Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 8 - Cultural Intelligence

The Dirty Chai Podcast discusses Carice Anderson's book, "Intelligence Isn't Enough," focusing on the chapter about cultural intelligence. The host highlights how intelligence was emphasized in school and university, but as one enters the workplace, the ability to adapt and operate within an organization becomes crucial. The book aims to provide guidance for black professionals navigating the corporate world. Cultural intelligence involves recognizing and adapting to different organizational cultures. The host emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting cultural differences to build credibility and succeed in the workplace. Examples are given, such as greeting customs and tone-deaf marketing campaigns, to illustrate the impact of cultural intelligence. Overall, the book highlights the value of diversity and the need to overcome cultural biases for effective workplace interactions. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Chai Podcast with me, your host Chia. And this week we're talking about Carice Anderson's book, Intelligence Isn't Enough. I'm not going to talk about the whole book because that is impossible, but what I am going to do is talk about my favorite chapter in the book, which speaks to cultural intelligence, or what she calls cultural quotient. I enjoyed this book in particular because the title of it speaks to what we are trying to do here. The title of the book is Intelligence Isn't Enough. And as I have developed my own career and watched other people's careers develop, I've realized that intelligence was the primary thing when we were going through school. If you went through a school similar to mine, where passing and passing well was everything, sport, etc., those were secondary things, and things that could be immediately forfeit if you weren't doing well at academics. Then when you go to university, it's more of the same. You need to pass, you need to attend classes, etc., etc., then you get your degree. Then you enter the workplace thinking that the same measure will apply to determining your success. But in fact, as you progress, and as you grow older, and as you start to build a career, you start to realize that your intelligence becomes less and less the primary thing. And your ability to operate within an organization, or whether that organization is yours to run, or run by other people, becomes the key thing to your success. And that's what Carice is trying to do here when she speaks, when she writes in her book Intelligence Isn't Enough, Sublime, A Black Professional's Guide to Thriving in the Workplace. And what she's pointing to, as I understand it, which I think is quite true, that a lot of black people, for many reasons, are making it further and further up the corporate ladder than has traditionally been the case. And whereas other cultures have had years of passed down knowledge and experience on how to do this, that hasn't been the case so much for black people. So a lot of people are blundering through figuring it out, especially black people, figuring it out for the first time. And books like this, and conversations like these, are meant to give you a leg up, or to help you cut a quick corner, or not reinvent the wheel as you figure this thing out. There's a comment or a compliment on the cover of the book, which I think is quite apt. It said, this book should be part of every corporate onboarding program. And I think that that is fair, because a lot of people really underestimate how much they don't know about the corporate environment when they go into it. So now let's talk about cultural intelligence in particular. So the title of that particular chapter, the formal title is Developing Your Cultural Intelligence, and it's chapter four. So Carice opens the chapter by talking about an example that we all can relate to. When you go to someone else's house, you observe the rules of that particular home. So when you go to a home, if I think about it, when I was younger, when I would visit my cousins, my cousins went to a Seventh-day Adventist church versus our Roman Catholic church, and they went to church on Saturday. So when we were visiting, we also went to church on Saturday. We didn't refuse to go and say, at our house, we only go on Sundays. They also didn't wear trousers. So out of deference to their beliefs, when we were visiting, we didn't wear trousers and we didn't carry trousers to wear at their home. And Carice says that that is what you do when you're in someone else's home. And yet we don't often translate that to the workplace. See, when you enter a new workplace, you are entering somebody else's home, and it's important for you to assess what goes on in that home, what the culture of that home is, and how best you can fit into that home. Often the conversation centers around being a disruptor and turning things around or changing things. Before you can gain the credibility, I think we talked about this in one of the earlier episodes. It was the one on navigating corporate and the lessons from the CIA, where it's important to first gain some idiosyncrasy credit before you start trying to make a change. People have to value your contribution before you try to trade that value to change who they are and how they do things that they do. And you gain that credibility by getting an understanding of the culture in which you're operating and