HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures (with featured article "Cultural Intelligence" by P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski). Harvard Business Review
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Your Cultural Intelligence
Unlike other aspects of personality, cultural intelligence can be developed in psychologically healthy and professionally competent people. In our work with Deutsche Bank, we introduced a program to improve managers’ work relationships with outsourcing partners in India. We developed a two-and-a-half day program that first identified a participant’s strengths and weaknesses and then provided a series of steps, which we outline below, to enhance their CQ.
Step 1
The individual examines his CQ strengths and weaknesses in order to establish a starting point for subsequent development efforts. Our self-assessment instrument is one approach, but there are others, such as an assessment of a person’s behavior in a simulated business encounter and 360-degree feedback on a person’s past behavior in an actual situation. Hughes Electronics, for example, staged a cocktail party to evaluate an expatriate manager’s grasp of South Korean social etiquette. Ideally, a manager will undergo a variety of assessments.
Step 2
The person selects training that focuses on her weaknesses. For example, someone lacking physical CQ might enroll in acting classes. Someone lacking cognitive CQ might work on developing his analogical and inductive reasoning—by, for example, reading several business case studies and distilling their common principles.
Step 3
The general training set out above is applied. If motivational CQ is low, a person might be given a series of simple exercises to perform, such as finding out where to buy a newspaper or greeting someone who has arrived to be interviewed. Mastering simple activities such as greetings or transactions with local shopkeepers establishes a solid base from which to move into more demanding activities, such as giving an employee a performance appraisal.
Step 4
The individual organizes her personal resources to support the approach she has chosen. Are there people at her organization with the skills to conduct this training, and does her work unit provide support for it? A realistic assessment of her workload and the time available for CQ enhancement is important.
Step 5
The person enters the cultural setting he needs to master. He coordinates his plans with others, basing them on his CQ strengths and remaining weaknesses. If his strength is mimicry, for example, he would be among the first in his training group to venture forth. If his strength is analysis, he would first want to observe events unfold and then explain to the others why they followed the pattern they did.
Step 6
The individual reevaluates her newly developed skills and how effective they have been in the new setting, perhaps after collecting 360-degree feedback from colleagues individually or eavesdropping on a casual focus group that was formed to discuss her progress. She may decide to undergo further training in specific areas.
Confidence Training
HELMUT WAS A MANAGER at a Berlin-based high-tech company who participated in our cultural-intelligence training program at London Business School. Three months earlier, he had been assigned to a large manufacturing facility in southern Germany to supervise the completion of a new plant and guide the local staff through the launch. Helmut came from northern Germany and had never worked in southern Germany; his direct reports had been raised in southern Germany and had worked for the local business unit for an average of seven years.
Helmut was good at developing new learning strategies, and he wasn’t bad at adapting his behavior to his surroundings. But he had low confidence in his ability to cope with his new colleagues. To him, southern Germans were essentially foreigners; he found them “loud, brash, and cliquish.”
To capitalize on his resourcefulness and build his confidence, we placed Helmut in heterogeneous groups of people, whom we encouraged to engage in freewheeling discussions. We also encouraged him to express his emotions more openly, in the manner of his southern compatriots, and to make more direct eye contact in the course of role-playing exercises.
Helmut’s resourcefulness might have impelled him to take on more ambitious tasks than he could quite handle. It was important he get his footing first, so that some subsequent reversal would not paralyze him. To enhance his motivational CQ, we asked him to list ten activities he thought would be part of his daily or weekly routine when he returned to Munich.
By the time Helmut returned to London for his second training session, he had proved to himself he could manage simple encounters like getting a coffee, shopping, and having a drink with colleagues. So we suggested he might be ready for more challenging tasks, such as providing face-to-face personnel appraisals. Even though Helmut was skilled at analyzing people’s behavior, he doubted he was equal to this next set of hurdles. We encouraged him to view his analytic skills as giving him an important advantage. For example, Helmut had noticed that Bavarians were extroverted only with people familiar to them. With strangers they could be as formal as any Prussian. Realizing this allowed him to respond flexibly to either situation instead of being put off balance.
By the time he was asked to lead a quality-improvement team, he had concluded that his leadership style must unfold in two stages—commanding at the outset, then more personal and inclusive. On his third visit to London, Helmut reported good relations with the quality improvement team, and the members corroborated his assessment.
In the sidebar “Confidence Training,” we describe how we applied these six steps to the case of Helmut, one of five German managers we helped at their employer’s behest as they coped with new assignments within and outside of Germany.
Why can some people act appropriately and effectively in new cultures or among people with unfamiliar backgrounds while others flounder? Our anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that the answer doesn’t lie in tacit knowledge or in emotional or social intelligence. But a person with high CQ, whether cultivated or innate, can understand and master such situations, persevere, and do the right thing when needed.
Originally published in October 2004. Reprint R0410J
by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern
WHEN A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE developer needed to produce a new product quickly, the project manager assembled a team of employees from India and the United States. From the start the team members could not agree on a delivery date for the product. The Americans thought the work could be done in two to three weeks; the Indians predicted it would take two to three months. As time went on, the Indian team members proved reluctant to report setbacks in the production process, which the American team members would find out about only when work was due to be passed to them. Such conflicts, of course, may affect any team, but in this case they arose from cultural differences. As tensions mounted, conflict over delivery dates and feedback became personal, disrupting team members’ communication about even mundane issues. The project manager decided he had to intervene—with the result that both the American and the Indian team members came to rely on him for direction regarding minute operational details that the team should have been able to handle itself. The manager became so bogged down by quotidian issues that the project careened hopelessly off even the most pessimistic schedule—and the team never learned to work together effectively.
Multicultural teams often generate frustrating management dilemmas. Cultural differences can create substantial obstacles to effective teamwork—but these may be subtle and difficult to recognize until significant damage has already been done. As in the case above, which the manager involved told us about, managers may create more problems than they resolve by intervening. The challenge