4 key steps leaders can take to boost team performance through cultural intelligence

Nearly 80% of HR and L&D professionals see the importance of cultural intelligence (CQ) to their organisations’ success, with 93% emphasising its role in boosting engagement and teamwork.1

In light of this, Chris Crosby, CEO at Country Navigator, a cultural intelligence training platform, explains how leaders can better develop cultural intelligence in their workplaces to help their teams reach the next level.

Why is cultural intelligence important for leaders?

Managing performance: A leader’s primary role is to drive team performance, understand potential, and motivate, develop, and encourage the team. Programs may promise development, but they don’t always deliver the expected results.

Cognitive diversity: This is the secret of diversity. And it’s really obvious, to the extent we even have a cliché that two heads are better than one. And that’s the principle behind cognitive diversity.

Harnessing disagreement: If your team is disagreeing and yelling at each other, it may be because they hate each other. But more likely, it means that you have a team with the potential to be more innovative and creative, and therefore, it’s a team with the potential for higher performance. What we need is a way of harnessing the power of disagreement without sacrificing collaboration, cooperation, and productivity.2

To help companies introduce cultural intelligence, Chris Crosby, CEO at Country Navigator,  provides four practical steps on how you can apply these skills today to foster a unified and productive team environment:

• “Attitude: Your attitude sets the tone. Managers often assume that everyone wants the team to succeed and knows what to do. But that’s different from actively striving to raise performance. People naturally seek comfort, which resists change and effort. Unless leaders clearly state their ambition to elevate performance, it remains an unconscious goal. Setting clear objectives tells the team that “good enough” isn’t acceptable and encourages them to assert their value. If the team isn’t aligned with this goal, success is unlikely.

• “Awareness: Knowing how many perspectives you have lets you gauge your team’s potential. Awareness of difference at a cognitive level emphasises inclusion, not on ‘diversity picks.’ And you’ll find that representation increases naturally when you focus on building a team for performance rather than cultural fit.

• “Knowledge: Using a learning tool, such as the Worldprism Teams report, gives you the range of styles in nine dimensions, covering three general areas: relating (how we interact with others), regulating (how we organise our work and processes), and reasoning (how we approach our tasks and challenges). That range shows you the impact of the difference.  This knowledge, when made explicit, is invaluable in raising the potential horizon of the team. If, as Plato argued, a team is greater than the sum of its parts, when each of those parts is working in harmony, the value added from team collaboration is even greater.

• “Skills: Diversity alone holds zero potential. To unlock a team’s full cognitive potential, the leader’s role is to build connections, enabling the flow of information, shaping collaboration, and providing a common sense of purpose. A culturally intelligent leader will recognise that just as a group of individuals has different approaches to time and risk, motivation and responsibility require an individualised approach. The hardest part is being intentional, recognising when disagreement is constructive, supporting decisions even when your idea isn’t chosen, and acting as a mediator to ensure discussions are seen as team wins, not win/lose situations.”