Culural Intelligence

"Cultural intelligence is a person’s capability for successful adaptation to new cultural settings" (Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions Across Cultures, P.C. Earley and S. Ang, 2003 Stanford Business Books) It picks up where emotional intelligence leaves off – how we deal with people and situations, but now in unfamiliar surroundings.

People with high emotional intelligence do not necessarily perform well abroad where the social and business cues in the environment are unknown. It takes building a new mental framework for understanding.

Why is this important?

When you are out of your cultural comfort zone, you need to glean cues from the environment in new ways and interpret them accurately to develop trust-based relationships that will help you get done what you need to get done.

Cultural intelligence takes thoughtful attention to three areas:
1. Learning about how you learn and thinking about how you think to build a new framework for understanding that works better in your new environment,

2. Cultivating what motivates you to persevere and fully engage with others across differences.

3. Putting your intellectual capacity to act into action with a new repertoire of culturally-appropriate behaviors.

Coaching can be a powerful support in the process as you gather new knowledge, practice new patterns of thinking and learning, find motivation and rewire your neurons for change and new behaviors.

Cultural intelligence will help you:
Manage and even leverage change, complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity,
Think strategically in new ways based on cultural cues from the environment, 
Successfully engage with others across cultural differences,
Select appropriate behavior among a new repertoire,
Build a personal framework for understanding.

The bonus is more confidence in how you operate, a better sense of who you are, and  a view into your potential for living in a larger world full of new perspectives. In this way, an experience abroad -- in the midst of change and complexity -- can help you become the best of who you are, professionally and in your personal life.  

My blog is dedicated to coaching for cultural intelligence, with resources, stories, observations and practical applications. Keep stopping by for more information and new perspectives.