications Podcast, where we'll be exploring how we can transform the way we communicate across cultures and differences, and how building our cultural intelligence could help us succeed in today's interconnected yet diverse world.

If you've been kind enough to spend time with me here before in podcast world, you'll notice some changes. And if you're new, thank you for joining us this time around. This time I've pivoted the podcast to a greater focus, something that's a real passion area for me. And that's on looking at how we improve how we communicate and connect and work across cultures and differences.

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Amazingly, all of these conversations have only been 15 to 20 minutes. I've already learned a lot, and I hope that you will too. But before we share those stories, I want to talk a little bit about why does this all matter? And why am I so passionate about cultural intelligence? Why do I believe it's one of the core skills that we need to thrive in today's world?

So let me ask you a couple of questions. If you've worked globally, have you ever had those real misunderstandings where you think you're saying something really clearly, and yet you're either causing offence, being told that you're rude, getting an answer back that doesn't make sense, maybe everybody's saying yes in the meeting, but then nothing's happening.

Or, maybe like me, you show up on your first day at work with a kettle, but nobody, like, that's not a thing. I realised when I started work in Texas that that wasn't a thing, so much of my work life in Belfast happened in the kitchen, over a brew and a biscuit. That wasn't really a thing when I started work in Texas.

They still have my kettle. I think it was a hit. But there were a lot of differences, a lot of cultural differences that I didn't expect because we all speak the same language, right? A lot of misunderstandings. I've learnt from deep, often difficult experience, that my sense of humour gets lost in translation across languages and cultures.

And so sometimes I have to flex that a little bit. So that I'm not inappropriate, I'm not offensive, I'm still me, but I'm just me in a way that people can hear and understand me better. Equally, you might have been in situations where maybe you've got a new client if you work in consultancy. But you just, there's a barrier, there's tension, you're not connecting, there's things just getting in the way.

There's some kind of block to being able to work together smoothly and effectively. Maybe they're kicking back all your ideas. Maybe they're picking over things that you don't see the importance of. And sometimes that's because we work a certain way, but client organizations have very different ways of doing things, ways of thinking about risk, about process, about time, all kinds of issues come up. Equally, you may have worked in multicultural situations. Different faiths, different identities, very different backgrounds. And here's a spoiler, even if you think you don't work in those situations, I bet you do. Because it's very rare that any of us these days are in a team that is completely homogenous.

And then their misunderstandings can come up. They don't understand how somebody's identity affects how they see and experience the world. And so we may be trying to communicate with them in a way that they can't hear or understand, literally or metaphorically. We may be using language that they feel is exclusive.

We may be creating situations and experiences that just don't resonate for them. And in a world where it is increasingly hard to communicate with our audiences, in a fragmented communications landscape, building connection is really the only thing that matters. This is where cultural intelligence comes in.

Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is simply the ability to work and relate effectively across difference. It isn't something I made up, it's based on decades of research and data. More than 300, 000 people from 90 countries have taken the CQ assessment. And yes, that's CQ, like IQ, EQ, your emotional intelligence, CQ is specifically a kind of intelligence that is intercultural.

And we talk about culture in such different ways, like it's just the way we do things around here. It can be national, family driven, it can be our figured worlds, to use an expression from the author David Livermore, which is really around our identities. Most of the time it's all those things at once, messy and complicated.

And that's why it's so important, because it is messy and complicated. CQ is a behavioural framework based on four core capabilities. It can be assessed, and the great news is That while some of us might have it intuitively, naturally, might be part of who we are, we can all build and improve our cultural intelligence.

So let's just basically quickly talk about the four capabilities. They're all interconnected and they're all essential. We don't get to pick one and not do the others. So we talk about our CQ drive. This is really about how motivated and confident we are about engaging with people from different cultures who hold different identity from us, which is almost everyone.

My colleague Trisha Carter, who you'll hear later on in this series, often looks at this in terms of how do we feel when we enter a party full of strangers? Are we excited to meet new people? Do we understand the benefit of engaging with people that are wildly different from us? Are we a little bit terrified?

For most of us, it's a little bit of both. But there are things we can do to improve our confidence and help us better understand the benefits of connecting across difference. Then there's knowledge. What do we need to know about differences? Well, here's a spoiler. We can't know everything. We're never going to speak all the languages.

We're never going to understand all the business systems in every part of the world. But we do need to know that different cultures and identities have an impact on how we communicate and build relationships with others. So, the language we use, the regulations, what holds value in a culture can vary enormously and we need a certain amount of knowledge to activate our curiosity and be able to build those connections effectively.

Strategy. How often do you think about your own thinking? The fancy word for this is metacognition. And often we assume that building our cultural intelligence and working across difference is all about others. But actually it's a lot about ourselves, learning what it is that we bring, the assumptions that we might make, the biases that we might hold, and reflecting on all of that and how we plan our thinking can really help us approach situations of diversity and how we show up in them.

