The Culturally Intelligent Leader: How Executive Teams Build Resilient Organizations
- Dr. Sarah Froning Nodarse
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
Resilient organizations succeed despite adversity and disruption because the people who work in them have the skills and systems they need to adapt, perform, and even innovate under any conditions.
How do organizations become resilient? What is one pivotal skill that leaders can rely on to build resilience in their organizations? We believe it is cultural intelligence, or the ability to navigate group dynamics and organizational systems in ways that benefit all involved.
As individuals we think of the organizations we work in as existing externally, outside of ourselves. Yet organizations don’t exist without people; we are of these organizations as much as we are in them. Our organizations may seem like disembodied systems of artifacts and practices, but we actually experience them as human interaction networks with ourselves at the center. Cultural Intelligence is the core capability that allows us to navigate those networks and interactions in ways that create more value for everyone.
Any examination of human networks and interactions must consider – even center – culture. This is because of the fundamental role culture plays in shaping human identity and driving human behavior. Culture is, in fact, what makes us human. Although we talk about culture as being something we have, culture isn’t a thing that we can possess. Rather, is a concept that describes the complex human operating system of symbols, tools, relationships, and ethics through which we make sense of the world and each other. Culture – not biology -- explains who we are, how we interact with others around us, and how we organize as groups.
Given how culture defines our identities and relationships, it makes sense that cultural intelligence would be a core skill for leaders who wish to drive agility and performance in their organizations. Executive teams build resilient organizations through culture.
After all, culture drives performance when it doesn’t eat strategy for breakfast, as has been documented time and again. Take the colossal failure to unify New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads in 1970 or to merge Snapple and Quaker Oats in 1993, Blockbuster’s failure to evolve in 2010, Nokia’s 2015 decline after the unsuccessful Microsoft merger, or Boeing’s recent cultural shift towards efficiency and its ongoing struggle to revamp the culture. Consider also, on the positive side, the employee-customer profit chain theories of the 1990s that gave us the ongoing research on employee engagement. We now know how to engineer employee experiences that drive better company performance.
In short, the evidence linking culture to performance is robust; if leaders are willing to believe in this link they have the power to deliberately engineer the cultures that will help their organizations thrive.
We posit that there are three locus points of cultural action in any organization: the self, the colleague, and the group. Leaders who wish to have a profound impact on their organizational performance can leverage culture by applying cultural intelligence at these three points. In practice, this looks like self-examination, interpersonal skill-building, team development, and building strategic talent management policies, processes, and tools.
You Are the Culture: A Call to Action for Leaders
The first step to cultural intelligence is believing it is needed. In my experience, this belief is not a given among the leaders of today’s organizations. Over two decades of working closely with talent and business leaders in multinational corporations worldwide, I have observed that many leaders persist in believing that culture either happens automatically or is not their responsibility.
It is a familiar refrain: “we don’t need to worry so much about culture, we just need to respect each other and work as a team.” This statement, which belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what culture is and how it operates, is akin to stating: “we don’t need to do math, we just need to add and subtract.” Indeed, respect and teamwork are, themselves, heavily culturally coded, and it is a good bet that every single person on any given team associates different behaviors with those words.
Many leaders will relegate culture out of the business and hand it entirely over to HR. This “potluck and parties” approach to culture focuses on social events, monthly heritage celebrations, and public statements. To be sure, these things constitute components of organizational culture, but they do not themselves constitute the culture.
Rather, the organizational culture is, more broadly, “the way we do things around here:” learned and shared practices, symbols, relationships, and tools that are unique to a particular organization. HR can certainly be a catalyst for building the culture, but only if leaders have been careful to first define and demonstrate that culture. HR cannot build it alone.
Culture is either your organization’s superpower or its downfall. Powerfully positive when it fuels the desired outcomes for the organization, culture can just as easily derail those outcomes, eating the best strategies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you are a leader reading these lines and saying to yourself “culture doesn’t matter to the outcomes I’m driving,” you are leaving your most valuable resource – your people – scattered in the wind. To say that culture doesn’t matter is to consider culture from the most powerless place possible – outside yourself.
On the other hand, leaders who understand the value of culture and wield cultural intelligence in their organizations are creating strategic value for themselves, their employees, and the communities they serve. The first step along this path is to see the centrality of culture to organizational functioning and to simultaneously recognize that you as a leader are responsible for the culture in your organization. With this recognition comes the commitment to building cultural intelligence.
Leaders: Own It!
Culture is both top-down and bottom-up, created and reproduced by individuals in communities at the same time that it is engineered by the leaders and technicians of those communities. Leaders who fail to deploy culture strategically will still get a culture, because culture will always continue to “happen” in the trenches. Employees will create their own ways of doing things, their own shared codes and tools, their own relationships and unspoken rules. Emergent mindsets, tools, symbols, and practices from the front lines are invaluable and can certainly be of strategic value to the organization. However, it is ultimately up to the leaders to define the strategic direction and goals that would give these cultural elements value in the first place. Indeed, if leaders fail to define the culture, they will be at the mercy of whatever culture emerges, whether it is helpful to their mission or not.
