CHAPTER 5

CQ STRATEGY

It’s one thing to be motivated to engage in cross-cultural work and relationships and to have some basic understanding about how cultures are alike and different. But the real lynchpin between CQ Drive and Knowledge with how we actually behave cross-culturally is CQ Strategy. CQ Strategy asks the question: Am I aware, and can I plan appropriately in light of the personal and cultural dynamics involved? This is one of the most important benefits of the CQ difference—the ability to apply your motivation and understanding to real-life situations.

WHAT’S CQ STRATEGY GOT TO DO WITH IT?

CQ Strategy is your level of awareness and your ability to plan in light of your cultural understanding. This dimension of cultural intelligence is what initially intrigued me most. I found a lot of material that dealt with learning about different cultures and some helpful hints about how to behave. But through my own experience and research, I knew that someone could be an expert on all things cross-cultural and still fail miserably. There’s a whole set of subtle, behind-the-scenes issues that have to be understood. It’s one thing to know that you and your culture approach risk differently than another culture (uncertainty avoidance); but can you actually use that understanding to behave in ways that are useful and respectful? CQ Strategy is the lynchpin between understanding and action. This is what really launches you into a different league of players out on the multicultural field.

Both Sana and Robert would be helped significantly by increased CQ Strategy. Some of the indicators of Sana’s CQ Strategy lie in her assumptions about Robert being dressed in a suit and his tardiness to the interview. Robert’s identification with being a minority is an important thing to pay attention to as is his decision to ignore the differences between Sana and him and to be direct with his Middle Eastern guests about his fear regarding corruption. These demonstrate low CQ Strategy.

Again, CQ Strategy asks the question: Can I anticipate and plan appropriately in light of the personal and cultural dynamics involved? CQ Strategy is a weak capability among many individuals tested because many of us are forced to function at a frenetic pace with little space for deeper thought and reflection. CQ Strategy is unlikely to be developed apart from intentional, focused thought. The technical term for CQ Strategy is meta-cognition, which means “thinking about thinking.” This is what happens when you transcend your immediate emotions and thoughts and try to observe them from outside yourself. And it’s what happens when you do that with others. Many refer to this as reflection-in-action, or reflective practice.

You demonstrate high CQ Strategy when you draw on your cultural understanding to develop a plan for a cross-cultural situation or assignment. With high CQ Strategy, you’re better able to monitor, analyze, and adjust your behavior in different cultural settings. You’re conscious of what you need to know about an unfamiliar culture, but you hold your assumptions about that culture loosely until you actually experience it. Individuals with high CQ Strategy often have developed this capability intuitively or have personalities (e.g., introverts) that are more naturally inclined toward analysis and reflection.

ASSESSING YOUR CQ STRATEGY

How is your CQ Strategy? To what extent can you make sense of culturally diverse experiences and plan in light of shifting realities? Based on the feedback report that accompanies the online CQ Self-Assessment, what overall CQ Strategy score did you receive?*

From what you’re learning about CQ Strategy in this chapter, are you surprised by the results? Keep in mind that the self-assessment is just one snapshot of your view of your CQ capabilities at a particular point in time. But it’s worth considering the results given the high level of reliability found in the assessment as used among individuals around the world.

In order to dig more deeply into your CQ Strategy, the assessment also helps you assess your cultural understanding in three specific areas of CQ Strategy (awareness, planning, and checking). There has been extensive research examining the way these various dimensions of meta-cognition influence your overall awareness and planning for multicultural situations.¹ Write your scores for each of the following and note the descriptions of these sub-dimensions:

These three sub-dimensions of CQ Strategy—awareness, planning, and checking—are the scientific bases for the strategies that follow. You’ll see these sub-dimensions alongside the list of strategies at the beginning of the next section. Not every strategy fits perfectly with a single sub-dimension, but the strategies have been organized according to the sub-dimension with which they are most closely associated. Use your scores from the sub-dimensions of CQ Strategy to help you pinpoint which strategies to use first (presumably, the strategies that go with the sub-dimension where you scored lowest).

