A Quick Dip into Cultural Intelligence - with Trisha Carter

Sarah: Hi everyone. Welcome to A Quick Dip, a series of short conversations about culture, communications, and change. I'm Sarah Black, founder of Athru Communications. I'm the communication strategist who is passionate about making sure you're not endlessly creating comms content, you're actually starting conversations that matter to your organisation, and that's what this podcast is about.

It's a series of conversations, introducing ideas to help make your communications activity more culturally relevant, more inclusive, and more effective.

And this week we're taking a quick tip into cultural intelligence with the help of Tricia Carter.

Hi Tricia.

Trisha: Hey Sarah. How are you doing?

Sarah: I'm good. Thank you. It's great to have you here. Would you like to introduce yourself to everybody listening?

Trisha: Sure. I'm Trisha Carter and as you were introducing the podcast and my first thought was, how much of a kiwi am I gonna be here?

Because, um, I'm a New Zealander, I was born in New Zealand and so I would say this is a quick dip, which is, you know, sort of different from the Australian in me, cuz I live in Australia now, where I'd say this is a quick dip. So, you know, I'm just not too sure which persona I should take on here.

I'm an organisational psychologist and I have been working with organisations and people moving around the world for the last 20 plus years, helping them to work well with people who aren't necessarily similar to them. And so to work well with people from different cultures is the majority of the situations that I work with people. Also helping people from a team's perspective too, to have diverse teams that work well together. So that's me and what I do.

Sarah: Fabulous. Thank you. And I believe you're also a CQ fellow. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Trisha: Oh, I am too. So this year, uh, one of the exciting things that I'm involved in is CQ Fellows, which is a mastermind group, set up by David Livermore. He's written a number of books in the cultural intelligence field and has done some of the research and set up some of the research areas.

And so as part of that mastermind group, we all have a project. And so I have a project that I'm gonna be working on throughout this year, supported by some fantastic people and Dave himself. And we have a retreat coming up in Singapore that I'm very much looking forward to as well.

So I'm gonna be stretching my mental muscles, to dive deeper into cultural intelligence, which as you know, is a field that I've been using for a number of different years, for a number of years to help people really build their capabilities in dealing with people from different cultures.

Sarah: Brilliant and we'll pop a link, I think, in the show notes to David Livermore's site so people can get, because he's got tons of books and resources and fabulous stuff. And read more about the fellows.

So, Trisha, what is cultural intelligence?

Trisha: So it's a capability. It's one of the forms of intelligence that we can have, and it's the capability to work or to be effective. Normally, I talk about it from the work context because that's where I'm meeting with people. So I talk about working well in situations of diversity.

So when you’re working in a situation where other people are different to you, so it might be a different culture, it could be a different age group, different gender. So that sort of situation where suddenly you look around and you realise that people think differently to you, people operate differently to you and you need to adapt. And so CQ is the ability to operate effectively in situations of diversity.

Sarah: Brilliant. And it's sort of an obvious question, but why does that matter so much in today's workplace for a leader or a communicator to be culturally intelligent? What's that look like as well?

Trisha: Yeah, I mean, there are so many situations that call for cultural intelligence, not just, you know, when you're, you have a diverse team with people who might come from different places around the world or, you know, have different backgrounds.

But also, you know, I was listening to a podcast the other day about the geopolitical risks that we're facing, and they were talking about the fact that leaders need to be able to take people on a journey to recognize the value in different, different people groups because, as a globe, we appear to be going more nationalist.

And so if you're a global organisation, then the people from one country, the risk is that they settle into a silo. And so you need to be able to take your people on that journey to value each other and to respect and to work well with people who, who aren't, who don't share the same nationality, who aren't compatriots, if you like.

And so recognizing that, that we are. Coming from different places and in many organisations we span different countries around the globe. And so we need to be able to get on and to work well together and that's the way that we get, you know, the best job done. That's the way we work best together.

Sarah: Yeah. And how, um, I suppose, what would a culturally intelligent leader look like in terms of behaviour? I know that depends very much on context, but are there some kind of core principles or attributes?

Trisha: Well, I sometimes think you probably know somebody, you know, they walk into a room, you know, imagine the sort of business room with people buzzing around the place and they're very comfortable walking up to any of the groups of people.

They're comfortable walking up to the young hip crowd. They're comfortable walking over to the tech nerdy crowd. They're comfortable walking to the people who are all speaking a different language. These people are comfortable relating to people, whoever they are. Um, and they have that curiosity and interest that says, oh, I wonder, you know, tell me about you.

You know, tell me about your life. Tell me about your experience or, or your background. So that they are the people who have curiosity and openness. And they might have different languages. They certainly will understand some of the similarities and differences between different cultures, and they'll have that ability to recognize if somebody's operating slightly differently and they'll be able to adapt to that.

