Tips on Cultural Intelligence

These past few months, I’ve been delivering talks and presentations on Cultural Intelligence at IDEX - a social enterprise which supports volunteer tourism and my audience comprises of experienced and inexperienced volunteers and travellers from all walks of life, different nations or cultures and with different ideas and inspirations. Some of them are so curious to learn about a new culture and some are already being torn apart by a culture shock. I can never forget one instance when a participant decided to wear a lone white shirt to the program. Whatever she was thinking, she couldn't have mistaken an office in Jaipur, Rajasthan (Thar desert) to be some kind of beach!
Anyways, here are some tips I would like to share about cross-cultural communication. First, think of the blocks. Intra-personal leads to inter-personal communication. So, whatever you are feeling inside or thinking inside, comes out loud in your communication, believe it or not. If one suffers from any of these:




Stereotyping (rigid perceptions, unwilling to change), Ethnocentrism (focusing too much on one's own culture), Cultural imposition (a result of a sense of cultural superiority), Cultural blindness (not wanting to see the positive in other cultures) or Discrimination.......




Then one is definitely going to face issues in cross-cultural communication. Now-a-days, most work places not only accept but celebrate diversity. So, learning about different cultures and respecting them is a necessity for any manager. There are simple things you could do to begin an informal diversity-training. Like, checking out community-specific restaurants, reading novels or books based on cultures and countries other than yours, learning a foreign language. Or, simply volunteering in a new country!




Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Ciao.