This is at the heart of CQ strategy. It's how we plan and prepare to interact and engage with others. And it's a really core part of building more effective connection. CQ action. This is all the ways in which we flex when we communicate and engage across lines of difference. I am famously pretty direct if you know me well, but I also understand and acknowledge there are some cultures where that can be a real barrier to building trust.

Or even just getting people to want to have a conversation with me. So I might dial it down. I might adapt. Not changing who I am or what I believe, I'm just moderating the way I express it. For all my communication professionals out there, if you want to think about action as being a little bit like this, you've had the idea, you've done the homework, you've got a really clear strategy, but of course you're going to flex how you communicate it.

You don't engage with an influencer in the same way as you write a press release. You don't write a piece for a website in the same way as you write a long form magazine article. TikTok is not the same as a briefing to senior leadership team, in other words. So you're just moderating, the messages remain the same, the content might remain the same, just moderating the form in which you express yourself.

There's other ways of thinking about action, but I think that's one that really resonates. Now that's the express version of what cultural intelligence is. There are multiple books, podcasts, LinkedIn articles, magazines, hundreds of pages and resources to deep dive into it. If you want to spend some time with me doing that, then I can do an introductory session for you.

And I also deliver half and full day training sessions tailored to your teams that walk you through in much more specific detail why this matters and how it can help your organization. Every guest this season has recommended a book, a podcast, a resource, a video that they think could help you build your cultural intelligence.

So look out for that list coming soon. But to come back to why it matters, I gave you a couple of examples from my experience. But here's a few more things. Your cultural intelligence is a better predictor of your ability to work and engage effectively across cultures than spending time in other countries.

And that might have implications for hiring and developing your team, particularly if you're moving into a global workplace. And speaking of teams, cultural intelligence can have a positive impact on team effectiveness. Put a diverse team together, and here's another spoiler, nearly all teams are diverse, and you won't necessarily get a great performance.

But a team with high CQ, however, will outform a just a diverse team every time. There's also positive associations between cultural intelligence and psychological safety, which can sit at the heart of unlocking potential innovation, more effective problem solving, and more inclusive workplaces. And all of those things save us time, energy, and reduce the drama.

When we need to perform well, there's also some interesting evidence emerging around cultural intelligence and stress reduction. And that makes sense to me because working with new people and new situations across differences can be stressful. Our little brains are programmed for us to want everything to be the same.

So developing skills and competencies that build our confidence and capability can only be a good thing for those situations. I think there's many reasons why CQ has those benefits. It's about perspective taking, something that's so important if you work in communications or if you're about connecting with other people.

Being able to see other people's points of view, hold them gently and respectfully without necessarily agreeing or judging, so that you can have a conversation, disagree well if you need to, and be able to work effectively together. I also believe that cultural intelligence helps us see ourselves better, and as we become more self aware, we better understand how we impact others.

So again, it's at the heart of building connection. That can also help us mitigate any negative impact of our own bias. And we all tend to think everyone wants what we want, and we know that they don't. Even if you're doing great audience profiles in your communications work, or thinking carefully about the people around you.

You still may be writing in a style that you think is, in inverted commas, right? You may be, you may have illusions about how they want to receive that communication. You may think, not realize what time of day it is. There's so many classic cases of that globally, in terms of content and newsletters and all kinds of things going out with content that just isn't relevant to people in different parts of the world.

Um, there's no point writing about snow days. And ice on the roads if you're sending it to your colleagues in Doha. Finally, CQ keeps our focus so completely on the audience we're trying to connect with. And it's so, so easy to lose sight of that for all of us. As I've just mentioned, we need to think about literally standing in somebody else's shoes.

And CQ can be a massive help in all the ways that we might do that. And so that's why I believe it's important and it gets the secret sauce to what we do. Um, one of the things that I'll be exploring in this season and in some of my work this year is how that fits with the growth of artificial intelligence, our friends AI.

Um, because I think there's massive implications. I think being, using AI without cultural intelligence is a huge risk for a lot of organizations. Um, we've all laughed, let's be honest, we all have laughed at those ad campaigns that get it wrong. You know, the brand is lost in translation and means something else in a different language.

But the reality is those risks are very real. And using AI without CQ might have even more risks. So look out for more on that. And as I said, if you'd like to talk more about what cultural intelligence is, how it might impact your business and your communications, please do drop me a note. I'd be really happy to chat with you.

Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this journey with me. I hope you enjoy meeting these incredible people and learning from them. And I'd love to hear your thoughts. What does cultural intelligence mean for you? Have you never heard of it? Are you deep in the work? What else would you like to know? And what else would you like to talk about as we explore this together?

Thank you for listening. I'm so glad you're here. And I look forward to talking to you soon.