What's Your CQ?

“Coaching from a cultural perspective allows the unleashing of additional human potential by systematically tapping into the richness of cultural diversity, into the wisdom that lies in alternative cultural perspectives.”
—Philippe Rosinski, MCC

Recently, my client—a vice president of a global manufacturing company—lamented, “My daughter now calls me ‘The Telecon Man,’” referring to the incessant number of teleconferences he has to make at home, in addition to his punishing schedule of jet-setting around the globe. I could be coaching him via Skype when he’s in Tokyo this week, or Mumbai the following week or face-to-face in Shanghai the next month.

In this age of instant connectivity, we live in a world seemingly without boundaries. Globalization has changed our executive clientele demographics to international road warriors, transnational navigators and global executives who work with cross-cultural and diverse teams just about everywhere on earth. Others are expatriates working in foreign countries on short-term assignments with families in tow.

This phenomenon has helped to internationalize and legitimize coaching as an effective intervention to help global executives adapt and thrive in new and foreign environments. In addition to traditional pre-departure training, global companies are increasingly adding cross-cultural coaching as part of their onboarding programs for global executives to quickly land on their feet and perform effectively in these foreign terrains. When this happens, we get the privilege to connect with clients from different countries and cultures and
diverse backgrounds.

Our foundational coaching skills, such as empathy, building rapport, listening, questioning and challenging will, of course, continue to form the bedrock of our coaching repertoire; however, by themselves they are simply not enough to deal with this new breed of clients who work and live in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.

To coach in a VUCA world, we need to build up our own cross-cultural competence so that we can coach more effectively across cultures and, frankly, stay relevant.

Working with clients who are not of the same national, geographic, ethnic, sociopolitical or even generational backgrounds necessitates that we don our “bifocal” cross-cultural lens to help our clients recognize their own cultural biases and address the stereotypes and perceptions they encounter from locals in their new environments.

From Minimizing to Leveraging Cultural Differences

We tend to minimize the impact that culture has in coaching relationships and the quality of coaching conversations. In a recent study I conducted, I interviewed 5 experienced Executive Coaches from the USA, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and China to understand how they coach clients of different cultures. None of them used a different approach or model to engage their cross-cultural clients, but all said that they should. However, they also said they believe there is no one reliable model to help them coach cross-culturally. A few of them responded that “people are just people underneath all the differences.”

I beg to differ. If you take a look at Milton Bennett’s 1998 intercultural sensitivity development model (below), it illustrates that people’s attitude toward cultural differences could span from being ethnocentric (seeing the world through my culture) to ethnorelative (seeing the world through multicultural perspectives).

I like how Philippe Rosinski, MCC, takes Bennett’s model further beyond intercultural sensitivity to add a seventh stage of development, leveraging cultural differences, to create positive synergies and unity in the midst of diversity. This, in my opinion, is the sweet spot for coaches whose mandate is to help our global executives reach a stage of adaptation that not just allows them to survive in new and foreign environments, but to thrive and succeed.

While it is unrealistic for us to aspire to be interculturalists overnight, we can strive to increase our cultural awareness and develop our cross-cultural competence to begin integrating basic cultural components into our coaching conversations. When we become more aware of our own cultural orientation and the associated emotional filters that come with our cultural baggage, we begin to connect more authentically with our clients and focus on their culture-specific issues and goals.

Cross-cultural Competence and CQ

Our cross-cultural competence can now be measured, evaluated and quantified like IQ or EQ. It is called the “Cultural Intelligence quotient,” or CQ. CQ is touted as the “x-factor” in differentiating a successful global leader from an ineffective one in navigating through cross-cultural terrains.

Soon Ang and Linn Van Dyne define CQ as the “capability to adapt effectively across national, ethnic and organizational cultures.” Researchers in the last decade have proven that CQ significantly increases cross-cultural adaptation, work performance and business outcomes in the cross-cultural workplace.

CQ has 4 dimensions, interplaying to be effective in cross-cultural situations:

• CQ Knowledge (CQ1) “What do you know?” (the cultural information you know, such as local cultures, norms and practices)
• CQ Strategy (CQ2) “What do you plan to do?” (your higher-level thinking processes that help you to pull together your cultural information and past cross-cultural experiences to form your plan of action, your repertoire and your perspective)
• CQ Drive/Motivation (CQ3) “Why would you want to do it?” (a look at your motivations that ultimately will drive your responses)
• CQ Action/Behaviors (CQ4) “What do you do?” (your outward actions and responses to adapt effectively in a cross-cultural situation)

At the heart of this model is CQ Motivation (CQ3), our inner drive to engage positively in cross-cultural situations, question our cultural prejudices and biases, and reframe our mindsets to incorporate a more ethnorelative, multicultural perspective.

The Role of CQ in Cross-cultural Coaching

The four-step CQ cycle (shown on the previous page) illustrates how coaches can, firstly, leverage their own CQ to bring a cross-cultural perspective into the coaching process.

The invitation is for us to stretch ourselves out of our own cultural comfort zone and cross over to “the other side” by questioning our own mental cultural schemas comprising cultural stereotypes, biases, prejudices and assumptions, and remain open to reframing our schemas, to fully make sense of our cross-cultural experiences. Only then can we connect our cross-cultural journey experiences and stories to those of our diverse clients. How well we leverage our CQ in our coaching repertoire will influence the rapport and emotional trust we can build with our cross-cultural clients.

Learning CQ in the Coaching Process

Of course, not everyone can just switch their cultural lens on and off with equal dexterity. Our CQ is dependent on the depth and breadth of our multicultural experiences and our own psychological makeup.

Coaches with a higher CQ tend to be willing to challenge and reflect on the accuracy of their own mental cultural schemas and worldviews. They are also more willing to recalibrate their perceptions of the clients they work with and adjust their coaching approach accordingly.

That being said, coaches who are genuinely motivated to learn how to bridge more effectively across cultures will tap into their CQ Motivation (CQ3) to drive their cross-cultural learning and experimentation. CQ, unlike IQ, can be learned and developed over time.

Our job is to help our clients uncover their hidden competitive commitments related to their own limiting beliefs and constraints placed by their own cultural setting. We help them experiment with new habits, changing the way they view their foreign environments to form new assumptions and beliefs.

However, our coaching conversations are heavily influenced by our own cultural backgrounds, which in turn impact our emotional filters. We need to recognize that despite our valiant efforts to stay “neutral,” our cultural selves cannot be divorced from taking part in the coaching conversations at multiple levels of consciousness.

Therefore, it is important for us to also engage in experiential learning and experimentation to address our own cultural blind spots and improve our own cross-cultural competence before we can help our clients make sense of their VUCA environments and their internal struggles to adapt.

I truly believe that both the coach’s and client’s potential are unleashed when we coach from a cross-cultural perspective. We just need to remember to have our “bifocal” lens on so that, while we stay authentic to our “cultural self,” we simultaneously have our clients’ cultural selves in plain view, and together, we leverage and celebrate our cultural differences to make our diverse world a better place to work, play and live in.

© 2016 Fenny Ang. All Rights Reserved.