successfully navigating that. And if you don't get that basic right, it's unlikely that you will successfully navigate the workplace and that you will succeed in that particular workplace. See, cultural intelligence or cultural quotient, as she calls it, is the ability to recognize and adapt to the rules of an organization, to interpret, to understand, and to become comfortable and operate within a culture that is different from your own. The thing with cultural intelligence is our cultural understanding is determined by our particular upbringing, the value system on which we were brought up, the people who brought us up, the country that we were brought up in, the things that we were exposed to. And what we need to understand is that each one of us was exposed to different things. Each person, even in corporate, was raised and exposed to different things, even though they all form within the same category. So you need to stop viewing it, according to Carice, as my culture versus their culture. It's simply what is the culture of this workplace and which parts of me jive best with this workplace. So, for example, there's an example in the book that I quite like. It's a woman who talks about working with Muslim men, and she talks about how she, in her culture, shaking hands is a normal thing with men and women, but working in an industry where there are a lot of Muslim men, she had to understand that Muslim men don't typically shake hands with women. And so she had to learn to stop extending her hand for it to be shaken, because they were not going to shake it. And she had to learn to understand that it was not necessarily about her, but about their culture and respecting that, and understanding that it is not such a fundamental part of her culture that they must shake her hand. And accommodating that one thing then allows a mutual respect that then allows the key conversation that you're seeking to have to be had with those people. I thought that that was a particularly good example, right? So when I read Sheryl Sandberg's book, Option B, she talks about resilience, and she talks about how resilience is a muscle that you have to work on. And the more I've read and the more I've interacted with people, the more I've realized that a lot of these skills are actually muscles that you have to work, and this one is no exception. The ability to be aware and self-aware enough to recognize the space in which you're operating and how your thinking is affected by how you've been raised, and how the person next to you's thinking is affected by the way they've been raised, is a huge game-changer in your ability to identify and apply synergies. There's an example that Carice uses that I relate to. I wasn't born and raised in South Africa. I came to South Africa as a young adult, and then I grew up here. But where I grew up, which was in Zimbabwe, you greet people if you know them, or you greet people if you're specifically addressing them for a reason. You don't generally greet people. When I came to South Africa, it was a huge thing here, greeting people, saying hello, saying hi when you enter a taxi, and I remember finding it very odd. But I also learned fairly quickly that when you're in South Africa and you don't generally greet people, they don't respond very well to you if you subsequently try to talk to them. People take that as a sign of general disrespect. Carice puts it quite nicely. She said, in South Africa, you're generally required to acknowledge that a person is human before you seek to get something from them. And you recognize that a person is human by greeting them. If you don't recognize that simple habit that is not perhaps natural to you, you then are not able to successfully operate or to optimally operate within the South African context. That's how cultural intelligence works, the ability to recognize the little things that make a room more comfortable for everybody and applying those things. The value of different cultures in the same space or thriving in the same space is often overlooked in favor of the criticism. People like to talk of the change agent stuff, and they don't often take into account the fact that when you don't allow different cultures to thrive in the workplace, that particular workplace doesn't get the benefit of seeing things through different eyes or seeing how things might be received by a broader audience. And I thought Carice's examples were particularly apt. She illustrates this using tone-deaf marketing campaigns that we've seen in the last few years, one of which was the H&M one, where they had a young child who happened to be black in an editorial wearing a sweater that said, the coolest monkey in the zoo. If a black person had looked at that sweater, they would very quickly have said, don't do that. The absence of cultural diversity in the team that created the campaign resulted in a very obvious gap in the way the campaign was put together. It resulted in a very obvious failure in the way that the campaign was put together, and the campaign team could have benefited from a little more diversity or a lot more diversity depending on where you're standing. You see, these small things make a big impact. And it's also quite important to understand whether cultural bias is making you ineffective in the workplace. Sometimes you're not aware because you grow up in a culture where something is normal. You might not be aware of the impact that it has on your