 

IMPROVING YOUR CQ STRATEGY

The following section is a list of strategies to help you improve your CQ Strategy. All these strategies are rooted in science and research on meta-cognition and the ability to engage in flexible thinking for multicultural situations. They stem from the three sub-dimensions of CQ Strategy (awareness, planning, and checking). The point is not for you to use all these strategies right now. There are many paths to increasing CQ Strategy. Start with a couple that interest you.

 

1.   NOTICE; DON’T RESPOND

One way to improve your CQ Strategy is to intentionally put up your antenna to take note of what’s going on in a multicultural situation. The key to using this strategy successfully is to notice without responding to what you see. Don’t rush to make sense out of what you observe. This is counterintuitive because our natural impulse is to notice something and then immediately interpret its meaning and react. We inevitably form hypotheses (actually, more often conclusions) about why people are dressed the way they are or why you only see men together at the market. But be very cautious of rushing to judgment. Notice what you’re thinking and feeling but don’t respond to it. Try to detach yourself. It takes effort, but it’s possible to train yourself to do this. In fact, forcing your brain to stop short of making a judgmental response to something you notice can actually change the circuitry in your brain in a matter of weeks.²

The other day, a North American friend and I were boarding a plane in Thailand. My friend said, “Most Asians seem so polite and reserved until you see them boarding a bus or plane. Then it’s an all out pushing match! They never defer to someone else to go ahead of them.”

Whenever I’m in Asia, I almost always hear a Westerner make a comment like this. And there have been plenty of times when being shoved out of the way by a sweet old Chinese woman leaves me just a little miffed myself. But in the words of anthropologist Grant McCracken, when we notice things like this, we need to stop and ask, “Hmm, I wonder why that is?”³ Rather than jumping to conclusions, look at something that puzzles you and think about it for a long time.

If you spend enough time noticing the masses of people in Asia, for example, you’ll begin to see that pushing is often a necessity here. Many times, you can’t survive here using the school-teacher’s mantra, “Everyone will get a turn. Just wait in line.” Everyone won’t get a turn. Some are going to get left behind, and a certain level of aggressiveness becomes a means to survival.

Gregory David Roberts, in his phenomenal novel Shantaram, refers to this as the doctrine of necessity. He suggests that the amount of force and violence necessary to board a train in India is no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey is as pleasant as possible. Roberts writes, “If there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterward much less.”⁴

Granted, the people boarding the plane with my friend and me already had a “guaranteed” seat. But we don’t unlearn our survival strategies quickly, even if they don’t apply at the moment.

For Sana to take note of how Robert is dressed compared to everyone else in the office is a good sign of awareness. But it’s dangerous when she assumes she knows why he wore a suit today. The same applies to the thirty-minute delay in starting the interview. Both Sana and Haani are rushing to judgment about why that occurred. Robert has also made some underlying judgments, presumably based on Sana’s name and her head covering. He would have no other reason to conclude she’s a Muslim.

Look around you. Notice and ask, “Hmm. I wonder why that is.” Why is the airport organized like this? What’s behind the clothes people wear to work here? What does this newsletter teach you about this organization? With time, you’ll be able to form some accurate interpretations about these things. For now, suspend judgment. Notice, but don’t respond.

 

2.   THINK WIDELY

Another way to enhance your CQ Strategy is to train your mind to think more broadly. Your level of comfort with this is somewhat related to your personality. Every individual has what psychologists call a category width (see Figure 5-1). This is the extent to which you’re comfortable with things that don’t neatly fit into one category or another. Your category width is shaped by your personality, your upbringing, and your culture.

Figure 5-1 Category width.

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Based on concepts in T. F. Pettigrew, “The Measurement and Correlates of Category Width as a Cognitive Variable,” Journal of Personality 26 (1958): 532–544.

I was brought up with very narrow category width. My grandfather had a mantra that was often repeated in our home: “When in doubt, don’t do it.” The idea was to avoid anything in the “gray areas.” And frankly, there were very few things in our home that were deemed gray. My parents had a lot of rules about the ways I could dress, the kinds of social events I could go to, how long my hair could be, and a lot more. In some ways, it made for a very stable upbringing. There wasn’t much ambiguity. Most of the world could be neatly divided into right or wrong.

