Not all Mercury managers were receptive to the change, however. Some went along with casual Fridays for a few weeks, then gave up. Others never doffed their more formal attire, viewing the new policy as a victory of carelessness over prudence and an attempt by Merrill to impose its identity on Mercury, whose professional dignity would suffer as a result. In short, the Mercury resisters did not understand the impulse behind the change (head); they could not bring themselves to alter their appearance (body); and they had been in the Mercury environment for so long that they lacked the motivation (heart) to see the experiment through. To put it even more simply, they dreaded being mistaken for Merrill executives.
How would you behave in a similar situation? The sidebar “Diagnosing Your Cultural Intelligence” allows you to assess the three facets of your own cultural intelligence and learn where your relative strengths and weaknesses lie. Attaining a high absolute score is not the objective.
Cultural Intelligence Profiles
Most managers fit at least one of the following six profiles. By answering the questions in the exhibit, you can decide which one describes you best.
The provincial can be quite effective when working with people of similar background but runs into trouble when venturing farther afield. A young engineer at Chevrolet’s truck division received positive evaluations of his technical abilities as well as his interpersonal skills. Soon he was asked to lead a team at Saturn, an autonomous division of GM. He was not able to adjust to Saturn’s highly participative approach to teamwork—he mistakenly assumed it would be as orderly and deferential as Chevy’s. Eventually, he was sent back to Chevy’s truck division.
The analyst methodically deciphers a foreign culture’s rules and expectations by resorting to a variety of elaborate learning strategies. The most common form of analyst realizes pretty quickly he is in alien territory but then ascertains, usually in stages, the nature of the patterns at work and how he should interact with them. Deirdre, for example, works as a broadcast director for a London-based company. Her principal responsibility is negotiating contracts with broadcast media owners. In June 2002, her company decided that all units should adopt a single negotiating strategy, and it was Deirdre’s job to make sure this happened. Instead of forcing a showdown with the managers who resisted, she held one-on-one meetings in which she probed their reasons for resisting, got them together to share ideas, and revised the negotiating strategy to incorporate approaches they had found successful. The revised strategy was more culturally flexible than the original proposal—and the managers chose to cooperate.
The natural relies entirely on his intuition rather than on a systematic learning style. He is rarely steered wrong by first impressions. Donald, a brand manager for Unilever, commented, “As part of my job, I need to judge people from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and understand their needs quickly. When I come into a new situation, I watch everyone for a few minutes and then I get a general sense of what is going on and how I need to act. I’m not really sure how I do it, but it seems to work.” When facing ambiguous multicultural situations that he must take control of, the natural may falter because he has never had to improvise learning strategies or cope with feelings of disorientation.
The ambassador, like many political appointees, may not know much about the culture he has just entered, but he convincingly communicates his certainty that he belongs there. Among the managers of multinational companies we have studied, the ambassador is the most common type. His confidence is a very powerful component of his cultural intelligence. Some of it may be derived from watching how other managers have succeeded in comparable situations. The ambassador must have the humility to know what he doesn’t know—that is, to know how to avoid underestimating cultural differences, even though doing so will inflict a degree of discomfort.
The mimic has a high degree of control over his actions and behavior, if not a great deal of insight into the significance of the cultural cues he picks up. Mimicry definitely puts hosts and guests at ease, facilitates communication, and builds trust. Mimicry is not, however, the same as pure imitation, which can be interpreted as mocking. Ming, a manager at the Shanghai regional power authority, relates, “When I deal with foreigners, I try to adopt their style of speaking and interacting. I find that simple things like keeping the right distance from the other person or making eye contact or speaking English at a speed that matches the other person’s puts them at ease and makes it easier to make a connection. This really makes a difference to newcomers to China because they often are a bit threatened by the place.”
The chameleon possesses high levels of all three CQ components and is a very uncommon managerial type. He or she even may be mistaken for a native of the country. More important, chameleons don’t generate any of the ripples that unassimilated foreigners inevitably do. Some are able to achieve results that natives cannot, due to their insider’s skills and outsider’s perspective. We found that only about 5% of the managers we surveyed belonged in this remarkable category.
One of them is Nigel, a British entrepreneur who has started businesses in Australia, France, and Germany. The son of diplomats, Nigel grew up all over the world. Most of his childhood, however, was spent in Saudi Arabia. After several successes of his own, some venture capitalists asked him to represent them in dealings with the founder of a money-losing Pakistani start-up.
To the founder, his company existed chiefly to employ members of his extended family and, secondarily, the citizens of Lahore. The VCs, naturally, had a different idea. They were tired of losses and wanted Nigel to persuade the founder to close down the business.
Upon relocating to Lahore, Nigel realized that the interests of family and community were not aligned. So he called in several community leaders, who agreed to meet with managers and try to convince them that the larger community of Lahore would be hurt if potential investors came to view it as full of businesspeople unconcerned with a company’s solvency. Nigel’s Saudi upbringing had made him aware of Islamic principles of personal responsibility to the wider community, while his British origins tempered what in another person’s hands might have been the mechanical application of those tenets. Throughout the negotiations, he displayed an authoritative style appropriate to the Pakistani setting. In relatively short order, the managers and the family agreed to terminate operations.
Many managers, of course, are a hybrid of two or more of the types. We discovered in our survey of more than 2,000 managers that even more prevalent than the ambassador was a hybrid of that type and the analyst. One example was a female African-American manager in Cairo named Brenda, who was insulted when a small group of young, well-meaning Egyptian males greeted her with a phrase they’d learned from rap music.
“I turned on my heel, went right up to the group and began upbraiding them as strongly as my Arabic would allow,” she said. “When I’d had my say, I stormed off to meet a friend.”
“After I had walked about half a block, I registered the shocked look on their faces as they listened to my words. I then realized they must have thought they were greeting me in a friendly way. So I went back to talk to the group. They asked me why I was so angry, I explained, they apologized profusely, and we all sat down and had tea and an interesting talk about how the wrong words can easily cause trouble. During our conversation, I brought up a number of examples of how Arabic expressions uttered in the wrong way or by the wrong person could spark an equivalent reaction in them. After spending about an hour with them, I had some new friends.”
Brenda’s narrative illustrates the complexities and the perils of cross-cultural interactions. The young men had provoked her by trying, ineptly, to ingratiate themselves by using a bit of current slang from her native land. Forgetting in her anger that she was the stranger, she berated them for what was an act of cultural ignorance, not malice. Culturally uninformed mimicry got the young men in trouble; Brenda’s—and the men’s—cognitive flexibility and willingness to reengage got them out of it.