We've heard of IQ and EQ. What's CQ?

It’s been a while since I’ve clickety-clacked on my keyboard and I thought it’d be a nice break from routine to write a post. 

Today I’m going to talk about a less than familiar subject but equally important in the field of communications. It's called cultural intelligence or Cultural Quotient (CQ). 

What is it?

The term cultural intelligence refers to a person’s ability to function effectively in culturally diverse situations and environments. So let’s say that you’ve lived most of your life nomadically, travelling and living in a host of Western and Asian nations for the past 30 years. You would, most probably, have quite a solid CQ. 

To be able to claim high cultural intelligence is not to lock oneself into any particular cultural habit or knowledge but to traverse freely and communicate across multiple cultures. So a person with high CQ may be able to speak multiple languages and also has the ability to blend in and make oneself a part of the in-group of many cultures.

Now, I’m not saying that if we only speak one language then we can’t be considered culturally intelligent. What I am saying, however, is that we should have an accurate and in-depth understanding of different cultural regions, thus being able to learn and blend into strange and unique encounters within the shortest period of time. 

Thus a person with a high CQ can have a meeting with different nationalities that he/she has never encountered before and yet can still find means and ways to converge without too much difficulty. This is because the person has a lot of cultural knowledge and literacies to draw on to socially manoeuvre in these unique situations. 

History

The term cultural intelligence itself has a diverse history and does not stem from just any one author. But we can trace CQ’s most comprehensive and focussed development to the 1980s, whereby the term cross-cultural psychology was developed to explain CQ and how we used language and social identity to adapt to different contexts. 

Cross-cultural psychology is, in its simplest sense, about how culture affects and manages our behaviour. So a European with strong cultural intelligence may be seen to be much more accommodating and soft-spoken in a formal Asian environment. Thus high CQ enables such communication changes and adaptability in one person. 

But we have, so far, only looked at the cultural side of things. What about this term called “intelligence”? Why is one’s ability to understand, interpret and exercise the cultural values of a foreign place part of the definition of intelligence? Isn’t intelligence about one’s logical and reasoning abilities? 

Well therein lies the misconception about intelligence. Logical reasoning is but one out of many types of intelligences and each has its own value and importance to how we succeed in society. For example, in 1937, Thorndike and Stein wrote about Social Intelligence and how this ability helps us to successfully adapt to social environments. Mayer and Salovey (1993) researched on Emotional Intelligence and explained how we read and adapt to the emotion of others.

And there’s also something that is not often heard called Practical intelligence. This is a person’s ability to solve real-world problems using experience and a keenly honed sense of pragmatic logic. So a person with strong practical intelligence could possibly fail high school but he/she is able to build the most sophisticated robot using only household appliances. 

Cultural intelligence is merely one out of many types of intelligences and they are each an important knowledge for different professions and situations. For those of us in the business of communications, having high practical intelligence is advantageous but not necessary. However, failure to have social, emotional and cultural intelligence would mean the end of our career. 

How to learn CQ? 

To be truly excellent at communications, we need to master all three intelligences. Why, you might ask? Because we’re dealing with human beings. And humans are truly one of the most vexing and difficult problems to solve in this world. We would need an arsenal of tools if we ever wish to win a battle of communication. 

If you’ve read to this point of the article, you’re already on a healthy start. Building your knowledge and understanding of CQ is the first step. To further increase that knowledge, you would need to read up on the Gallup Polls and the general cultural behaviours that define each nation’s people; read travelogues and first-time experiences of foreigners in a new country. These journal entries would most probably mirror your own anxieties and inexperiences but they would also offer solutions and guides. 

The next step is to engage with the culture. It’s all fine and dandy to read up about other people from the comfort of our ivory tower. But the couch potato will only know a life that has already been lived and interpreted. He/she has never lived it and is therefore only a parasite of experiences. We do not want to become that leech. So the next step is to be in, within and beside the culture. 

This is, of course, much harder than it sounds. If we’re living in Singapore but need to learn about the Spaniards, exactly how are we going to be in, within and beside the culture? Well, the first step is to do what they would do. We would, for example, sing their songs, eat their food, watch their movies and, if we’re lucky, go to a Spanish cultural event.

And what about learning a foreign language? Well, if the meeting is next month, I wouldn’t go as far as to advice you to enrol for Spanish academic classes. But I would go as far as to say that you should learn a few simple greetings and learn how to pronounce it accurately. It is always pleasing to the other party when we show enough respect and effort to learn their language. 

The magic happens when…

you begin to master several cultures and realise a complex latticework of behaviour that seems to connect different people from different countries.

As much as cross-cultural communication touts the differences between people in different nations, we also share quite a number of similarities. Take the Spaniards and Bruneians, for example. The people from these two nations cannot be, geographically speaking, more further apart yet they share strong cultural commonalities. These common grounds have the potential to strengthen relationships and bridge social and cultural divides. 

For example, the people of Spain and Brunei have strong kinship ties and it is part of the fundamental basis of their social structure. In relation to business behaviour, they are both equally formal, confrontation aversive and views class and social status as important indicators of authority and power. Thus, negotiation strategies and ethics are primarily driven by how much respect we aptly give to the right person and position. 

And that is why a person with high CQ can easily negotiate with foreigners. With a keen understanding and experience of cultural habits and behaviours, we are able to draw correlations that connect people and nations. In short, they aren’t as foreign as we believe them to be. One of the bridges that connects us in negotiations is our cultural intelligence and the person who masters this art will blend-in effortlessly in alien and unfamiliar situations.