Eight big global shifts that make CQ more needed than ever

I believe that we need Cultural Intelligence (CQ) now more than ever. The world is shifting in ways that demand leaders who can navigate complexity, bridge divides and bring people together. They are needed in organisations and communities alike, they embrace rather than fear difference. I think of CQ as the ability to cross boundaries between cultures and thrive while doing it. The ability to work across geographies, generations, sectors, specialisms, backgrounds, beliefs, abilities and aspirations with people who are ‘not like you’.

I see eight major shifts that underscore why the time for CQ has come. There may be more, but these are my eight.

1. The need for collaboration

Big problems can no longer - if they ever could - be solved by one person, one sector, one culture, one community, one country or even one continent operating alone. So, leading across boundaries through collaboration is increasingly crucial. The problems faced by organisations require their separate divisions – production, sales, marketing finance - and their leaders to collaborate. Communities need the public, private and not for profit sectors to find ways to work more effectively, together, if they have to use their resources and assets to best effect. Countries and continents face global problems of an order that requires old and new divides to be crossed.

Leaders who see that the only sustainable route to change is collaboration are having to learn to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds, people of different ages, people whom they don’t understand or know whether to trust.  People who are difficult, sensitive, touchy, even hurt.  People who can be precious, on occasions rude or offensive or simply confused. In many cases people who really really don’t want to collaborate at all.

Such collaboration is not easy because mostly leaders spend the bulk of their time operating within the boundaries of their division, their sector or their nation. And this effect is compounded because leaders so often respond to the scale and complexity of problems around them by retreating into isolation. By operating in parallel universes, their collaborations becoming more like ships passing in the night, unable to understand each other’s points of reference and vocabulary.

To reverse this, we need CQ.  Without it, leaders will lead underperforming collaborations, where two and two struggle to add up to one.  Or collaborations will simply never get off the ground as people go their own way. SILO’s will go unbusted, sectors will continue to clash, resources will be wasted, divides will deepen, and the big problems will simply stay unsolved.

2. The reality of networks

Leaders know they must build networks to cope with the scale of change all around them, to avoid their blind spots and to capitalise on the opportunities change presents. There will always be a role for networks of people ‘like me’ to give leaders, encouragement reinforcement and support. But ‘like me’ networks will always be of limited value for leaders who want to see what other others see and to cross boundaries. Leaders need to develop ‘turbulent networks’ to give them a counterbalancing discomfort, and sometimes even distance.

Turbulent networks are difficult to create. Generally - and not surprisingly - human beings much prefer support networks; we all seek out people like ourselves. And the internet has made this ever easier, allowing leaders to create new forms of closed clubs, seeking out yet more people ‘like me’.

I believe the temptation for leaders to simply increase their homogenous networks, needs to be resisted in order to address complex problems and bring people together to solve them. Leaders must go further field, and they’ll need to build turbulent networks that will challenge and discomfort them and this will require CQ.

3. The importance of trust

In this new less structured world trust has become the greatest of assets. People buy brands they trust and listen to sources they trust. And they choose to follow leaders they trust. Without trust they don’t  give their best.  Or worse they eventually simply move on to follow someone they do trust.

I think it’s up to the leader to build up a record over time to become and remain worthy of peoples trust. It is one thing for a leader to do this in their own culture, where the reference points for trust will be familiar on all sides. It’s much harder to establish trustworthiness with people whose frame of reference for trust is very different.  This also calls for CQ.

4. The demands of demographics

Perhaps it’s a natural precondition of progress that old and young must clash but I believe it’s also a precondition of progress that they must connect and particularly in such a rapidly changing world facing such daunting problems. I have heard many times variations on ‘oh they won’t be interested in an old man like me’ or from a young person ‘they don’t want to hear from the youth voice’ the more these words are uttered the more self-fulfilling they become.

I also too often hear the expression ‘harnessing young talent’. People seem to forget just what harnesses are: thick pieces of leather that are strapped around an animal's head to force it to go where it doesn’t want to go or to prevent it from going where it does want to go. My instinct says that the established leaders who will succeed will do exactly the opposite to this harnessing, they will be the ones young people will choose to follow, choose to learn from and choose to throw their energy and ideas behind. But it’ll require the leaders to accept the different cultures of different generations, to resist the temptation to preach or use excessive control, and instead to back young leaders emerging around them.

