Why CQ is more important for global team managers than IQ or EQ.

There was a time when we thought that a high IQ, our ability to solve problems and use logic, was the main characteristic of all successful leaders and managers. 

Then, through working with a number of leaders with high IQs, we learned about the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ) - our ability to understand and manage our own emotions, as well as respond appropriately to the emotions of others. 

Emotional intelligence is crucial: many studies have uncovered that, more than average, the most successful leaders have a high IQ and EQ. The combination of excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to establish and maintain relationships with your team, clients, colleagues, and stakeholders, goes hand in hand with success. 

But here’s the issue: emotional intelligence is highly dependent on understanding the social rules of the game and reacting to others’ cues. It needs to be upgraded as the acceptable rules, cues and behaviour change worldwide. That’s why working with people from different cultural backgrounds can cause a sudden and complete shake-up that most managers are not equipped to deal with without additional skills and training.

In over 25 years of doing business with global team managers and training them, I have learned that even today, most of them need to remember the most critical factor for their success with teams from diverse backgrounds: cultural intelligence, CQ. 

In this article, I will introduce some of the characteristics that help you upgrade your skills and mindset to include cultural intelligence. After that, I’ll explain how you can start the process of strengthening your EQ + CQ combination.

“Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.”

 - Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

If you work with multicultural teams, you probably already recognise that it takes more than a high IQ and EQ to manage your team successfully in today’s diverse global business environment. 

The reason is that the characteristics, behaviour, and leadership style that make you successful in your own cultural environment often work best with people who mostly come from the same or similar cultural background. Your greatest strengths and tested methods can unexpectedly become counterproductive in a multicultural setting. This occurs when you interact with team members with different expectations of effective leadership, clients with different standards for great presentations or communication styles, or stakeholders who anticipate different approaches to demonstrating respect, for example. 

Unfortunately, all you do as a manager and leader - managing, planning, delegating tasks, communicating, giving and receiving feedback, and controlling projects - are subject to cultural expectations. 

These expectations govern what we see as the right or wrong behaviour by different people in different positions. Managers with high EQ are used to consider these reactions and expectations efficiently. However, when collaborating with multicultural team members, the same rules may only sometimes apply. 

But upgrading your emotional intelligence to cultural intelligence when collaborating with culturally diverse teams is crucial because the ideas of appropriate and non-appropriate are often deeply rooted in our cultural values. As a result, value-based cultural issues trigger stronger emotional responses than almost any other aspect of our multicultural work lives.

Without CQ, your EQ can lead you to wrong conclusions or solutions. Let’s look at two examples:

1. Micromanagement or supportive attention: frequent checks by the team leader can be taken as positive attention and as a sign that the team member’s work is important OR it can be taken as negative micro-management and distrust of their ability to do their work, which ends up feeling utterly demotivated.

2. Too much or too little information: a team member might want to get a detailed understanding of the task they are working on before they feel confident to start OR they might think going through too much detail before you get to the work itself is a frustrating waste of time. Get it wrong, and one might be unable to start while the other has lost motivation and feels the work is managed badly.

The good news is that a culturally intelligent mindset and approach allow you to detect when things are going wrong and allow you to understand the cultural factors at play. It doesn’t mean you can always get everything right, but your team will appreciate you demonstrating flexibility and an open mind.  

CQ involves open-mindedness, cultural awareness, and adaptability, enabling you to navigate diverse international environments.

Upgrading your emotional intelligence with cultural competence: a path to excelling as a global team manager

The first step to developing CQ and upgrading your emotional intelligence to lead your diverse team effectively is to choose the skills and characteristics to work on that have business value. 

In my experience, the most effective mindset factors you can work on to navigate cultural nuances in business are within three areas:

• Curiosity and openness - being open to diverse perspectives, avoiding being judgmental
• Self-awareness - knowing yourself and your responses to situations, recognising your biases and the impact of your cultural background to your values
• Growth mindset - building your knowledge of different cultures and truly developing your cultural competence 

Several characteristics play into CQ, like the ability to flip perspectives, tolerance for ambiguity, confidence, risk-taking, mindfulness, restraint of your cultural gut-feeling reactions, flexibility, and resilience. But these three are the basic areas to build on. 

If you can harness your innate desire to learn about others and the diverse world around you that your team inhabits, you will naturally start asking more questions like “I wonder why…”

Then you can develop the ability to recognise subtle cultural differences, not just the obvious ones, and understand their potential implications. Self-awareness helps when you wonder why your EQ radar is off target. It leads to more questions about how to improve, and you begin discovering your personal biases (we all have them). 

Knowing how your  perception of the world influences your behaviour and communication, you can also start understanding other ways of looking at problems, strengths, motivations, and work.

Harnessing the power of EQ + CQ in your work

Emotional intelligence or EQ surpasses academic qualifications, professional experience, or technical expertise. It embodies a set of skills anyone can nurture.

 - Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

This quote from Daniel Goleman says it all: not only you, as a global team manager, but also your team members can nurture these elemental forms of intelligence. 

You can do it by making the characteristics of CQ and EQ an essential part of how you work, or you can acquire people skills training that helps you measure where your team is now and then build action steps and a strategy based on that analysis. 

Either way, the next step after reading this article is to bring it into reality and start harnessing the power of the combination of cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence in your work today. 

Whether you want to do that individually as a manager and leader or develop how your whole team works together, we can help you implement this powerful combination to improve team performance and add to your toolbox as a leader and manager. 

You don’t have to solve every problem and face each conflict or the friction in the air alone or wonder what adding curiosity and openness as a manager looks like.

Meet with our team’s development strategists to identify a personalized plan for your team’s performance in 30 minutes. No Catch. No surprise pitch. 

Simply real honest advice from global team experts. 

Book Your Team Strategy Session by e-mailing [email protected] .