behavior. So here, the easiest example that comes to my mind is the fact that in corporate Nigeria, if your meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m., you're probably going to see the CEO arrive at the meeting at 1 p.m. if you're lucky. That's because Nigerian culture has permeated into their corporate space. But in South African corporate spaces, you have to work in line with the culture of the corporate space you're in. You have to fit in and manage your own cultural biases so that they don't make you ineffective at work. This is Toko Zilelewani Kampuponi being quoted by Carice in her book on page 163. So now that we understand the importance of culture, what then do you do? What you need to do is assess your culture, assess the culture of the workplace that you're working in, and assess the cultures of others. But as always, it's always good to start with these things at home. So start with yourself. And Carice has a guideline and subtopics that you can consider in assessing your own culture. And I thought they were brilliant because they got me thinking. So I'll run you through my thought process as I go through the different ones. Number one, individualism, right, the extent to which people within a culture are seen as individuals or as part of a bigger community. When I started working, I was newly orphaned and I was looking after my siblings. And I remember talking about looking after my siblings, which is a normal thing in my own culture. But I found that the people who I worked with who were white found that particularly strange. Like your siblings are also children, also your siblings are also adults. Why are they relying on you to do stuff, right? Why don't you just kick them out and let them take care of themselves where the actual words used by someone. And the colleagues who are from the same culture agreed with them. But the colleagues who are from my culture fully understood why I needed to look after my siblings, because that's what our cultural context requires. So when you're in a workplace where the predominant culture, because there's always a predominant culture depending on the number of people. So I've worked in an organization where it was primarily white people. And I've worked in an organization where it was primarily Indian people. And then I've worked in a cultural organization where it was primarily white men. And all those cultures are very different, right? And individualism plays a different role than each one. So you might find, depending on the culture that is dominant, so if I was working in a predominantly black culture, displaying traits of strong individualism would not be considered a pro. Working in a culture that is predominantly white male, displaying strong individualism is a pro. So you need to understand when to be what. Then there's power distance. The extent to which power is distributed in the culture and the hierarchical distance between those who make the decisions and those who are affected by those decisions. So there are countries that have a high power distance. And you'll find those mostly in Asia, where people in authority are not questioned. I remember listening to one of those shows that talks about airplanes and crashes. And they talked about an airplane that was circling. And it had an Asian crew. I'm trying to remember which country specifically, and I can't. But it had an Asian crew. And the crew was politely trying to tell the captain that he was making the wrong decision. But they were so polite and so careful and so mindful of the power distance dynamic that the plane crashed and everybody died. And we only hear this on the black box, where they try to hint and are polite, etc. And try to tell the captain that maybe he shouldn't be going in that way. But they take so long that everybody actually dies. And it is typical of their culture to be that respectful of people who are considered the people in power in a particular situation. And when you work in a place or a dynamic or a country like that, you need to be aware that being outspoken would not be received well. But you also need to understand how to approach. What is it that you do if you want to get an outcome? If the way of achieving outcomes that you know is not appropriate for that particular place, understand power distance. I've worked in places where the CEO cannot be questioned. And I've worked in places where the CEO actively engages and consults when making a decision. And you need to adjust appropriately once you understand what the power distance dynamic is in the organization in which you're working. Then there's the concept of masculinity, which I thought was interesting. I came across this for the first time in Carisha's book, or rather the label for it. So in masculine cultures, there's a focus on winning, on assertiveness, material success, and the ideas of bigger is better and more is better. And in feminine cultures, there's less of a difference between the genders. So I thought this was very interesting, because when I look back, I realized not because I had a female boss, but in my first role, even though I had a female boss, it was more of a feminine culture. But in my second role, I went into a deeply masculine culture. And the adjustment was significant and a little trying for me. It was be assertive. And I remember my boss actually using the words, grab this thing by the, you know, and I thought, oh, my gosh, do we use such language