Everyone can agree that a good organizational culture is crucial. However, the difficult part is to define what “good culture” actually means. Many consultants and organizations still endorse structures created over a century ago.

Moreover, a large percentage of organizational culture research has been done by or for corporations based in the United States. So how does that apply to new cultures and organizations that are now emerging all over the world?

According to the 2015 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends research “Business leaders gave HR a D-plus (an average of 1.32 on a five-point scale), while HR departments themselves “rated their teams the equivalent of a C-minus (an average of 1.65 on a five-point scale)”. The same report identifies that “culture, engagement and global leadership have now become urgent priorities,” while “the gap between readiness and need for improvement is actually widening”.

A new global business environment requires a new approach to HR

The 21^st Century entrepreneurship movement is further disrupting all organizational culture concepts, pointing out the fact that in a globalized and hyper-connected world, organizations are becoming networks of extremely diverse teams.

Company culture is no longer a fixed, easy to replicate environment, but a dynamic network of people with very different backgrounds in terms of nationality, age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and preferences.

Creating, developing, optimizing and maintaining such complex cultures requires the help of professionals who have specific skills and expertise.

For a while now HR departments have been working on changing the way they do business. Unfortunately, many companies, including some of the current tech “unicorns”, are known to have serious culture problems. Part of that is due to the complexity of the matter. A well-known issue is the claim that we are facing a “lack of qualified talent”.

You need to understand different cultures to hire diverse employees

Culture fundamentally influences labor supply and demand, since a specific culture will attract more of the same candidates. As it turns out, most recruiters and interviewers make their selection based on a very rigid values and beliefs system, which is further influenced by a complex chain of unconscious biases.

As an example, let’s suppose that an American company interviews a highly qualified job applicant from Sweden. If the interviewer doesn’t have any knowledge about Swedish cultural values, the Swedish applicant has fewer chances to be hired when compared to an American applicant.

The cultural values of an average Swedish individual direct them to be modest and downplay their accomplishments. Doing otherwise is considered throughout Scandinavia as impolite, even disrespectful behavior. The Swedish applicant will likely avoid spending time during the interview talking about their qualities and accomplishments.

By contrast, American culture differs in that candidates from this region will be much more comfortable highlighting their success and ambitions, and they frequently use a long array of superlatives to describe their skills and accomplishments.

Interviewers and recruiters who are not familiar with the culture metrics in the candidates’ home countries, have a greater chance of misinterpreting the candidates’ behaviors.

Even if the candidates make it through the interview and are hired, retention of diverse, internally motivated employees seems to be another big problem. It makes perfect sense that creative employees will not want to stay in a culture that they feel does not care about them on a human level, and focuses only on accomplishing the business tasks.

Culture shift needs to be more than fun titles

In fact, many organizations, in updating their cultures, in fact failed to change anything fundamental in the way they view and treat employees. Some of them simply changed labels, such as from “Human Resources” to “People’s Department”.

Even some of the newly formed -“progressive”- consulting companies are still referring to people as “Human Capital”. That seems to be seen as an improvement, although in my opinion treating humans as capital instead of as resources makes no difference at all. Perception of people as some sort of exchange currency, which can be manipulated at will, is what got companies into trouble in the first place.

So, it turns out that HR departments across the spectrum are now facing an interesting paradox: although their job is to ensure employees are in top shape, most of them employ no actual people specialists. This trend has been changing in the past year or so, with some visionary organizations hiring skilled Chief Diversity Officers (CDO).

The Culture Influencer concept takes the whole process a step further, focusing on training specialists in human behavior, human interaction, leadership and organizational culture, fully disrupting the current Human Resources model and bringing it into the 21^st Century.

Culture Influencer training builds on existing, invaluable practical expertise that many HR professionals already have. It’s providing them with a repertoire of knowledge and skills that address what Deloitte calls the “sweeping global forces that are reshaping the workplace, the workforce, and work itself. 