It also calls for young leaders to grab the benefits of working with established leaders, taking what is good, discarding what is not, and adapting what hasn’t worked yet but might just this time.  They must avoid either dismissing established leaders or putting them on a pedestal or perhaps the worst paying them necessary homage but with ears firmly shut.

Ever more CQ is called for, this time across the generations.

5. The spark of innovation

Everywhere you look everyone is crying out for innovation, new ways, new ideas, new processes, new technologies, new ventures. I believe the secret to innovation is that it comes best from well lead discord. The enemy is group think. Mixed teams led by leaders with cultural intelligence see things quite different. People help each other to think the unthinkable, they take ideas and turn them on their heads and in the process, they break out of group think to create something genuinely new. They start to say different things, speak from opposite points of view, argue the unarguable, play with crazy ideas, question, challenge, sometimes even offend one another as they prod and prompt each other to shift thinking. But this seldom happens if it’s led by people who are so frightened of dissonance and discord or saying the wrong thing that they rush to close it all down. It calls for leaders with CQ who are not frightened by difference in conflict, who are not timid about holding dissonance in the room, who take time to understand the different cultures at play, who don’t think it’s polite to ignore those differences or pretend they aren’t there.

Innovation needs leaders who actively seek to encourage difference, who enjoy it and thrive in it, even if they secretly know that they have no real idea where it might take them, just that it won’t be where they have been before.

6. The urban magnet

People are moving as never before, and this will only accelerate as climate change dictates the areas of the world where people can live. Cities are growing in size and are becoming magnets of talent, coming together from multiple countries and different cultures. To be a leader in any of these cities, people will need to have serious CQ. They’ll need to be able to set diverse groups alight and not set out to homogenise them, instructing them to leave the difference at the door. They will need to create a culture in which people know they belong while at the same time being different and to be many different things all at the same time.

These cities will thrive only if they have enough leaders with CQ, and their leaders won't be asking ‘where are you from?’ expecting a one-word answer (and glaze over when they get more than one) because they risk making themselves irrelevant.

7. Growing world, shrinking leaders

Leaders are crossing the world almost constantly, physically and remotely.

My father used to call them the flying dead, people who fly around or reach across the world and are expected to deliver with little idea of the cultures they were crossing. My father’s fear was that the world would be increasingly run by the flying dead who thought that they were running the world simply because they travelled or zoomed across it.

Globalisation has meant that there are more potential flying dead leaders than ever before. Many of course would claim to have CQ in abundance. Unfortunately, they measure it in air miles or online minutes. Yet with real CQ they could become bridge builders who can genuinely connect the world and counterbalance the increasing fragmentation.

8. The pressure to focus

I’ve always thought that leadership journeys look very much like an hourglass. Leaders become more and more knowledgeable in a smaller and smaller field. And then suddenly they get that next promotion when they need to be broad again and nothing has prepared them for it. I think the forces that create the narrowing of the lenses are even stronger now because the world has gone through many shocks over the last few years and history shows us the people react to such shocks by looking inwards and building new walls.

When dangers and pitfalls and opportunities surround you, it’s the job of a leader to spot them and ideally anticipate them. Because they can come from unexpected places, in unexpected ways, that demand a wider lens at the very point when everything and everyone else is pressing you to focus.

If leaders don’t see context, don’t see what’s coming, whether it’s a problem or a blow or a way through or a golden opportunity, I believe that their legitimacy comes into question.  

Eight shifts that call for CQ. No, I think they demand CQ. They are shifts that also have the potential to pull people apart, it is our role in leading to do the opposite and use our CQ to pull people together.

I am having a conversation on this on LinkedIn, 2nd April at 2pm UK time. Do join me.

https://www.linkedin.com/events/everythingyouneedtoknowaboutcul7308110467602784328/theater/

About the author: Julia Middleton is the mother of practical CQ and the founder of Women Emerging.