The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional

In today’s multi-cultural organisations, cultural intelligence capabilities will be critical to enable health and safety practitioners and professionals to build interpersonal trust with members of the workforce.
This podcast provides a platform whereby Safety Professionals can develop a pathway to enhance their cultural intelligence capability, helping them to function effectively when working in a multi-cultural situation.

All Episodes

The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional

The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional Episode 14 Developing habits of minds

June 16, 2024 • Greg Dearsly • Season 1 • Episode 14

Who would have thought I would get to meet and speak with Dr. Catherine Wu, and in her adopted city of Singapore. An expert in cultural intelligence Catherine, shared her journey from a small village in France to teaching in Asia. She emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural values and how they impact interactions in diverse environments.

In our short time together we covered a number of Key aspects related to CQ including:

1. Cultural Intelligence Framework: Dr. Wu discusses the four components of Cultural Intelligence (CQ): Drive, Knowledge, Strategy, and Action. These components are essential for effective adaptation and building positive relationships in multicultural settings.

2. Power Distance and Collectivism vs. Individualism: She delves into cultural values like power distance, which affects respect for authority and communication styles. Additionally, she explores how collectivist cultures prioritize group harmony over individual opinions, contrasting with individualistic cultures that emphasize personal accountability.

3. Challenges in Cross-Cultural Communication: Dr. Wu shares her personal struggle with communication styles, particularly in navigating the balance between directness and saving face, a common challenge in Confucianist cultures like those in Asia.

4. Practical Steps for Culturally Intelligent Leadership: She suggests that cultivating cultural intelligence begins with awareness and storytelling. Sharing personal experiences and cultural insights can help raise awareness and bridge understanding among team members, ultimately fostering a more inclusive and culturally intelligent workplace.

In essence, Dr. Wu highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity and effective communication in navigating diverse cultural landscapes, urging leaders to share their experiences to promote greater cultural understanding and collaboration.

If you want to hear more from Catherine and her students studying CQ, check out the range of Podcasts featuring Dr. Wu as presenter or in her Producer role.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcatherinewu/

The Cultural Quotient – featuring Dr. Catherine Wu -
CQ Leading with culture – Produced by Dr. Catherine Wu
CQ WEESDOM - Produced by Dr. Catherine Wu

Greg: 0:00

Hi, everyone welcome to another episode of the Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional, a podcast aimed at providing a platform where by safety professionals can develop a pathway to enhance their cultural intelligence capability which will help them function more effectively when working in a multicultural situation. I'm Greg Dearsly your host and I have a range of guests lined up to talk to this year. We have people with experiences across leadership psychology, health and safety, education and of course cultural intelligence. All of our guests come from a wide range of different backgrounds across the diversity spectrum, including from different organizational context. In this podcast you'll hear stories aimed at helping you the listener enhance your cultural intelligence. You'll gain an understanding of how you can create trust when working in diverse environments and quite frankly, that's all the time no matter how homogenous the place you work, it might be, it's still full of diversity, people with different backgrounds, experiences and beliefs, all built on their figured world. So this week I'm coming to you from Rochester in Singapore and I'm here in person with somebody who has set an absolutely outstanding goal in the area of cultural intelligence. Dr. Catherine Wu is a thought leader on global leadership and Interculturalism a passionate advocate for cultural diversity, and she's on a mission to inspire, get this 10 million interculturalists to connect cultures and speak up for diversity. She's a lecturer at the Nanyang Business School in Singapore, where she teaches in Asia's top Nanyang MBA program and the prestigious Nanyang Fellows MBA for Senior Public Executives. Dr. Catherine is best known for her thought provoking LinkedIn posts and her engaging conversations on the Cultural Quotient Podcast, the first podcast to grow your cultural intelligence at work and in life. Dr. Catherine received her PhD from the Center for Leadership and Cultural Intelligence in Singapore, which is the first research center in the world on the subject of cultural intelligence. She is French and has lived in Asia for the past 20 years. She lives in Singapore with her Taiwanese American husband and three third culture kids. Catherine, I don't know whether to say Bonjour or Ni Hao, but I guess we might explore that later on. But for now, welcome to the show, and it's really great to have somebody with your experience in CQ here today.

Catherine: 2:39

Great. Nice to meet you, Greg, and I'm so glad that we got to meet in person. Thank you for making the stop on your way back from London, just specifically for meeting me here.

