Cultural Intelligence

 

“So first of all, I want to divide the room by your IQ so whoever has a 100 to 120 IQ I want you to sit over here, if you have 120 to130 over here, and 130 to145 over here so go ahead…. You guys know your IQ? You know that everyone the United States who went to elementary school here had their IQ tested and you can actually get a record of that if you just go back to your elementary school. But we talked a lot about IQ didn’t we and we put you into reading groups and math groups and you know, we divided you up into you know you’re good, I don’t know how I could never sit still so they didn’t put me in any group I think they put me in the principal’s office so you know that’s all I get but then we went from IQ to EQ. Do you know what EQ is? Emotional quotient. Men, Brett and I, we have none. We have no emotional quotient you know so most men are not very high actually on emotional quotient unless we’ve taken time  to really try to understand and develop our right brain. But now we come up with CQ and CQ- what is CQ? CQ is cultural… quotient, cultural intelligence. So I could give you a quiz today but he said I only had two hours to speak, two hours is that right? (laughs) He said 7 to 8 minutes. So cultural intelligence, cultural quotient is our ability to understand and work in a global environment. It doesn’t mean you’re working overseas, doesn’t mean you’re going overseas it means you’re working in a global environment. I just have heard that Orlando had about 62 million visitors last year and about 20% of those were international. So what is cultural intelligence and how do we get there? So really it’s all about business leadership and it’s a four-dimensional framework that looks at all first of all, are you motivated to understand people from other cultures and other languages? Because if you’re not motivated to understand different people in a different environment you might as well get out and go home, right? But second you have to say so what is my cognition what do I know, what have I been told, what have I heard, what have I read online. And then really learn. You know the third thing is metacognition. All of us metacognitively have something we think about other people and other cultures. So if I had you let’s just do a little test here I want you to uh don’t have to close your eyes if you don’t want to but think about a dog just a dog we’re not thinking about other cultures right now cause it can get us in trouble but think about a dog. Tell me what size it is small medium or large and what color it is brown black white so just think about it for a second first thing that pops in your head…ok how many people’s dog were brown….how many black…how many white…ok how many dogs small….medium…large…ok. So you guys skewed my statistic (laughs) but if you look at traditional research on sociolinguistic principles most people in the United States will say I have a medium black dog. You guys were about there if you looked at hands you had about 60-65% said black dogs and about 70% who were medium so we’re all geared, guys, to look and think about things in a certain way. And so if I say Chinese, Japanese, Hispanic, Brazilian, we immediately begin to think things don’t we? We feel things we look at you know what do we hear on tv or the radio and those things start coming up in us whether we want them to or not so that’s metacognition. Metacognition is how we feel, how we sort of relate to things. And then the 4th paradigm is actually behavioral change and when you have behavioral change we think you have effective leadership. So effective leadership as it says here you want to manage diversity and so you have teams I guarantee you this everyone… does anyone in this room not work with someone from another culture?….Anyone? Look at that. So like I said you don’t have to travel overseas, you don’t have to do business overseas, no one in this room doesn’t work with someone from another culture so it’s really important for us to understand  what are the other people thinking, what are they feeling, what is their background and I know guys a lot of you say, but I’ve traveled I’ve been to Costa Rica I’ve been to you know Panama City and I’ve been to China on a vacation and I flew into Beijing and I saw the Great Wall and you know I ate some cha siu bau and I had some noodles and I know everything about China. But really when we think about China so when we go up to a Chinese person is this how we greet someone, “Hi how’re you what’s going on?” Is that how we do it? And if we do not understand then that’s just a simple greeting. So in China you know one of the things intrinsically I’m going to have a lighter handshake, I’m not going to look at his eyes and those kinds of things in business and in interacting and sociolinguistics it goes a long way to really help us pave the way for us to be able to do business to relate to open doors for us so I can’t go through all of these things but you can get this I’ll put it out online you guys put it out online too because I only have 7 or 8 minutes but how does it impact you? How does it impact you positively or negatively if you want to grow your business if you want to develop? You know we really do have to understand other people from other cultures and how they think believe and act and that’s why we have a panel of cultural experts here today who will help us understand some of those cultures.” (Applause)

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