I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.
[00:00:14] Trisha: Hi there everyone, I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives. especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness, the shifts in thinking.
[00:01:02] Trisha: As those of you who have listened to some of our earlier episodes will know, cultural intelligence, CQ, the capability to be effective in situations of diversity, is made up of four areas. There's the motivational, CQ drive, the cognitive, CQ knowledge, the metacognitive, CQ strategy, and behavioral, the CQ action.
[00:01:23] Trisha: And all four of these capabilities can help us operate effectively in situations of diversity. In this podcast, we tend to focus more on the metacognitive aspect, thinking about our thinking, and it is CQ strategy. Today, it's only me. There is no guest that I'm interviewing. It's really just me thinking about something that I've been thinking about.
[00:01:46] Trisha: It's a question. How does confidence in one's own ability show up in the area of cultural intelligence? Well, if you are a CQ facilitator or are familiar with the model, your mind has probably jumped already to the CQ drive aspect, where there's a subcategory which is self efficacy. And self efficacy, sometimes people would say, is just a fancy way for psychologists to speak about confidence.
[00:02:13] Trisha: It's defined in the model as having the confidence to be effective in culturally diverse situations. And that makes sense, right? We need to have the confidence in our ability to work with people who are different to us. Or if we aren't confident to do that, we might shy away from interactions with those people.
[00:02:33] Trisha: You may know people who do just that. They keep away from people who are from a different cultural or linguistic background to themselves, or people who are different in some other way. And it may be because of that lack of confidence. Don't worry, there are ways that we can work with people to increase that sub capability and to increase that confidence.
[00:02:55] Trisha: But that's not exactly what I want to focus on today.
[00:02:58] Trisha: I was listening to a podcast by Katie Milkman, I'll put the link in the show notes, and she interviewed David Dunning, Now, some of you will know what I'm heading to. He's one of the researchers behind the Dunning Kruger effect. And what is that effect? It's the observation that those who don't have expertise in something don't have the expertise to recognize that they don't have the expertise.
[00:03:26] Trisha: So people often think they're good at something because they don't know enough to estimate their capability effectively. And this leads to people overestimating themselves and their skills, and as you can imagine, it could be quite serious for a leader, a leader of a diverse team, or somebody leading in another culture.
[00:03:45] Trisha: If you're less skilled, you may not recognize that you are less skilled. This is almost like the metacognition of learning and development. As David Dunning said in Katie's podcast, people who are unskilled come to erroneous self judgements. and are overconfident about themselves because they don't have the skill necessary to judge themselves.
[00:04:08] Trisha: Some of you may know that I work with expatriates delivering coaching and training and helping them to build the cultural intelligence they need in the new environment, the new culture they're working in. As part of that I often share a graph about culture shock. And don't worry, I do make it clear to people that although I'm sharing a graph that generalizes responses, individual responses can vary.
[00:04:33] Trisha: But, given that caveat, this graph has an initial high point when people first arrive in a new country. Sometimes it's termed the honeymoon effect. And that high point reflects our sense of enjoyment. of emotional well being, of capability.
[00:04:51] Trisha: And sometimes, after a period of time, the graph drops. And it shows that people move from that high point to a much lower emotional state. This is not depression, but it may feel like it to people. It's often also felt as a loss of capability. So I label the graph with terms that those of you who are in learning and development will be familiar with.
[00:05:15] Trisha: The first point, the high, I label as unconscious incompetence. That's when we don't know what we don't know. And if we're experiencing a wonderful environment and we don't know that we're incompetent in it, we will feel good. We may not know. The CQ knowledge that we need. We don't know that our CQ strategy is low and we don't know that our CQ actions are inappropriate in this culture.
[00:05:40] Trisha: But then as our knowledge of what we are trying to adapt to increases, our awareness of our incompetence increases. So there's a movement to conscious incompetence. And as you can imagine, this is a low point. None of us like being aware of our incompetence. The good news is that most people come out of this having recognized their incompetence and having done the learning that's needed to build that capability.
[00:06:09] Trisha: So they move to conscious competence when they're thinking about their actions, remember when you were first learning to drive a car, and then eventually they move to unconscious competence. Where they don't need to consciously think through each step and they're operating well.
[00:06:26] Trisha: And I think this awareness is part of the metacognition that we need to grow our cultural intelligence. One of the things that Katie said in the podcast was that when people are gaining a skill or increasing a competency, they should give themselves more time, a buffer, if you like, to build to a point where they're aware of their own capability, and can self correct when they make mistakes.
[00:06:50] Trisha: So if you're trying to learn a new skill, for example she used tiling the bathroom, allow more time to get that tiling done than you think it will take. A while ago I did a survey with expats that I'd been working with and asked them about the first 90 days in their new roles and the consistent response.
[00:07:09] Trisha: was they needed more than 90 days to become effective in their new roles. These were all roles in a different country, a different culture, than they had previously worked in. The good thing was that these expats that I surveyed had been aware of their lack of skill and their knowledge and their need to grow it.
[00:07:30] Trisha: They'd all had the benefit of a cultural intelligence assessment and training in how to increase that. Sometimes I have worked with experienced people who have overestimated how experience in one culture will transfer to another. Sometimes it may, but sometimes the cultural values might be very different or some aspect of the business system may be very different and they need to learn new ways and new skills.
[00:07:55] Trisha: And of course we can do this if we have the awareness that we need to. And probably, I think, the humility to be willing to work on it. I hope to unpack more about this in future episodes, possibly in series two, when we interview some researchers to help us gain more understanding of the research behind cultural intelligence and metacognition, and metacognition in general.
[00:08:19] Trisha: If you have any suggestions for great researchers to interview, please drop me a line on LinkedIn or by my email, trisha at cicollective. com, which I will put in the show notes. So if you haven't done so already, please push that follow or subscribe button so that you can join us again next week for another exciting episode of The Shift.