Going away to college, doubting my faith, and traveling internationally broadened my category width significantly. I still have things that I consider to be right and wrong. In fact, there are things I put into those categories that I never thought much about as a kid—poverty, the environment, human rights, and so on. But on the whole, I have much wider category width today. So many things seem neither right nor wrong but simply different. Think about how you respond to that statement; it’s probably some indication of your own category width. If you’re repulsed by what feels like my loosey-goosey view, it probably indicates you have a more narrow category width. There’s nothing wrong with that (see—I have wide category width, so I’m fine with yours being “different” from mine); but narrow category width definitely increases your challenges when it comes to how you interpret cultural differences.

Narrow categorizers focus on differences. They watch the behavior of people from different cultures and categorize them based on what those actions would mean in one’s own cultural context. For example, a narrow categorizer has certain words in mind that should and shouldn’t be used by educated people, clothes that shouldn’t appear on men, and norms for how married couples should relate. When there isn’t a category in which to place the behavior of an individual, narrow categorizers judge it as an exception and don’t entertain it as possibly being another whole category altogether.⁵ Those with narrow category width are much quicker to characterize things as right vs. wrong.

Broad categorizers demonstrate more tolerance for things that might not fit into preexisting categories. And a broad categorizer puts more discrepant things in the same category. For example, broad categorizers might be quicker to acknowledge that healthy parent-child relationships in one cultural context might look different from those in one’s own culture. And broad categorizers are much more apt to put “new” behaviors observed cross-culturally into a category of “different” rather than right vs. wrong or normal vs. “weird.” By the way, this isn’t necessarily a “liberal vs. conservative” difference. I’ve met liberals who were very intolerant of more conservatively minded people because of their different ideals and beliefs. You can be a “liberal” and still be a narrow categorizer.

By training your mind to think more broadly, you can increase your CQ Strategy. One practical way to do this is to see beyond the details to the big picture. Again, your comfort with this is related to your personality. And every organization and community needs both big-picture thinkers and detail-minded ones. The goal here isn’t to tell the detail-oriented people to change. But it is to say that one way to improve CQ Strategy is to rise beyond a narrow focus on details for a period of time to see the big picture.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the software entrepreneurs who have made tools like Basecamp and Campfire, say that when they start designing something, they always do so using a thick Sharpie marker rather than a ball-point pen. For them, pen points are too fine and tempt them to get lost in the details. But a Sharpie forces them to keep sketching out the big picture before getting into all the important details.⁶

Something happens neurologically when the brain thinks widely and globally. It’s hard for insights or creative thinking to happen when surrounded by lots of minutia. When you’re stuck at an impasse in how to do something, often the best thing you can do is walk away from it for a bit, think about some other things, then come back to it.⁷ This basic habit is one that correlates to the development of CQ Strategy. Multicultural work often requires adapting your thinking to deal with unpredictable situations. As you learn to think more broadly, you’ll become better at understanding and interpreting the differences you encounter in different cultures.

 

3.   FOCUS DEEPLY

The next strategy is the mirror opposite of the last one. Just as broadening our minds can enhance our CQ Strategy by helping us deal with unpredictable situations, deep, focused thinking helps us to zero in on things we might otherwise miss. We need to train our minds to do both—think widely and focus deeply.

This strategy stems from what is often referred to as mindfulness training. Mindfulness is complete awareness of everything that happens within your body, mind, and consciousness. And it’s applying the same kind of awareness to your environment. In a cross-cultural situation, mindfulness can help us move out of our automated habits of thinking and behavior. With little thought, we shoot off an e-mail, tell a joke, or become discouraged by an unresponsive audience. Our brain operates on autopilot as a way to cope with the many things that pull for our attention. But in a culturally diverse situation, even the task of writing e-mail and engaging in small talk, if done well, will require that we become more mindful.

To what extent are the following true of you?

•   I drive places on “automatic pilot” and then wonder why I went there.

•   I find it difficult to stay focused on what’s happening in the present.

•   I tend not to notice feelings of physical tension or discomfort until they really grab my attention.