You know, they're not the person that will be standing too close to you and making you feel uncomfortable if you are accustomed to, you know, having a little bit more distance between yourself and somebody else. They are the person who will put you at your ease because they'll be able to adapt well to you.

They're also the person that in a negotiation, they will be able to come out with the right words and the right arguments. Um, they'll know whether to go hard or go soft or build the relationship or drive down on price. Whereas many of us haven't quite got those skills in all those different situations, but a leader with high cultural intelligence will have those abilities.

Sarah: If this is the first time that a listener and in communications or in business leadership has heard of cultural intelligence, where can they start to build that capacity and that capability in terms of even just thinking about it. If they're realising that they're mono culturally, they've been, you know, not thinking about the differences.

Trisha: Well, the good thing about CQ is that it is, as an intelligence, it is something you can grow and it has four sorts of sub capabilities. And so often when I'm working with people, whether I'm coaching or training, I might just be running through in my head, how do, how do they, you know, how are they showing up, if you like, on these four different areas?

And so the first one is around drive, which is motivation. And so that's that openness, that willingness, that, that motivation to be with people who are different to you. You know, cuz we always meet people. There are some who just just wanna be with their own kind and so they don't really have that drive.

If you perhaps are like that, but you'd like to be different, so maybe you could think about somebody who's a little bit different to you and you could ask some questions and learn more about them. So, you can begin by thinking, oh, I wonder what their life is like, and then ask some questions to try and understand a bit more.

I think for many of us, we do have that drive and for often we can see, you know, the benefits and so that can increase the drive. So, you know, we all know about, uh, the benefits of diversity and the fact that you know, the more diverse a team, um, the more innovative it can be. And so we can at least if we can't, if we don't just have that sort of internal drive, then maybe we can think, well, I, I need to learn this from, from a business perspective because it's what I want to do.

I want to get an innovative team. So that's sort of the motivation level. And then there's, you know, some knowledge that you can build and you can think, how is this person similar or different to what I've experienced previously. And so that might be about culture, it might be about age, it could be gender, but you're thinking about the similarities and differences.

And so what do I need to understand? And so if it's somebody's background, you know, you can ask questions or you can go and read things. I was discussing with somebody recently and, and we had a point about history and we both immediately went to Google it. And just that increased understanding of a historical part about another country then increased both of our recognition.

Oh, really? You know, so, so sometimes learning how a country or a culture is similar or different can help us in relating to people. And then the third component is what's called CQ strategy. And that's a little bit around how can I be more aware? And so you might have heard people speak from a leadership perspective about being able to take that balcony view.

And this is a little bit like that from a cultural perspective, being able to sit above your own culture because so often we are just embedded within our own culture and we've never really unpacked it to ask, why do I believe what I believe? you know, how have I been shaped? And so the ability to sit above that and recognize how other people are relating to us.

Or maybe what's motivating them. And that recognition will then enable you to relate better, to deal better in that situation. And the last one is behaviour. So we've done motivation, knowledge, strategy and then behaviour. And so behaviour is sometimes you've gotta do things differently. So you know, just the most basic thing, like how do you greet?

So do you shake hands? Well, if you shake hands, is it a soft handshake or is it a firm handshake? And is it just with one hand or does another hand go on top? And you know, so all of the little things that you can adapt so that somebody feels greeted well by you, so that somebody feels at ease with you, because that's really the whole purpose.

To help people to feel like they can build a relationship with you. And so you're helping people to feel at ease, uh, and sometimes there are things you need to do differently to enable that to happen, whether it's speaking slower, speaking faster, toning down your volume, toning it up. We spoke before about the distance you might stand.

Sometimes it's about eye contact. There are lots of different subtle behavioural differences, and the more we can learn about them, sometimes it's, you can observe them before you even start to do them, which is helpful as well. Yeah. So those are the four key areas, the, the motivation, the knowledge, the strategy in terms of thinking, and then the behaviour.

Sarah: Brilliant. Thank you, Trisha. Um, any great resources for anybody who wants to dive a little bit more into this? They can obvious go to your website, which we'll put in the show notes. Um, anything else?

Trisha: Okay. Yes, that's good. I think you referenced David Livermore, he has some good books, so that would be good as well.

And I will also give you the website for the CQ centre and they have some excellent resources along the more nerdy research based type things for those of you who may like that sort of background as well.

Sarah: Brilliant. Trisha, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have you and on the show, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Trisha: Fantastic. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah: If you've enjoyed today's conversation and maybe wanted to join it, then please do get in touch so that we can talk more. I'd love to hear from you. You can sign up from my newsletter by finding me on LinkedIn and let's connect and continue the conversation, thank you.