Nanyang MBA

CQ: How culturally intelligent leaders can shape global teams

For MBA students at Nanyang Business School (NBS), familiarising themselves with different cultures is not just ideal—it’s essential. Today, they’re participating in a culturally-diverse MBA cohort; tomorrow, they’ll lead their own multicultural teams in their post-MBA careers.

NBS teachers like Dr. Catherine Peyrols Wu provide MBA students with a guide to navigating these unpredictable cultural currents.

Dr. Wu and her colleagues at NBS’s award-winning Center for Leadership and Cultural Intelligence (CLCI) have pioneered a structured approach to navigating and addressing cultural diversity. Their approach centres around a concept called cultural intelligence, or “CQ”.

“CQ is a skill possessed by people who can adapt well to other cultures, and is missing in those who don’t adapt so well [to multicultural situations],” says Dr. Wu.

“People who have CQ are better at making judgments and decisions in a culturally diverse environment,” Dr. Wu tells us. “Decision makers who have better CQ will be able to think more deeply about the cultural implications of their decisions.”

A firm foundation in cultural intelligence

Dr. Wu’s cultural intelligence course is one of the first classes taught to Nanyang MBA students. Students take her CQ class in their first trimester to study the mechanics of cultural interaction, and learn new techniques to work with classmates from unfamiliar cultures in their highly diverse MBA cohorts.

“The course is designed to come very early in the MBA experience,” Dr. Wu tells us. “[It’s taught first] because cultural intelligence is a life skill, like communication or teamwork. After the course, students can take advantage of the culturally diverse environment of their MBA to hone their CQ skills to a professional level. ”

Most MBA students already possess some cultural intelligence, even if they don’t have a fixed definition or meaning in mind. “Culture is soft and immaterial,” Dr. Wu explains. “Unless you’ve experienced a cross-cultural situation that went wrongly, you probably won’t even think about it.”

The consequences of leading without CQ can be extremely costly. One of Dr. Wu’s students worked for the Cambodia branch of a China PRC-based company, which had run into a PR crisis due to clashes in working habits.

The management was “used to a very strong and homogeneous management and work culture,” she recalls her student saying. “We thought about things like regulations and permits… nobody thought that the local culture would be different, that the workers would have different work habits, or would reject our management style.”

Drive, knowledge, strategy, action

The first dimension is Drive, which refers to the motivation to learn about other cultures. This comes naturally to people who are curious and open to working with people from different backgrounds. Someone with more experience in multicultural interactions may also possess a higher level of self-confidence navigating different cultures, which may help sustain their motivation and efforts.

Knowledge, the second dimension, refers to what people know about other cultures and how they learn even without any prior awareness of the culture. Such people often use mental models that allow them to quickly identify differences between their own culture and other cultures.

The third dimension, Strategy, refers to how people use their knowledge of different cultures to make sense of other people in cross-cultural situations; whilst the fourth dimension, Action, refers to how people can change their behaviour to match what is appropriate in other cultures.

Putting the framework to use

These dimensions come into play in a variety of real-world situations. Dr. Wu provides an example based on experience: MBA students from India have a very assertive mode of communication, while students from Japan communicate using a more respectful, structured approach.

“These students have fundamentally different norms for communication,” she tells us. “That causes a lot of tension and stress…. If your culture is very structured and polite, and the other side does not comply with that, you will judge them and think, ‘These people are not respectful’.”

Dr. Wu states that culture is fundamentally neutral, but most people lack the cultural awareness to perceive the cultural differences behind the behaviour. “We cannot say they are good or bad—just different ways of operating in different cultures,” Dr. Wu says. “Most people don’t see culture, so they judge and dislike each other based on personality and other reasons.”

In a leadership setting, this often manifests as unconscious bias. Vanessa Barros, research scientist at Nanyang’s CLCI and author of the book Don’t Mess With My Professionalism!, found that when executives fail to recognise the cultural differences behind instances of miscommunication, they tend to blame it on the other’s lack of professionalism. “We don’t recognise that we make wrong attributions to behaviour, or we ignore unique conditions that shape the experience of a group of people,” Dr. Wu explains.

CQ’s four dimensions and framework can be applied in these situations to help one navigate multicultural interactions more effectively.

For instance, the Knowledge dimension allows you to understand that cultures have different styles of communicating. Strategy allows you to notice your biases and correct them, and to incorporate cultural differences into your understanding of the situation.

In Dr. Wu’s situation, culturally intelligent students may recognise the need to adjust the way they communicate to people from different cultures, or may consider explaining their cultural communication style to their classmates. “You find a solution to create a new form of culture that allows this team of Indian and Japanese students to work together without disliking each other,” she explains.

Why leaders need to embrace cultural intelligence at work

In today’s business environment where even rank-and-file staff join global Zoom meetings, Dr. Wu says that managers should create a culturally open environment in their workplace by integrating CQ into their management techniques.

“When it comes to team culture, it’s always down to the manager,” Dr. Wu tells us, citing a Google study that showed psychological safety as the first predictor of a great team. “And the psychological safety of a team is determined by the manager…. Because of their power, a manager sets the tone and shows people what behaviour are acceptable and which ones are not.”

Dr. Wu advises leaders to be very intentional about prioritising developing cross-cultural skills in their teams. This means pairing people from different countries and cultures to work together on projects, and having conversations around the value that diversity brings.

“It’s through this real experience of engaging with the person on a daily basis, of having a goal to achieve together, that people can really develop, translate this theory of cultural intelligence, into the practice of [negotiating] those cultural differences,” Dr. Wu says.

Promoting harmony in the global village

At NBS, MBA graduates are shaped to thrive and lead in global environments, with a deeper understanding of various cultures. It’s a recognition of a more globally interconnected business environment—one where you “don’t need to find talented expertise within your region—you can find it anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection,” as Dr. Wu says.

What makes Nanyang’s MBA programme stand out are the concepts like CQ taught to our MBA cohorts that equip our future leaders to shift to more inclusive approaches. These approaches empower them to maintain productivity and smooth interpersonal relationships in a cross-cultural, increasingly global environment.

Find more details about our MBA programmes here: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/business/admissions/graduate-studies/nanyang-mba.

The Nanyang MBA is a flexible 12-month or 18-month programme designed to fuel your growth into a future-ready leader equipped with the skills needed to excel in a global, digital environment. The programme aims to develop impactful, culturally adept leaders who embrace the connection between business, technology, and innovation to excel in global environments and adapt to each new wave of digital change.