Why You Need Cultural Intelligence (And How To Develop It)

• After IQ and EQ, Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is a new type of intelligence on the rise due to globalization and a complex, competitive and dynamic business environment.
• Employees having a high level of CQ are able to act as a bridge that connects to a diverse group of peers, transferring knowledge and helping build interpersonal connections.
• Their multi-faceted, multicultural approach gives a global, vibrant flavour to the product or service that they are working on while driving up innovation and creativity within the team.

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is a system comprising of three well-connected components:

1. Cultural Knowledge: The content and process knowledge of the various cultures.
2. Cross-cultural Skills: A wide range of skills that pertain to the various facets of a culture, like relational, tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, adaptability, empathy, and the ability to understand other people's feelings.
3. Cultural Metacognition: Also called cultural mindfulness, is the art of being aware of the cultural context, the subtleties of various situations, and the kind of strategies that can be taken.

One can develop cultural knowledge through newspapers, movies, travelling to various countries, and interacting officially or personally with people of different cultures, learning new traditions, customs, cuisines, and rich new ways to live life.

One can identify and analyse the different cultures and utilize the knowledge in future.

Experiential learning, On-the-job training or studying abroad make us develop various cross-cultural skills in a course of time. The process takes less time when there is already ample cultural knowledge.

Example: Showing up ten minutes late in a meeting is not considered rude in Spain.

This advanced cognitive understanding of other cultures takes place when one observes and analyzes the behaviour of the person from a different culture you want to learn about.

One needs to pay a good amount of attention to check, reflect and optimize the other person’s behaviour to be able to develop this cognitive ability.