CQ – The Leadership Professor

It’s time to add another form of intelligence to the list. We have IQ to measure cognitive intelligence, EQ for emotional intelligence, CQ for cultural intelligence. Why do we not encourage people to enhance their JQ – their capacity to find and express joy through their work? We’d advance their quality of life and their leadership acumen and stamina if we did.

There’s nothing simple about raising your JQ. In the same way you can’t boost your IQ by reading one book, enhancing JQ takes time and effort. Three steps can set the process in motion. (I’ll tackle one today, the others in subsequent posts.)

STEP I: Find your passions, true talents, and contributions. A high JQ isn’t hedonism. Nor is it hakuna matata or a don’t worry-be happy philosophy – although an easy going spirit and the ability to wear life loosely are good life traits to possess.

We raise our JQ as the result of self-reflection and thoughtful experimentation over time that enable us to (a) identify our true talents and passions and (b) find ways to express those. True is the operative word.

We are all good at many things, but our true talents coincide with our deep interests and passions. They energize us with use. Engaging in activities that use them makes time fly. What are your true talents? How can you identify them for yourself?

In their chapter “The Traces of Talent” in my edited book Business Leadership (Jossey-Bass, pp. 79-86), Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton suggest monitoring four areas:

1. spontaneous reactions – the ways you naturally respond to similar situations over time. Rising successfully to the challenges of project organizer in every crisis, for example, tells you something about your organizational and executive talents.

2. yearnings – things that have fascinated you from an early age. Architect Frank Gehry remembers building avant guard wooden structures at age 4 from wood scrapes on the floor of his father’s hardware store. At 10, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were meeting regularly at school to plan their creative projects. Picasso was in adult art school by age 13 and loving it.

3. rapid learnings – things that come quickly and powerfully. Matisse was a sickly law clerk when his mother gave him a box of paints to pass the time. A new world opened for him, and he never looked back. He filled his days with paining and drawing from then on and was accepted into Paris’s most prestigious art school four years later.

4. deep satisfaction – consistent good feelings from an action. In neurobiological language, this is a physiological response to the use of your strongest synaptic connections. Gregg Breinberg, music director of the PS 22 Chorus, and Gustavo Dudamel of the LA Phil (discussed in previous posts) are good examples of this.

We alone know our true talents. We need time and a process to find them — and the confidence to believe in what we discover.

Sometimes advice from others is helpful: it can give us an outside perspective on ourselves. But be forewarned: not always. It may encourage us to short-cut self-discovery or be unduly influenced by the contributions important others want us to make. “You can’t make money with an art degree, so major in business.” “Be a teacher. You’ll have summers off with your children.” “You’re good at math. Take a job on Wall Street where bonuses are still big despite the economy.”

A joyless life is one spent convincing ourselves that we should like what others value in us more than who we really are.

Cultural intelligence is key in a multicultural world. The skills are as helpful in navigating a multinational as they are any where in today’s diverse global world. Organizations, groups, professions, nations, ethnic groups all have their own cultures. Even facilitating conversations between different groups or divisions in your own organization requires strong cultural intelligence.

Consider, for example, the divide that can exist between engineers and sales folks in many large organizations. Difference language, values, training, expectations, goals, worldview, behaviors, practices. Learning to diagnose and move comfortably and ably between cultures is a skill to be treasured.

The idea of multiple intelligence dates back to the early 1980s and the work of Howard Gardner. Gardner proposed that a single general capacity that every individual has – one that could be measured by IQ tests and the like – was too limited for the reality of the human experience. Individuals are unique in the portrait of their diverse skills and strengths and in the different kinds of intelligence that underpins each. A star athlete knows and uses different knowledge and skills than a great artist or a Nobel prize winning scientist. Gardner proposed seven intelligences: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spacial, body-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

In the 1990s, Daniel Goleman broadened interpersonal intelligence into the idea of emotional intelligence.

Ten year later, Christopher Earley and Soon Ang popularized the concept of cultural intelligence (CQ): the ability to understand someone’s gestures and behaviors in the way that person’s colleagues and group-mates would.

Bottom-line, strong cultural intelligence is the capacity to determine the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, behaviors, and practices that characterizes a group, institution, or organization. That’s not an easy task. CQ is not stereotyping or equating the idiosyncrasies of an individual from a cultural group as characteristics of the entire group.

Those with high CQ are akin to good anthropologists with strong ethnographic skills. They look, study, discern, watch over time and situation, compare — and suspend judgment as they work. They note differences and determine the meaning of behaviors from those within the culture who know.

So how does one increase cultural intelligence? Become more open to (and even intuitive in) teasing out the appropriate responses and understandings in a cross-cultural situation? Remain comfortable while knowing that despite best efforts to decipher gestures, language, and behavior that you will never be able to learn, know, or plan for everything? Mistakes will happen – and that’s OK.

Building CQ involves cultural studies and learning about your own and others cultures. There’s a clear cognitive component in CQ. However, just knowing about a culture doesn’t mean you’ll be comfortable in it or have the courage and motivation to adjust body movement and language to mirror someone very different.

That’s where experimentation and practice come in. Accept that we all have our own brand of CQ and that like learning a new musical instrument, practice will expand skills and capacities.

Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski studied 2000 managers from 60 different countries and identified six different portraits of CQ, each emphasizing different combinations of natural skills, strengths, and experiences. They found:

1. The Provincial with predispositions for the comfort of predictability of the known

2. The Analyst with good learning, planning, and environmental scanning skills

3. The Natural with strong intuitive capacities

4. The Ambassador with confidence, as well as motivation and behaviors that convey “I belong”

5. The Mimic with abilities to sense how to mirror actions and engage in the cultural dance

6. The Chameleon with skills and orientations that draw from all of the portraits .

So what’s your current style? Which portrait best fits your approach to cultural differences? How’s your motivation and what’s your plan for growth and development?