Case Study: Using Strategic Thinking in Cross Cultural Situations

One of the basic tenets of culture is that it consists of levels and sublevels. It is useful to think about culture in terms of five basic levels: national, regional, organizational, team, and individual. Within each of these levels are tangible and intangible sublevels of culture. Cultural Intelligence helps you to understand at the different levels of culture at play. Additionally, CI can be useful in helping you to break down habitual patterns of thoughts.

Read the case study below and respond to the questions that follow.

A businesswoman from the United States is in Germany for contract negotiations between her employer and a large German bank. The meeting is scheduled for nine o’clock in the morning. When she arrives to the meeting a few minutes before its start time, she is amazed that all her German counterparts are already seated and ready to begin the meeting.

A few days later, upon her arrival back to the United States, she remarks to her American colleagues about her experience with German culture. In particular, she notes their level of attentiveness to punctuality and planning and says, “I thought we were punctual here in the United States! It’s nothing compared to how Germans view punctuality.”

Strategic thinking is “thinking about thinking.” It is being conscious of your thinking processes, such as how you have gathered and organized the information and experience in your memory (old information), and then how you reorganize it (new information) to fit a new situation. You have to connect the new information to what you already know in order to help make sense of what actions to take. You can do this by identifying what you know and what you do not know about a cultural situation.

1. If you were in her position, how would you “think about your thinking” in this situation?

2. What are some habitual patterns of thoughts that are unconscious for the business woman as well as for her German colleagues?

3. How would you coach the business woman to develop a stronger strategic thinking skill set?

This example illustrates the national differences between two cultures: American and German. National differences refer to the cultural influences of a nation that result in its national characteristics. Although nation-states have regional and political differences, national culture can be viewed as the values held by a majority of the population within the nation. These values are largely unconscious and developed throughout one’s childhood. The values are pushed to a level of consciousness when in contrast to another nation’s cultural values.

What We Think, We Become: Cultural Intelligence Techniques

Cultural strategic thinking is your ability to think and solve problems in specific ways when you are in unfamiliar cultural settings. To understand cultural strategic thinking, it is important for you to comprehend the two elements that make up this foundational piece of cultural intelligence: cognition and metacognition.

Cognition is generally thought of as your ability to process information. As related to culture, you can think about it as the complete knowledge and experience you have gained about cultural situations and your interactions within those situations. Additionally, how you have thought about or processed this information is stored in your memory. Your ability to retrieve this stored information is defined as cognitive ability.

Metacognition refers to “thinking about thinking” and was introduced as a concept by John Flavell, who is typically seen as a founding scholar of the field. Flavell said that metacognition is the knowledge you have of your own cognitive processes (your thinking). It is your ability to control your thinking processes through various strategies, such as organizing, monitoring, and adapting. Additionally, it is your ability to reflect upon the tasks or processes you undertake and to select and utilize the appropriate strategies necessary in your intercultural interactions.

Many people become accustomed to having trainers and consultants provide them with knowledge about cultures to the point where they are dependent on the coach, mentor, trainer, or consultant. However, they need to learn to be experts in cultural situations themselves through metacognitive strategies such as adapting, monitoring, self-regulation, and self-reflection. Culturally intelligent leaders can use metacognition to help themselves and to train themselves to think through their thinking.

How can you improve your strategic thinking? Basic strategies for improving thinking include (a) connecting new information with what you already know, (b) selecting your thinking strategies carefully and intentionally, and (c) planning, monitoring, and evaluating your thinking strategies and processes.

Strategic thinking is “thinking about thinking.” It is being conscious of your thinking processes, such as how you have gathered and organized the information and experience in your memory (old information), and then how you reorganize it (new information) to fit a new situation. You have to connect the new information to what you already know in order to help make sense of what actions to take. You can do this by identifying what you know and what you do not know about a cultural situation. Here is an exercise to help you identify old and new information. Take a sheet a paper and draw a line down the middle of the sheet to create two columns. At the top of the left column, write, “What I know,” and at the top of the right column, write, “What I want to learn.” As you research, explore, and interact with a cultural situation, people, or information, you will learn to clarify, revise, verify, or expand your understanding of the situation.

Case Study: The Labyrinth of Cultural Intelligence

Recently, I wrote about the labyrinth of cultural intelligence. Here is a case study to explore the labyrinth of CI. Read the case study, and then respond to the questions that follow.

Martha works as a program director for a large nonprofit that directs volunteer programs. Her coworkers describe her as, “personable, outgoing, empathic, and caring.” Whenever there is conflict or unsettled business, she is the “go-to person” for helping her colleagues work out their issues. Her ability to be empathetic enables her to understand others’ thoughts and feelings as well as their intentions.

When Martha gets upset or frustrated, she “takes a pause” or will back away from the issue or person until she can get a hold of her emotions. If Martha is asked how she manages her emotions, she replies that meditation and exercise help her to regulate how she feels from moment to moment. She’s even led agency wide sessions on self-care and exercise.

Volunteers who work for Martha love that she cares about their needs. During workshops and events she introduces volunteers to one another, helping them to learn about and get to know each other. Martha is also much attuned to those around her by listening and observing, which makes her a great program director for volunteers.