Automation and artificial intelligence is forcing us to move from a task-oriented economy (we will never be able to perform repetitive tasks better than a machine, that’s for sure) to a people-centered economy. It is therefore crucial to shift the focus on optimizing the way people interact, collaborate, and create value for each other.

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Economies are more and more global, and so are our customers, employees and opportunities. But that means that our challenges have also gone global. A common mistake is that people want to do [business] exactly the same way they did before. We cannot afford to apply the same local solutions to very different, global, problems. – SAFRA CATZ, CEO, Oracle

Let me put it this way:

The good news is that the exponential development of technology allows many of us access to amazing opportunities. People, products and services are brought together in ways that have never happened before.

The bad news is that the growing interdependence of different regions and communities around the world also has a great potential to produce conflict, ranging from global refugee and financial crises to missed business opportunities.

Why you need cultural intelligence

One of the (still) commonly held beliefs, even here in the highly innovative Silicon Valley, is that doing business across the globe means simply replicating the models that have already brought financial prosperity in a certain country or region. I lost count of how many times I heard or read about how the solution to global business is to clone Silicon Valley in various places around the world.

There is one issue with this strategy: it does not work. A business strategy does not, and cannot, exist independently of the people and circumstances that made it possible. There is no one single way of doing business, and the reason for that can be summarized in one word: culture.

Culture forms the matrix of all human interactions. As social beings, we tend to interact and associate with people who hold similar values, beliefs, expectations and symbols.

It is only normal to prefer the safety of the known, and to reject those with whom we have a hard time identifying. That worked relatively well when the cultures of the world were neatly separated into national, ethnic, and geographical communities, and only communicated with each other in a very slow and prescribed manner.

Technology is blurring geographical borders

Technology, however, is now blurring and even blowing up those lines, by facilitating instantaneous communication and exchanges across geographic borders.

For this reason, being successful in the 21st century business environment requires specific knowledge and a set of skills which we at ICQ Consulting define as cultural intelligence.

A few entrepreneurs and leaders have that naturally. But most of us simply behave (often unconsciously or subconsciously) according to values and beliefs we’ve acquired from our culture of origin.

What fascinates me is how few people, especially people in power, are willing to admit that their choices and decisions are seriously influenced by their cultural values and beliefs.

Of course, in certain circumstances, some of us are able to be more objective than others. But deep down within us are beliefs and symbols that are imprinted, branded at an emotional level. And from there they often dictate how we behave.

If we put this in the global context, we see why cultural intelligence is crucial. Globalization now forces us to interact in ways that we have never had to before. We need to interact not only with businesses from different countries, but also with our own multicultural, multigenerational and multi-ethnic organizations and teams.

We are now trying to acquire and service customers all over the world. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, over 135 different cultures live and work among each other.

Diversity + Inclusion = Success

According to Cisco, if a diverse team is managed and trained well, they produce results 6 times higher than homogeneous teams. What Cisco research shows is that not only is diversity important, but that diversity in itself is not enough. What gives diversity 6 times more value is something called inclusion.

Thus, in order to reap all the benefits of diversity, we need to create an optimal inclusion environment. And given the pace of technology and globalization, diversity is not a choice anymore. Diversity has become unavoidable, and that makes inclusion through cultural and organizational intelligence an absolute necessity.

The best way to figure out how to optimize interactions within or between diverse groups is to assess the needs, values, beliefs and expectations of each member of the group.

There are various tools (such as the Intercultural DISC) that assess key cultural metrics, which are even more helpful in an organization with employees who have lived and/or worked in multiple cultures.

Cultural intelligence is a paradigm shift in both business interaction and organizational culture, and it is one of the central pieces of Culture Influencer training.

What makes cultural intelligence different is that it addresses core dynamics of the human psyche. It takes into account not only the differences between individuals, but also the similarities that make us all humans.

How is your business working to build cultural intelligence? Has diversity changed your business?

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