•   It seems I am “running on automatic,” without much awareness of what I’m doing.

•   I find myself listening to someone with one ear, doing something else at the same time.

These are the kinds of things measured by psychologists Kirk Brown and Richard Ryan in their Mindful Attention Awareness Scale.⁸ The more these statements are true for you, the more you will be helped by training your mind to focus, which will, in turn, heighten your CQ Strategy.

Here are a few exercises to help you focus deeply:

•   Choose an external sound and focus on it for thirty seconds. Don’t let your mind wander. If it does, come back to focusing on that sound.

•   Sit in silence for sixty seconds and notice where your mind goes. Follow its train of thought. What do you discover?

•   Find some incoming data (e.g., a sound, sight, scent, sensation, etc.) and focus your attention on it. You could think about the feeling on your body right now as you sit in the chair, pay close attention to the texture of your clothes, or listen to the sound of a bird chirping. Do this for ten seconds right now .… You may have found it difficult to focus on that one input even for just ten seconds. Your mind wants to take in more. Perhaps you lost track of the feeling or sound because you started thinking about something else (e.g., When should I eat?). Your mind is always wanting to move toward the next thing, so mindfulness training is needed to slow it down and to spend more time taking in everything around us.⁹

•   Walk down the street and be mindful of the sensations in your body as you place one foot down and then the other. Concentrate on the “simple” act of walking.

If you do these kinds of exercises often, you’ll get better at noticing how the mind wanders, which, in turn, can move you into higher levels of consciousness as you relate and work cross-culturally. Formal training in mindfulness and meditation is another way to become more mindful. Many options are available, either from a religious or secular perspective. Deep, focused thinking will help you pick up on the subtle cues going on in multicultural encounters that otherwise go missed. Join a yoga class and improve your CQ Strategy at the same time.

 

4.   JOURNAL

Carry a journal with you for a couple of weeks or when you travel abroad and record your observations and insights about cross-cultural situations. Begin to explore the meanings behind what you observe. Just be sure to hold your interpretations and insights loosely until you’ve had a chance to test them more thoroughly.

Your journal is a place to write down the things you notice (the first strategy we covered). And it’s a good place to begin hypothesizing why you think these things are the way they are. Don’t rush to judgment but ask yourself questions.

As you journal, don’t just chronicle the events of the day. Record your frustrations, describe how you feel when certain things occur, and write down questions that are stirring in your mind. Don’t write for an audience. Your journal is a safe place to admit your biases, fears, insecurities, and rants.

In addition to chronicling your observations about others, pay attention to what’s happening within yourself. Try to step out of your own skin to see yourself as objectively as possible. Imagine seeing yourself through the eyes of someone else.¹⁰ This kind of self-awareness is important because most of the influences that shape how we behave are largely unknown to us. Many of our interpersonal behaviors and thought patterns are largely beyond our day-to-day awareness.¹¹

Using a journal can help you with some of the other strategies in this section, like “noticing” and becoming more mindful. As already noted, CQ Strategy requires that you shut down some of your semiautomatic behavior and step outside yourself to see what you’re observing, thinking, and feeling. For example, you might catch yourself feeling irritated, bored, or lonely in the midst of a cross-cultural encounter. Write about that in your journal. If you have no idea why you felt that way, that’s okay. Just write it down, the very practice of which helps you transcend merely being defined by your irritation or loneliness and can do wonders for dissipating the level of energy you put toward it.

Use journaling to pay attention to internal distractions. When you’re engaging cross-culturally, there’s a powerful conversation occurring internally, and there are all kinds of neurological connections going on. Your nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting trillions of connections in your brain each moment, something called ambient, neural activity. One study found that people hold thoughts for ten seconds on average before the mind wanders elsewhere.¹² Hold some of those thoughts captive by writing about them.

Write by hand in a physical journal rather than typing at a keyboard. There’s a different kind of reflective thought process that occurs when we write by hand. This is partly because so many of us live in continuous word processor mode and the very tactile process of writing with pen and paper can nurture a slower, reflexive process that enhances valuable journaling. Journal writing enhances our ability to consider how to interpret the barrage of cues we encounter in cross-cultural situations.

