Cultural intelligence is crucial for todays leaders

Cultural intelligence (CI) may be the deciding factor in 21st-century leadership.

“Nearly 90 percent of leading executives from sixty-eight countries named cross-cultural leadership as the top management challenge for the next century (Livermore, pg. 14).” Livermore’s research, which aggregates this surprising statistic, indicates that the leaders who can navigate the intercultural landscape will be the most valuable asset to any company in the 21st century.

Charisma and efficiency may top the charts on most U.S. leader’s most wanted skills, but in Prague “it’s a liability.” Likewise, the democratic style of top leaders in Prague will certainly not function in Saudi Arabia (Livermore, pg. 17-18). Like Joshua’s interviewee from Duerr Dental, Michael Koll, those who can transcend their native culture are the leaders of today’s world.

If “leadership is influence–nothing more, nothing less (Maxwell, pg. 20)” then the leader who can influence people from any cultural background is in a position to manage the world’s global business connections. The entrepreneur with high CI has unrestricted access to the world’s entrepreneurial resources, not just those in his host culture. The personnel resources of the world are also at his disposal since he can lead all types of people. The perspectives of countless cultures are accessible to him, which gives his business advantages in vision and strategy that people from a single culture do not possess. CI cannot replace non-negotiable leadership traits like humility or integrity, but it is more valuable than any one culture’s prized characteristic by itself.

I’ve heard it said that missionary kids are often highly successful business people, and I think it’s because they’ve developed high CI. This is a trait followers of Jesus ought to have, since he himself navigated at least three cultures in his own day; Jewish, Samaritan, and Roman. My application from this short reading assignment is to prize cultural intelligence as more valuable than any single U.S.-bound characteristic for effective leadership.

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