The roadmap to success in strategic culture work has two phases: design and delivery. The design phase is focused on the organization in the abstract and what it is trying to achieve. This initial external focus is a framing device to ensure that the real culture work, which based in people and is empirical and relational.
The design phase entails envisioning the culture needed to deliver on the organization’s current strategy. Are we trying to compete on quality? Customer service? Lowest cost? What is our approach to the market, and what cultural attributes do we need in place to succeed with that approach? For example, to provide the best customer service, customer-facing employees need empowerment to make certain choices without decision bottlenecks to “wow” customers in the moment. To take another example, if innovation is a desired outcome, employees need freedom from long, bureaucratic processes or nonstop meetings. Indeed, for every desired outcome, there is a cultural attribute that will support or hinder it.
The design phase focuses initially on the business strategy, defines the ideal culture to support that strategy, and conducts a gap analysis to see how well current reality matches that ideal culture. At this point, we know which cultural attributes we need to change, stop, or cultivate. This abstract design phase is crucial to all culture-building work in organizations. Failing to design the culture results in an ad hoc, emergent culture that, at best, only partially sabotages your strategy and at worst completely derails it.
Once we have a blueprint for the culture, we can make it come to life. In my experience, leaders at this phase often think the work is simply about communication. They might create a poster with the target cultural values listed on it. Under each value might be a description of specific behaviors the leaders want employees to demonstrate. They might distribute the posters throughout the workplaces. They might ask HR to develop programs to train and reward people for living the values. They might send emails to staff or host town halls. Then, leaders announce that – ta-da! They have created the culture! Yet they have done no cultural work on themselves, their peer relationships, or with the group as a whole. They have led their cultural horse to water, but they have not yet convinced that horse to drink. Those posters and town halls will not convince employees that the cultural water is worth drinking. Leaders have to take the first sip.
For culture to truly take hold, leaders need to demonstrate how the values and behaviors come to life in everyday interactions while performing the daily tasks of the job. Simultaneously, the organization must put systems into place to codify these values and behaviors into the talent management life cycle (e.g., through competencies and performance management criteria). I will discuss these talent management systems in a subsequent article. Here, I want to focus on what the leader must do to operationalize the values and behaviors they have defined, because in my experience this is the step that most often gets overlooked.
To truly operationalize culture, we argue that the leader must pause to do some internal work. This is the place in the process where the leader’s own cultural intelligence becomes the game changer. This is when the leader explores, embodies, and demonstrates the cultural attributes they want to see in their organization. Starting with the self is crucial because the locus of cultural action is always first the self, then the other, then the group. We begin with cultural competence and upskilling, followed by training to apply these skills in interpersonal and group settings.
Influencing Culture
How does cultural change actually happen? The real change agents in organizations are specific power holders and experts who demonstrate specific practices. This is why leaders and technical specialists have the largest responsibility for modeling the culture needed to deliver on the organizational strategy. They demonstrate the culture through everyday interactions with other people, and through practices, policies, and procedures that drive how work gets done.
The work of deliberate culture creation necessarily begins with examining who we are as individual leaders and the lenses through which we view the world. We then learn effective ways of interacting with our peers and the group as a whole. Finally, we build systems (policies, processes, and tools) to manage how people collaborate, communicate, and move through the organization so that the group as a whole performs better.
The layered approach to culture leads us systematically through the existing networks of interaction in the organization. Focusing first on the self allows us to approach the other layers of colleague and group culture with a clearer view. As we unpack our own cultural identity and thus our assumptions about the world, we can reveal judgments about our colleagues and the group as a whole that we didn’t even know we had. We call this holistic understanding of culture’s layers of self, other, and group Cultural Intelligence or CQ.
A caveat is in order regarding the commonly accepted definitions of cultural intelligence. My definition herein aligns with the existing literature in terms of what the skill actually consists of (understanding of self-identity, navigating interpersonal relationships and group dynamics through the lens of culture). Where I differ is in the centering of CQ as the pivotal skill for ALL leaders. Most definitions assume that cultural intelligence is needed only in situations where “cultural diversity” is present. Take the definition from the International Journal of Management Reviews (2018, Vol. 20): “Cultural intelligence (CQ), an individual's capability to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse situations and settings."
We recognize that some organizations are more diverse than others, however we also recognize that even between culturally similar people, many differences can and will exist. In other words, ALL organizations are culturally diverse to an extent, because even though culturally homogenous groups may share many traits, they will not share ALL traits. We therefore agree with David Livermore that CQ can be more broadly applied as an individual’s capability to function and manage effectively in ANY organization where there is more than one person: “Leading with cultural intelligence is not about geography. It’s about having the dynamic agility to lead anyone, anywhere.”
Cultural intelligence is built in layers: self, other (team), and group (organization).
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