Share your journaling insights with someone you trust. Some of the greatest value from journaling is in going back and reading the reflections later. Read your reflections a few weeks later, a year later, and several years later. I’ve been keeping journals since high school. Don’t be overly impressed. It’s therapeutic for me, and there have definitely been major lapses when I didn’t journal for a while. But going back and reading the ways I described different circumstances and cross-cultural realities across the course of time has been an entertaining, enlightening, and sometimes painful but always transformative experience.

Writing allows us to understand ourselves and others in ways that few other things do. It forces us to slow down and become more aware of our surroundings and the meanings therein.

Robert and Sana appear to be engaging in some valuable inward observation. Robert thinks about his own experience as an African American male and is considering how that shapes his decision about hiring Sana. Sana is thinking about whether it’s appropriate for her to remove her head covering. If they took time to write about this—not for anyone else, just for themselves—it could play a powerful role in strengthening their CQ Strategy.

 

5.   PLAN SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

The more personal the interaction you have with someone from a different culture, the greater the potential challenge and conflict. Interacting with a restaurant server from a different culture can surface minor points of confusion or discomfort, but it has limited impact. Sitting in class next to someone from a different culture is a bit more challenging, and if you work on a project together, the challenge increases further. Marrying someone from a different cultural background is the most challenging cross-cultural encounter of all. For any of us, social gatherings are where we most often feel the cultural chasm between ourselves and people from different cultural backgrounds. Engineers from different cultural backgrounds might be relatively comfortable working together all day but find an after-hours drink together very awkward.

One way to make these encounters less uncomfortable while also improving your CQ Strategy is to plan ahead when you’re going to spend time with someone from a different culture, especially if it’s a social context. If I’m going to have coffee with someone who comes from a background similar to mine, chances are, I can wing it socially because I know the basic norms of small talk, appropriate topics, and humor. If, however, I’m having coffee with someone who comes from a different cultural background, spending even a few minutes thinking about the appropriate kinds of questions to ask, things to share, and ways to interact is a good way to enhance my CQ Strategy and simultaneously improve the way I interact with the individual. Some of the things learned through CQ Knowledge will help me know how to plan. When I actually get to the meeting, I might find out that my plans weren’t appropriate. But the very thoughtfulness put into anticipating the meeting will strengthen my CQ Strategy. This is even more important if you need to confront someone or deal with a potentially awkward topic like money or if you have to conduct a performance review.¹³

If Robert interacts with Sana socially, he should anticipate the most appropriate way to do so. This can catch people like Robert off guard because he’s an extrovert who finds social interaction easy. Some extroverts find cross-cultural, social interaction even more disorienting than introverts because extroverts are used to relating easily and naturally. Spending a few minutes thinking about how to best engage socially with someone from another cultural background will strengthen your capabilities in CQ Strategy and will more than likely strengthen the quality and effectiveness of the interaction itself.

 

6.   MANAGE EXPECTATIONS

Expectations—good, bad, or otherwise—are one of the most important things to manage when working on your CQ Strategy. The best way to manage expectations is to pay attention to them. Focus on your expectations for an upcoming cross-cultural experience. What do you anticipate happening? What do you hope to learn? What are your hopes and fears? What assumptions do you have about the people in this culture? Which judgments do you need to suspend? Write them down. Talk about them with others.

Unmet expectations are one of the most important experiences to avoid, if at all possible. David Rock, who has written extensively on the brain and leadership, writes, “Great leaders carefully manage expectations to avoid not meeting them.”¹⁴ This is a tricky balance because having goals and expectations can be motivating in and of itself. Think about how good it feels to check something off your to-do list. Expectations alter the way your brain makes sense of things, and meeting them reinforces the way the brain thinks about it. Rock says we should find ways to develop realistic expectations and then work to set them a little lower so you can come out ahead of them. When a positive expectation isn’t met, reframe the situation to see if the alternative outcome might be better than what you expected at the outset.