Martha’s emotional and social intelligences are high, which makes it difficult for Lorraine, Martha’s direct supervisor, to understand why Martha has such challenges working with people of cultural groups different than her own. Martha, as her jovial self, is always kind and thoughtful, but sometimes she will say culturally inappropriate things, not aware that she’s said them.

One of the volunteers who is Southeast Asian has noted, “I like Martha but it seems like she just doesn’t understand me. Like the time I had to cancel my tutoring shift. No one was watching my sister’s baby so I had to watch her. I told Martha and she was real nice and understanding, but I feel that she didn’t really understand that I have an obligation to my family before this volunteer job. I had to explain to her that this is what it’s like in my culture, that family comes first. Then, she nodded and understood.”

1. Describe Martha’s journey in Cultural Intelligence. Be specific about behaviors, actions, attitudes, thinking processes, etc.
2. What does Martha do well that would benefit other CI leaders?
3. What advice would you give to Martha if you were coaching her to be more culturally intelligent?

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com

The Labyrinth of Cultural Intelligence

We have not even to risk the adventure alone. . . . the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. . . . and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Labyrinths often serve as metaphors for personal journeys into the self and back into the world. In a labyrinth, there is one path to the center, and that same path leads you out. You make the choice to enter the path and start a journey. You make the choice to continue the journey or to end it by retracing your steps to the place you entered.

You can think about your journey into cultural intelligence as entering a labyrinth. It is not a maze; rather, it is journey that brings you to a deeper awareness of yourself and your place in the world. In a labyrinth, you find yourself walking around short curves, long curves, around edges of the circle, getting closer to the center. As you do so, you may feel a variety of emotions and thought: hesitation, confidence, motivation, ease, caution, or reflection. In the labyrinth, we become the observer of these thoughts and emotions. As Richard Carlson noted, “We can simply step back and watch the show. It’s really just like watching a movie on the screen.”

The labyrinth has long served as a metaphor of change and growth. Walking the labyrinth is a time of exploration and discovery. Careful listening and the willingness to take risks, and to challenge yourself, lead you to a transformation. This transformation encompasses a new, expansive vision of possibilities in your world. It serves as a container for your experiences in life: fun and play, disappointment and sadness, grief and loss, joy and prosperity, success and failure. When you look at the labyrinth as a metaphor for your cultural intelligence journey, you will see that your path is sometimes shared with others, and, at times, it is yours alone.

As Joseph Campbell noted, everyone goes through a psychological transformation that brings them to a more fulfilling life. Cultural intelligence is a process and a tool to help you evolve, to help you take the risks required when in unfamiliar cultural interactions. When applied, you will notice that you have gained a new consciousness of your place in the world.

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com

Case Study: Dynamics of Culture

Culture is dynamic and thus complex. Culture is fluid rather than static, which means that culture changes all the time, every day, in subtle and tangible ways. The following is a short case study of culture in action. Read the case study and answer the questions that follow:

Shelia is the director of marketing for a social services agency. She provides feedback to one of her managers about how to improve services. Shelia sits behind a large executive desk and is leaning forward. The employee sits with her arms crossed, leaning away from Shelia.

1. If you were observing this scene, are you able to tell from the body language what each person is thinking? Why or why not?

2. What cultural factors (tangible and intangible) are present?

In the scenario, Sheila’s body language can be interpreted as any of the following: eager to assist or help, intensely interested in what the employee has to say, aggressive and wanting more information, or needing deeper engagement in the conversation. Her employee’s body language could mean any of the following: protective, suspicious, not caring, or relaxed. To understand the dynamics of culture in this example, you would need to pay attention to the things you do not see such as:

• Is Sheila older or younger than her employee?
• What has been their working relationship?
• Does Sheila naturally lean forward when speaking with her employees?
• What is the tone of voice in the conversation?

Can you identify other elements of culture that will help you understand this situation?

In this type of scenario, Albert Meharbian found that people pay attention to (a) the words, or what is being said; (b) the tone, or how the words are said; and (c) the visual behind the words, often called the body language. All of these are aspects of culture that are interpreted differently depending on the cultural context. Add multiple layers of culture to the conversation—such as time, power and authority, emotion, age, gender, religion, nationality, and even previous intercultural interactions— and communication at a cross-cultural level becomes complex and hard to manage.

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com

The Fork in the Road: To see or not see different perspectives

“We shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. This is a process that doesn’t end; only in death. The choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt

When my parents came to the United States in 1979, their world became vastly different than what they had known. Before their arrival, they lived in a small hilltop, tribal village in the mountains of Laos, like many of their ancestors before them. They had the simplest tools for doing their work and for living their lives. The natural world provided everything they needed. If they wanted to use the bathroom, they went outside—not to an outhouse but to the woods. When they were hungry, they cooked the meal in a pot over a large fire pit. When relatives asked them to attend celebrations and notified them that the celebration meal would begin sometime when the sun was to set, my parents knew that the path of the sun would let them know when they should leave their house. There were a lot of assumptions my parents made about their world.