at work. But he was pretty much trying to say to me, you are approaching this too softly. You are not like, I want you to go at this thing super aggressively and get an outcome, get an outcome. And over time, I learned that that was the language of that workplace, that you go in hard, you punch hard, you get an outcome. And then I changed jobs again. And I went into a place where people generally land softly, even though they're mostly men, where people approach strategically and get an outcome. And generally, self deprecating humor is the norm. And it is so interesting, because then if I took any one of the traits of the previous workplace to the third workplace, they wouldn't work. They wouldn't work. None of the three cultures work in any of the other places. Each one has its own particular form of femininity or masculinity or a blend. And the idea is understand where you are. And it took getting to the third one for me to realize, wait a minute, this is not really about my ability to speak a certain way, demonstrating growth, it's my ability to adapt to the language of the place that I am now in. Then Therese also talks about uncertainty avoidance. And this points to an organization's level of comfort with uncertainty. And this, I've also noticed, makes a big difference. So in my second workplace, the uncertainty avoidance was very low. And in another one of my workplaces, uncertainty avoidance is very high. So consequently, when you are presenting a view, you want to sound as certain as possible in the one place. But in the other, you know that even if you are at a probable or a 50-50, people will be able to make an adjustment. And that affects your ability or the assessment that you do or the level of detail you put into perhaps giving an opinion if you're a lawyer or giving a view if it's a regulatory thing. And it actually affects your workload. Long-term orientation is the same thing. Is the organization that you're in very much a right-now culture? One of them was. And the other one is, let's figure out how this is going to affect us all the way through to the end. And again, you want to come at issues from a different lens for each one. The extent to which a society allows for relatively free gratification of basic and instinctual human rights related to enjoying life and having fun. Cultures with more restraint repress the gratification of needs and manage them by implementing severe social norms. This has been different in the different workplaces. But my first workplace was by far the most conservative of all three. And my current workplace strikes a nice balance. Now when you think about these six things, so it's individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, indulgence, what you want to do is you want to assess yourself and your culture and where you fit in. Then you want to assess the cultures of those around you. And then you want to assess the culture of the organization that you're in. And then you need to find how these three things can fit together so that they can create effective symbiosis, so that they can create effective interdependence. Interdependence is a concept from last week's episode and Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's very important to understand how you can fit into the whole for the purpose of achieving mutually satisfying results. There are many other aspects of culture to consider besides these six, but these six are the key ones. But you also want to consider perspective on time. I remember understanding the gravity of time to some people when I went to my friend's funeral and one of the speakers said, Londeka always drove up to a meeting right on time. She was never late and everybody around nodded and I thought, oh, wow, it was a very important thing to them that she arrived on time. And I realized that a lot of people, a lot of people simply treat time differently. I have a lot of Kenyan friends. I think I mentioned this earlier in the pod might have. I have a lot of Kenyan friends and it's normal to say, let's meet at a particular time and they arrive a lot later than that time. In my culture, that is very rude. That is very rude because you're requiring someone to sit and wait for you. In other words, then they have unproductive time to your productive time. But in their culture, it is very normal and people generally tend to be mutually late. There's an understanding of how much lateness is appropriate for a particular occasion. I often find that while this might work in social context, it's a very challenging thing in corporate places. So you find in one of my workplaces, arriving a few minutes late was normal. Everything ran a few minutes late. In my current workplace, everything runs one or two minutes early and you want to be on time. If you're not logged into a meeting by a minute to the time that's actually set, you usually start getting phone calls to check if you're going to dial in. So understanding that that's what everybody else is doing in this workplace and you doing it as well creates some mutual respect and a mutual symbiosis and an ability to pull things. It's one of those small things that pulls things in the right direction. Whereas if you don't do it, which you can choose not to do, you might not understand that that small thing results in people perhaps not taking you seriously or perceiving you as not taking them seriously. And perhaps perceiving you as disrespectful. And even if they do