If you’re heading on an overseas trip, think about whether your expectations are appropriate. Is it realistic to come home with a contract if this is the first time you’ve met this client? Is it likely you’ll become fluent in Spanish from your time in the immersion program, or might there be a lower expectation that’s more appropriate, such as being invited to submit a proposal or getting through a shopping excursion without using English?

This strategy can also be used in our day-to-day cross-cultural encounters. When going to a class taught by someone from a different cultural background, what realistic expectations can you formulate that can make it beneficial? If you’re meeting with a group of colleagues, what cultural differences will be present? How you anticipate that will shape what occurs. Accurately anticipating an experience plays a strong role in how we engage with it.

Robert Merton, an American sociologist, studied how U.S. Army recruits’ expectations influenced their adaptation to the Army culture. The more accurately the privates anticipated the values and norms of the U.S. Army culture, the more likely they were to succeed and be promoted.¹⁵ In a similar way, when global professionals accurately anticipate their job expectations in intercultural situations, they better adjust to the changes required.¹⁶

Whether it’s entering a new work culture, marrying into a family with different ethnic or religious origins, or taking on a sales account in another country, spend time anticipating the cultural landscape.

 

7.   CREATE CHECKLISTS

Using something as simple as an old-fashioned checklist is another way you can improve your CQ Strategy. We live in a world of growing complexity, something often compounded in the midst of multicultural circumstances. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and Harvard Medical School professor, suggests an amazingly simple strategy for dealing with the complex issues of life: a checklist.¹⁷ Military officers, airline pilots, chefs, and surgeons are realizing the value of a basic checklist. The very process of creating a checklist prior to a cross-cultural encounter can help you do the planning that’s essential for CQ Strategy.

Dr. Gawande notes that the pressure and complexities of many professions today overwhelm even the best-trained practitioners. He suggests that checking things off a list can prevent potentially fatal mistakes and corner cutting. He examines checklists in cooking, aviation, construction, and investing, but focuses most on his own field—medicine—where checklists mandating simple measures like hand washing have dramatically reduced hospital-caused infections and other complications. This can have great relevance to cross-cultural work.

When you’re working cross-culturally, taking the time to plan ahead by developing a checklist can prevent you from spinning off into what you’ve convinced yourself is just a necessary adaptation culturally, when in point of fact it might be detrimental to your overall success. The disorienting nature of doing something cross-culturally makes the value of checklists all the more important to behaving in ways that are consistent with your ideals. If you see the chance to strike a million-dollar deal, don’t lose your sanity. Walk through a checklist created in more objective times to ensure that this is in the best interest of your business. Or this can even be as basic as helping other travelers plan for routine things: pack medicine, find filtered water, plan transportation from the airport, and so on.

Those leading others on cross-cultural travel experiences should prepare checklists for use in case of a crisis:

Who do you need to call first?

Where can you go for twenty-four-hour help?

Where will you get the information you need?

What’s the phone number for your nearest embassy?

Improving your CQ Strategy can be as simple as creating a few checklists. The very exercise of making them is a tangible way to work on your cross-cultural planning.

 

8.   REFRAME A SITUATION

Many of the circumstances you experience in a cross-cultural situation are beyond your control, but you can control your interpretation of what happens. Reframing or reappraisal means changing your evaluation of something. Our brains do this all the time. You hear a loud bang and think it’s a gunshot. Perhaps you feel panicked only to find out that the bang is fireworks going off at a nearby celebration. Your brain immediately reorients itself from fear to excitement or ambivalence.

I often wonder how individuals survive the tragic loss of a spouse or child. I hope I never have to find out. Part of people’s coping ability is tied to whether they can reframe their situation. The most successful recoveries occur when individuals can reframe their lives and future. Studies have revealed that six months after many individuals become paraplegics, they’re just as happy as someone who won the lottery. This occurs because the brain recalibrates for a different set of circumstances.¹⁸

Reframing your interpretation of circumstances is part of how you train your brain to be flexible in multicultural situations. Reframing begins by labeling an emotion or reaction to something. Give it a name (e.g., “I’m ticked off that I can’t get clear directions to the hotel). Label it but don’t obsess over it, or you’re likely to become more anxious. Just label it for a couple of seconds with a few words or a brief phrase. Then refocus your attention on another stimulus and channel your energy away from your frustration to solving your problem.

