Why cultural intelligence is a key capability for effective communications

Sarah Black, Founder of Athru Communications, and CIPR Fellow invites us all to take a minute to consider the value and potential of Cultural Intelligence.

Take a moment to think about all the people you’ve talked to, texted, emailed, met or jumped on a video call with today.

Think about your similarities and differences.

Some of you will have worked across geographical borders, regional differences and languages. You may have worked across very different approaches to and understanding of PR and communications depending on someone’s organisational culture or professional background. There’s a good chance you will have worked across different generations, possibly different educational backgrounds and experiences. And those are just the types of differences that you might know about.

Most days, we are all navigating different cultures and lines of difference. Cultures can be based on geography, organisation, professional function, teams, identities and even family background.

Our ability to communicate effectively across these cultures is fundamental to our success, whether that’s growing employee engagement, building more inclusive workplaces or building an organisation’s reputation.

What are the challenges of communicating across cultures?

Often working across cultures can feel almost effortless because we might share similar values, preferences, beliefs and assumptions. But often, there can be challenges.

You might have experienced some of these.

• Deadlines: you might understand ‘as soon as possible’ to mean tomorrow at the latest but to someone with a different cultural understanding of time, this might mean next week because that’s as soon as they feel they can do it.

• Feedback: very direct feedback may be seen as constructive and useful in your organisation but perceived as rude and inappropriate in another one.

• Leadership: in some cultural contexts, it is acceptable to challenge a senior member of the team in a meeting. It is seen as part of productive brainstorming, idea generation and problem solving. In other contexts, it may be seen as challenging and wildly inappropriate.

• Misunderstanding: even when everyone is speaking the same language, there can be misunderstandings because not everyone speaks the same ‘jargon’ or understands idioms, expressions or metaphors in the same way.

• Communication preferences: you love to email, they love to chat. You might be happy to talk on the phone but they would never pick up and dial. Some cultural contexts tend to lean towards very informal, chatty styles, others will tend towards highly formal language and style. It can be easy to misinterpret the intention behind these differences and that can lead to more misunderstanding.

• Relationships: in some cultural contexts, meetings are straight down to business with no small talk or chat. Wanting to talk about the weather or get to know about a colleague or client’s family is seen as a waste of time. But in other cultures, not spending time on exactly these things and focusing on achieving key tasks is almost disrespectful!

While these challenges can seem minor on their own, the implications for our effectiveness are not.

There can be implications for our ability to build trust with key stakeholders, to negotiate and influence communications decisions appropriately. Our ability to perform and to lead a team to success may be compromised.

Harnessing the potential of cultural intelligence

We cannot hope to learn every detail about every cultural difference or how it might impact individuals’ behaviours. And research tells us that knowledge alone is not enough to be effective in working across cultures.

What research does demonstrate is that developing our cultural intelligence or CQ can help us become more effective in working across cultures. In fact, it is widely recognised as the best predictor of our potential to succeed in culturally diverse situations.

The good news is that cultural intelligence is something that you can assess and build – it is a bit like a muscle. With care, effort and continuing exercise, it can become stronger. Based on decades of research and global assessment data, CQ can help us build the skills, insights and practices to recognise what is happening as we interact across cultures and lines of difference and adapt so that we can communicate more effectively.

In addition, stronger CQ has been linked to improved creativity and performance in culturally diverse teams. There are also connections to more effective leadership and to reduced anxiety when working across cultures and differences. There is also a relationship between cultural intelligence and improving psychological safety, which is vital to creating more inclusive workplaces and communities. And it doesn’t need you to be traveling or living outside your home culture, you can build CQ without leaving home or working globally. You can read more about this research here.

The potential to be CQ leaders

As communications professionals, my theory is that we might have a bit of an advantage when it comes to building cultural intelligence. We are skilled in adapting communications tactics to suit different media platforms and audiences. We have to understand and address the needs of different audiences and stakeholders. In line with CIPR’s focus on evaluation and measurement, we prioritise learning from what has worked, or not, and adapting accordingly.

As we seek to make the case for communications as critical to organisational performance in an increasingly multicultural and complex world, cultural intelligence may be the key to our success.