When they had to relocate to the United States, they found out how different their assumptions were when they were tested in an environment that contradicted their ways of being. They were not aware of a different way of living their lives, because the norms that shaped their lives influenced their actions and behaviors. The norms helped them to learn that what they did was the correct way to live.

One of their most difficult challenges was to unlearn what they knew in a different context and with different materials and tools that they did not have before. What naturally occurred was a process of culture shock and then a period of acculturation. When my parents’ sponsors showed them how to use the toilet by gesturing what to do and how to flush, my parents were embarrassed. Coming from a culture where modesty is important, they did not know how to respond to the American sponsor’s gestures, yet their embarrassment quickly turned into fascination when they saw how a toilet could dispose of materials.

As human beings who are accustomed to behaving (consciously and unconsciously) in specific ways, we often do not recognize another perspective until it is presented to us. Ellen Langer, a social psychologist, says that it is in the perspective of another that we learn to see ourselves—to see who we really are.

When faced with a fork in the road, culturally intelligent leaders make strong efforts to see a different perspective than what they believe and hold to be true. They choose to confront blind spots, and they know the choices they make are their responsibilities.

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com

Case Study: Accountability through Cultural Intelligence

Can cultural intelligence breed accountability? How can leaders ensure that employees are accountable for cultural intelligence work? How can it be conducted in such a way that makes the organization efficient and more effective? What does it take to do this?

Yes, it is possible for people to hold themselves accountable to inclusion and diversity work, and yes, cultural intelligence work can spark change in an organization building accountability where there was none. Here are some tips for leaders in creating accountable organizational environments when it comes to Cultural Intelligence.

1. Be present, have presence, and be visible. I was brought in to facilitate a workshop about cultural differences for a group of public sector employees. In this workshop, the city manager and a city council member were actively present; they wanted to demonstrate to their employees the importance of culture and their own commitment to diversity in the city. They sat with the employees; they didn’t separate themselves from the group or sit at their own table; no “special” signs were given to them, nor did they want this type of recognition. They were simply present through their mindful and intentional presence.

2. Listen without judgment, without giving advice. Throughout the session, the city manager and council member listened to the feedback, heard the stories shared, and took part as observers of the cultural intelligence activities. When asked by employees to share their perspective and take a larger, more active role in the exercises, they said, “We talk all the time. That can be a problem. We want to know what you think.” Through active listening, observation, and inquiry, they demonstrated the cultural intelligence principles they wanted others to embrace.

3. Honor your commitments. At the end of the session, the city manager and city council member stood up and addressed the participants, reminding them that the workshop they participated in was only one of many to come. Moreover, they told the employees that they would do whatever it took to ensure that everyone was held accountable for delivering culturally relevant services to the department’s clients, including them. At the end of the session, they signed a form indicating their commitment and their efforts to finding the resources needed to align their city to be in step with the cultural changes.
When everyone is held accountable for their choices and behaviors in an intercultural workplace, there is a higher level of respect and trust among workers. Everyone is encouraged to perform his or her best and to hold themselves to the highest standards in working with each other. Intercultural conflicts still occur, but the responses to these conflicts from individuals are different; they care, are more compassionate, and forgiving.

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com

No Excuses! Fostering Accountability through Cultural Intelligence

One day an elephant saw a hummingbird lying flat on its back on the ground; its feet in the air.
“What are you doing,” asked the elephant.
The hummingbird replied, “I heard that the sky might fall today. If that happens, I am ready to do my part to hold it up.”
The elephant laughed and mocked the bird. “You think those feet can hold up the sky?”
“Not alone,” said the bird. “But we must each do what we can, and this is what I can do.”
—Adapted from R. MacDonald, Three Minute Tales

How can we ensure that our leadership matters at a very deep level? What can we do to cultivate awareness for cultural intelligence in all individuals within our organizations? As this Chinese fable tells, we have a responsibility to one another.

Culturally Intelligent leaders have an important role in developing a curiosity for differences in the workplace. They help to provide access to information and intentionally gather cultural knowledge on a daily basis that will help them and others learn more about differences and the influence of differences in the workplace. Additionally, leaders can foster creativity and curiosity when they set aside some time, on a day-to-day basis, to practice and master their cultural intelligence skills.

When I have seen culturally intelligent leaders in action, they cultivate an environment of trust, which is critical when working with differences in the workplace. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, wrote that trust is a critical foundational element in interpersonal relationships. Leaders must be willing to be vulnerable in intercultural interactions, openly admitting what they know and don’t know about culture and cultural differences. They must be able to admit that they might not be able to resolve intercultural differences.

By demonstrating vulnerability, a leader enables richer communication and creates an inviting space and environment for intercultural dialogue. In this situation, people are more willing to ask for help and to provide one another with constructive feedback; they take risks and learn to appreciate the differences in skills and style that each person brings to the work environment.

For diversity and culture to flourish in organizations, everyone in the workplace must hold each other accountable toward differences. My experiences working with leaders of different sectors, both formal and informal, have shown me that the creation of a mission and vision for diversity can only take an organization so far. Culturally Intelligent leaders create standards of accountability, explaining what is expected of each employee and of themselves in intercultural interactions.

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com