Reframing is most helpful in intercultural situations when you feel angry. If you’re upset and the other party isn’t, chances are, you’re blaming the other person for doing something who’s clueless he’s at fault. Stopping to realize that this may be explained by cultural differences and assumptions can help you reappraise a situation rather than allowing your anger to mount and distract you.

Effective reappraisal requires the input of others. Peers can help us interpret circumstances. Particularly when you’re in the midst of a highly emotional state, you need colleagues who can help you reframe the event. Talk it through. Write it down. Name it. Then move toward action.

Brain researchers have often said that stress isn’t necessarily bad. It’s how you deal with it that’s key. When you learn to harness deep stress by reappraising a situation, you enhance your CQ Strategy and your overall effectiveness. Be conscious of things that may increase your anxiety and work out ways to reduce these before the arousal kicks in.¹⁹

 

9.   TEST FOR ACCURACY

Several of the tools for developing CQ Strategy are based on becoming aware, noticing what’s going on, and developing appropriate plans in light of what you understand. But an essential tool to add is learning how to check back and see if your assumptions and plans were appropriate. Look for ways to test the accuracy of your observations, interpretations, and plans.²⁰

I recently had a meeting with Bayani, a Filipino executive who was interested in having me do some cultural intelligence training for his company. Bayani leads a Filipino company that works throughout Asia and the Middle East. My only contact with him previously was a couple of e-mails. We found out that we were both going to be in Hong Kong at the same time, so we met for dinner one evening. Bayani had already given me a sense of what he wanted me to do for the company, but we hadn’t talked at all about fees and contracts. Given that Filipino culture as a whole values building trust through relationships and time together, I had no intention of raising the issue of money in this first meeting.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure when and how to bring it up, because doing so in a follow-up e-mail didn’t seem culturally appropriate, either. But my plan was to get to know each other, learn more about his company, talk about ways we could work together, and worry about the contractual elements later. No sooner did we place our order then Bayani said, “So how much will this cost us?” I thought he meant the restaurant bill and said, “Oh, this is on me.” “No, no. Not that,” he said. “I mean, to get you to come train for us.” I quickly shifted gears from my plan to avert any discussion about finances but still didn’t answer him directly. I was trying to read whether he was coming at me the way he thought I’d want to be dealt with as an American or whether this was really the way he wanted to negotiate. I told him we could get to that but that I’d love to learn more about him and his company before we talk about the financial arrangements. Bayani wouldn’t go for it. He said, “But I want to know what the fees are.” At this point, I could see my assumptions going into this meeting were not accurate at all, so I started to talk more directly about finances and Bayani responded well. It was still a risk. And I can’t presume a future conversation with another Filipino will go that way. But I had to adapt on the fly, given that the interaction was going in a different direction than what I planned.

You can see how several of these strategies work together. Paying attention to the invisible cues, being aware of how I’m being perceived, and adjusting the plan I developed in light of my cultural understanding were all things that were necessary. Of course I didn’t stop and think all that through at the moment. Perhaps I should have, but I was adapting on the fly. And I can give you as many examples of times when I didn’t pick up on the cues and appropriately adjust my plan and floundered as a result.

Do the hard work of planning for these kinds of interactions, but then test your plan to see if it’s working. Does what you’re observing correlate with what experts have said about how people from a particular culture usually behave (this requires CQ Knowledge)? Continue your observation in other settings and of other individuals. As you seek additional input about the same kind of thing, does it confirm or negate the interpretations you were making? And best of all, find someone with whom you can discuss your interpretations. Use a cultural coach like we discussed in Chapter 4. Ideally, you want an individual who has an understanding of both your cultural background and the culture you’re observing. When appropriate, you can also test for accuracy with the individual with whom you’re interacting. Ask if what you perceive is accurate. It might take a more indirect question to get at this. Be creative. But look for ways to test the accuracy of what you perceive.

Practice this strategy by forming a hypothesis about a cultural situation you’ve been observing. Then test your hypothesis by reading up on it, talking to a variety of people from the cultures involved, and observing what occurs.