not say so, it might have an impact on your ability to progress. So in the book, Carice gives an example. There's Tina Taylor, a professional who comments that there's a script in corporate America which wasn't designed for us. They didn't have us or our culture in mind. The culture of the corporate environment is a different language with a different cadence. All too often, young professionals of color don't understand that. Show up and be on time. We had to let go of one of our African-American female employees, one of the top ones, a PhD student, because she kept showing up to work 30 minutes late. She was showing up to meetings late. Everything was late. Could she not set her alarm clock? And this is what's going on in the mind of a person who's from a different culture. And when you understand the culture of your workplace, then you learn to operate within that place, and you don't get dismissed like this PhD student who probably never fully grasped what it is that she was supposedly doing so wrong. There's also the question of particularly questioning authority and speaking up. And that one is particularly pertinent in that power distance dynamic that we talked about earlier. Is it possible, and is it safe, and how do you speak up and question authority? Because obviously over time, once you have gained your credit and credibility in the workplace, you do want to be maybe a change agent if it's necessary. You do want to grow the workplace, and sometimes you grow that workplace by implementing change. Understand how questioning authority and speaking up in that particular workplace works. So I had an interesting realization, which I proceeded to tell my current CEO about in great detail. To his credit, he indulged me. I had a huge aha moment because I kept trying to find my corporate voice. In my first workplace, I worked with a predominantly white team, but mostly white women. And I found that I learned to speak a particular way there. I was taught to speak a particular way, to be assertive, but also to be sort of soft in a certain way. It was assertive, but not a hundred percent. Then I changed jobs, and I went to work at a different place. I went to work in an environment that was predominantly Indian. So I was assertive in some areas. So I found I did very well when I was assertive in a combative situation with an outside party. But if I was assertive internally, over time, not if, when I was assertive internally, over time, it started to create friction for me. And I could not understand what it was. And at some point, a male colleague said to me, you speak too much like a man. I didn't understand it at that time, but I was offended, deeply offended by it. Then I changed jobs, and I moved into a workplace that's predominantly white, male, run. And there, I realized that I'd picked up habits from the previous work where I sort of toned down what I was saying, and I tried to be polite and to come at it from an angle so I don't sound so much like a man, right? And I found that this irritated my boss immensely. He said, do you either have a view or you don't? Tell me what it is you're trying to say. And it finally clicked that what was changing, it wasn't that I was a problem. It was that my voice was inappropriate for the particular culture. So in an Indian culture, and I'm speaking to an Indian man, where he might view me as being disrespectful by speaking particularly assertively or coming at it in a particular way, a white man might not see it that way because that particular cultural norm doesn't apply there. Perhaps the way I would speak to an older black man, or a way I would speak to an older black woman, or a way I would speak to an older white woman versus an older white man or an older Chinese man, all those people are different people with different backgrounds and different upbringings. And the way that I approach them is not necessarily appropriate. The way approaching them uniformly is not necessarily appropriate. Gosh, the cultural topic is so intense, and so detailed. But the point is, understand where you are. Understand the house rules. This is not a discussion about changing the house rules. We've already had that discussion. That's the CIA episode. Here we're talking about learning how to be in a workplace with other people, and learning how to thrive in that workplace. And this does not entail pretending to be anything. It simply entails letting the different aspects of your personality do their best work according to the context in which you are operating. This episode is not really about providing answers, like Carice's chapter was not about providing answers. It was more about providing lots and lots to think about, and understanding some of the pieces on which your corporate success is built. And this is one of them. A lot to think about, and I hope a lot that is useful. And I hope a lot that gives you aha moments in the way that it gave me. I agree with Teliwe Ross that this book should be required reading for everybody in the corporate space, more so for black professionals who don't have a lot of guidance on what to do and how to be in the workplace. So take time to read Carice Anderson's Intelligence Isn't Enough, A Black Professional's Guide to Thriving in the Workplace. And let's go out there and get something done. Let's grow together. Thank you for your time this week. If you liked the episode, please like, share, subscribe, and we'll chat next week.