Cultural Strategic Thinking
Intercultural differences provide significant problems to a global workforce, and managers frequently collaborate across boundaries with teams from many nations. Cultural strategic thinking is essential in internationally diversified divisions for managers to swiftly adapt to numerous cultures. The aims of cultural strategic thinking are to link new knowledge to old, to choose the best strategies, and to plan, monitor, and evaluate activities (Goldman & Casey, 2014).
Cultural intelligence is a multidimensional process that enables people to understand and adapt to new cultural settings (Early & Ang, 2003). At the same time, strategic thinking is defined as the start of strategic planning and by function tends to aid in the establishment of prospective growth opportunities for an entity in terms of not just value generation, etiquette, and behavior development. Improving such behaviors would improve communication within a business, promote a good working atmosphere, and have a favorable influence on workplace culture.
How cultural strategic thinking plays a part within your current organization?
According to Goldman & Casey (2014), specific employment experiences also help to build a person’s strategic thinking skills. Through a mix of formal training, developmental activities, and self-directed learning initiatives, I think my organization’s executives have the ability to enhance the strategic thinking of the people they oversee.
I have been working in an IT company in Osaka, Japan since 2019. From these 3 years experience, I can see that cultural strategic thinking plays a really important role in my company. Since we are consists of diverse staff who come from all over the world, it allows us to apply social intelligence concepts like accepting differences with others and striving to enhance communication, cooperation, and sharing for the company’s success.
What two specific cultural strategic thinking techniques have you observed within your team?
Peer learning is the most typical technique to develop cultural strategic thinking in my company. Peer learning is an efficient and effective technique to investigate cultural relations and address cultural difficulties (Leading with cultural intelligence, 2012). We usually utilize a single language during the meeting, like English, to ensure that everyone is on the same page even though our team consists of Japanese, Indonesian, Philippines, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and other nationalities. Throughout the daily standup and discussion session, we learn by confirming our team progress, clarifying the issues, asking questions, and confirming the thoughts of others. The organization promotes online meetings by using Google Meet. This is useful for developing suitable cultural strategy thinking, which would be tough to do with email and/or chatting platforms such as Slack.
Did you see evidence of Cultural Intelligence (CQ)? How CQ could have been improved?
Yes, I have seen cultural intelligence (CQ) in my company. Even though my company is a Japanese company, we use English as our main language to accommodate all the team members who can’t speak Japanese. Not only that, but we also adopt a flexible culture in which we let our Japanese staff use high-context communication while we communicate with more direct communication with our non-Japanese staff.
According to Cultural Intelligence for Leaders (2012), to improve cultural intelligence, we can establish a common ground to make all the staff the same understanding and keep them on the same page. Next, what we can do is steer clear of stereotypes, so we can have a better understanding of others’ perspectives.
Conclusion
As we already know cultural intelligence is a vital component, particularly for international teams, in ensuring that the team’s mission is properly communicated. It prevents erroneous interpretations and ensures that everyone is on the same page. Metacognitive, motivational, and behavioral component training has been linked to cultural intelligence. It does not, however, necessitate an understanding of all aspects of many cultures. As a result, there is a disadvantage that cultural intelligence oversimplifies and generalizes cultural awareness because it does not necessitate in-depth research on a specific culture. It also does not take into account personality (Kiznyte, 2015).
References
Cultural Intelligence for Leaders (v. 1.0). (2012, December 29). Lardbucket. https://2012books.lardbucket.org/pdfs/cultural-intelligence-for-leaders.pdf licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0
Early, P.C., & Ang, S. (2003). Cultural intelligence: Individual interactions across cultures. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.
Goldman F. E., Casey A. (2014). Building cultural that encourages strategic thinking. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 17(2) 119–128
Kiznyte, J. (2015). Applying cultural intelligence in international project management. Retrieved from https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/pmwj35-Jun2015-Ciutiene-Dechange-Kiznyte-applying-cultural-intelligence-second-edition.pdf
Note:
This article is written based on University of The People Managing in the Global Economy (BUS 5211) written assignment by Fristy Tania in September 2022