 

10.   ASK BETTER QUESTIONS

Questions are essential for enhancing CQ Strategy. Question your observations, question your assumptions, and find appropriate ways to ask questions of others. Listen carefully to the responses. And listen for what’s not said. Then test out what you learn by asking the questions again in another situation and to another person. Asking good, probing questions is one of the most important ways to enhance your CQ Strategy.

One of the best ways to do this is to keep asking yourself “why?” Just as some kids keep asking their parents “Why, why, why?” this can be an effective way to get beyond surface observations to deeper insights about what’s going on in a cross-cultural situation. When you experience something disorienting due to cultural differences, ask yourself Why. Try to dig deeper to explore what’s behind something you observe.²¹

Here’s how this might look for Robert to employ this strategy with himself. Robert thinks, Hiring Sana could be a challenge for his clients.

Why?

Because they’re uncomfortable around people who look like her.

Why?

Because there are lots of implicit biases against Muslims and Arabs.

Why?

Because of 9/11, segregation, media portrayals of Muslims, and related concerns.

You get the idea. Some of the responses we give to the why questions might be inaccurate. So we have to ask this together with the last strategy—testing for accuracy. But the point behind the questioning strategy is to keep peeling away the layers of symptoms that can lead to a root cause of a situation. Observe a cross-cultural situation or challenge and ask yourself, why, why, why?

Practice this when you’re sitting in a meeting and you hear someone making an argument. Or do it when you listen to a presentation or watch the news. Be careful about asking other people why because it can trigger defensiveness. It’s better to begin with more indirect questions. For example, “Can you explain more about … ?” or “What do you think is going on here?”

Other questions can be used to help you dig deeper into developing CQ Strategy as you travel into different cultures. For example, some questions you can begin to ponder with a friend or in your journal are:

•   What is the dominant sound here?

•   What does it smell like?

•   What are the most obvious objects I see?

•   What don’t I see here?

•   How are young people viewed? Old people?

Useful and appropriate questions require a higher level of thinking. Learn how to use them to improve your CQ Strategy.

 

BACK AT THE OFFICE

Robert and Sana both demonstrate some encouraging signs of being aware. They seem moderately conscious of their behavior, engage in reflection about their interactions, and think about the meaning behind what occurs. This suggests some strengths in their CQ Strategy capabilities.

They need to slow down their interpretations, however. Sana and Haani are quick to assume they know what Robert’s suit and late start of the interview mean. Noticing these details is important. Making hasty judgments about what they mean is very dangerous. Instead, Sana could more cautiously hypothesize that the suit might be a statement of power, or it could be a personal or cultural preference for Robert to dress up despite it being “casual Friday.” This could also be interpreted as a sign of respect to appear professional to interviewees, or simply necessary attire for a later commitment (e.g., a major meeting with international guests). For that matter, Robert may have simply forgotten it was casual Friday! Sana’s quick judgment is typical of what most of us do unless we intentionally slow down our assumptions.

Robert’s commitment to overlook the differences between Sana and him is commendable but may actually be problematic in the long run. Seeing Sana as a fellow human being is a great starting point. But he would be helped to see the great value her differences will bring to him as a person and to the job. What benefit is there in hiring people who view things just as we do? Sure—it might make for a bit less conflict, but it might also seriously undermine our ability to have a more robust, holistic approach to our work.

I have an Italian friend who says, “You Americans think, Now that we’re friends, we shouldn’t argue. But we Italians think, Now that we’re friends, we can have a real argument.” Perhaps neither stereotype is fair. But the point is—many of us, regardless of nationality, are reticent to focus on differences because it seems divisive. Differences can be a real strength—they aren’t something to be merely tolerated, but explored and leveraged!

 

INCREASING YOUR CQ STRATEGY

A lot of people have a decent measure of cultural understanding. But the individuals who can move into a higher level of consciousness and use that understanding to develop effective and respective relationships cross-culturally are much harder to find. Be among this minority by improving your CQ Strategy.

Identify two strategies you can begin using to enhance your CQ Strategy.

Which one will you try first? When?