What is CQ and What can it Do for You?
With the recent shift towards removing DEI initiatives across the country, many companies who are wanting to work with diverse cultural groups are feeling rudderless. While building cultural acceptance and empathy are important, it can feel extremely difficult to take that first step if someone doesn’t know where to start. At 7C Lingo, we have worked with numerous companies to help prepare them for their first forays into working with a multicultural audience, and every time, we have recommended using the Cultural Intelligence method.
Cultural Intelligence, also known as Cultural Quotient or CQ for short, is designed to be a way to measure someone’s ability to function effectively in a culturally diverse setting. It’s comparable to emotional intelligence, but while emotional intelligence focuses on more universal experiences that make us all similar, cultural intelligence is about acknowledging the cultural features that make us different; not in an attempt to separate us from each other, but to grow closer through understanding and acceptance.
For those interested in working towards building your organization’s cultural intelligence, here is what you can expect during your first few CQ meetings.
How Cultural Intelligence is Helping Companies Succeed
Many companies have begun employing CQ in order to expand their cultural intelligence and prepare their employees for interacting with people from various backgrounds. Starbucks has gone on record saying that the CQ method has been foundational in helping their company expand. As an international corporation with employees across the globe, Starbucks needed to construct a cultural understanding program that would work for both baristas in San Francisco and Corporate Managers in Dubai. Because of the flexible framework of the CQ method, it was a perfect fit.
CQ continues to be heavily utilized in the tech world, in particular. That is because, like tech companies such as IBM, the CQ Method is constantly moving forward and innovating, ensuring that it is ahead of the curve when it comes to major shifts. The program has become so popular, in fact, that many US agencies have adopted it for their HR training programs.
Your First Meeting
Your first CQ meetings will be guided by someone trained in Cultural Intelligence, and will focus on preparing you for your CQ test. Not all of the members of your organization may be ready to dive head first into building their cultural intelligence, and many might question the efficacy of developing these skills. Your cultural intelligence trainer will work to instill within your organization why these meetings are important, how they will improve your workplace’s ability to communicate with new cultures, and will also help to instill a greater sense of community within the workplace, as the skills you develop within these meetings will also make employees more open to sharing their experiences and viewpoints. After this initial discussion, everyone in attendance will be given a cultural intelligence aptitude test, designed to gauge someone’s current cultural intelligence level.
Receiving your Test Results Back
After completing your initial CQ test, you will receive back a report on your cultural intelligence profile, designed to assess your ability to properly navigate a culturally diverse situation. This assessment features four broad categories of cultural intelligence skills, each graded on a scale of zero to one-hundred, with those four scores then being averaged to create a general CQ score. The four categories are:
- CQ Drive: Your level of interest and confidence in interactions within a multicultural environment. Those with a high CQ willingly seek out interactions with people from diverse backgrounds, and don’t let the fear of failing hold them back.
- CQ Knowledge: Your level of understanding about different cultures. Those with high CQ knowledge may be knowledgeable in a variety of cultural practices from around the globe, but could easily just understand a variety of cultures within their hometown.
- CQ Strategy: Your ability to plan for interactions within a multicultural context. Individuals with a high level of CQ strategy will plan well in advance for meetings with people of different backgrounds, such as changing their wardrobe or ensuring that the catering at an event takes into account cultural or religious dietary restrictions.
- CQ Action: Your ability to adapt when working in a multicultural situation. Individuals high in this area are skilled at changing their behaviors, such as tone or word choice, on the fly in order to accommodate other people.
What Happens if I get a low score?
If you get a low score in any of these categories, don’t worry. One, these tests, while robust, do not paint a complete picture regarding your aptitude towards multicultural situations. They do, however, give you a good idea of areas you can work on to make yourself a better, more culturally empathetic person.
It’s important to remember that this, Cultural Intelligence, is first and foremost a skill, and like any skill, it can be developed and improved overtime. By acknowledging deficits in one’s own abilities, you take the first step towards mastery.
What Next?
After receiving your score and going over your own cultural abilities, the next step is working with your CQ instructor to develop a plan of action. This plan will vary wildly depending on the needs of your organization and the general results of your assessment. A manufacturing plant looking to work with contractors in Turkey is going to have to take a drastically different approach towards improving their cultural intelligence than a law firm looking to work with a local non-profit to support underprivileged youth.
It is for this reason that it is of the utmost importance that you work with a certified CQ expert. The strength of the Cultural Intelligence program is its flexibility, but that flexibility becomes a hazard if someone isn’t there to properly guide the transition. At 7C Lingo, we have worked with dozens of companies over the years to help build their own personal plan for success when tackling cultural intelligence, and have seen how these personalized plans greatly increase a company’s ability to handle novel interactions with people from vastly different backgrounds. If you are interested in seeing if cultural intelligence is right for your company, then begin your journey by talking with one of our CQ experts here.