Greg: 2:51

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's really great to have you here and I'm, just to start off, really interested just to hear a little bit about you. I've given a bit of an overview, but how did you end up teaching CQ in Asia?

Catherine: 3:04

Wow where to begin? I think it, I, we have to start from the start, right? I grew up in a village in the south of France and I like to say that in my village, there is no cultural diversity. Everybody is white, everybody speaks French, some people have traveled, been to other places, but very few have, In fact, nobody have actually, move away and spend their life abroad or anywhere far away. But somehow when I was growing up, I became fascinated by the way people from other cultures and in the part of the world, how do they live their lives and how different it is from anything I knew. And so I decided that when I'm a grown up this is a life I want to have. I want a life where I have friends all over the world and I travel to different places and I discover how people live their lives in other countries. But No, that was just a dream. And when I was 23 years old and I graduated from business school I decided that I was not going to wait for other people to serve me my dream on the plate, which I knew would not, was not going to happen and instead I decided I was going to take my destiny between my own hands, and so I say, no, instead of looking for a job which I could have easily found, I Decided that I was going to take whatever money I had in the bank and I bought myself a ticket to Beijing. Yes. And I thought, if I was going to have an international life, international career initially I thought, okay, I'm, what can I do to have that life? I thought I'm going to be an HR manager and I will help expatriates. But I thought if I'm going to help expatriates, I need to know what is the experience of adapting to a very different culture. I wanted to have a culture shock. Nice. So I went to Beijing and I did have a culture shock. I had many of those. But one thing led to another. I spent four and a half years in China and and then I was lucky to get a scholarship to come to Singapore to study cultural intelligence with people from the Center for Cultural Intelligence and Leadership here at the Nanyang Business School. And it was not a smooth ride, but it was a fun journey. And, for the past 15 years, I've been here and mostly teaching cultural intelligence and helping people transform develop these skills. I think When I started my career in China, I was doing cross cultural training and a lot of the things I was doing was based on cultural values, okay, the Chinese are like this and the French are like that, and they are models, like models that PhDs and professors and psychologists that can allow us to describe cultures and compare, but this model didn't reflect my reality. On the, any given day, I had a, my boss was American, my colleagues were Chinese, my friends were Korean, my clients were German. And I felt like knowing how the Chinese are and the French are, it's not helping me at all with all these different relationships. And the other issue is, Even the Chinese people I knew, my colleagues, my friends, our business partners and all this, often they were not exactly like what the book said, right? So that was always a problem. And when I came to Singapore to learn about cultural intelligence I remember thinking that, wow, this new concept of cultural intelligence, it flips this idea of cross cultural relation inside actually, it's outside in. I want to say outside in because the traditional mode of teaching cross cultural communication is to look at them. It's okay, the Chinese, the French, the Singaporean, the New Zealanders, right? But cultural intelligence, bring it back to me. It's not about what I know about you. It's about The way I think it's about, I say developing habits of minds, like different ways to change the way we normally think and to think differently so that we can learn and then we can adapt more easily to any person that we meet who come from a very different cultural background.

Greg: 7:11

Yeah. Yeah nice. So let's get straight into it in terms of the CQ content. There's a framework that really makes up the basics of how we learn about this stuff, and we've got the four components of CQ drive, knowledge, strategy and action, and we know that they've been renamed from an academic name, to these more sort of understandable terms. I'm just really interested to hear, your perspective of those four components and I don't know, maybe what you tell your students about what they mean.

Catherine: 7:48

The, I think the question about around cultural intelligence, it started in the 1990s here in Singapore and it was driven by a question, why is it that some people who work in multicultural teams, multicultural organizations, Do so more effectively than others and by effectively we mean that these people are better at building relationships with their colleagues with their bosses, with their clients, and they can get things done more easily. And maybe the way they, the reason they get things done more easily or better at the higher level of performance is because they are better at building those relationships. They have fewer conflicts, people like them more, they want to help them, they want to collaborate with them, right? All of this. So that was the end goal. The end goal is what, why do some people adapt better than others in an environment where there is cultural diversity? And traditionally, the way people research the skills, they will go and they will observe and then they will interview different people and say, okay, if you want the people who adapt better to other culture, they have more empathy, they are more open minded, they have, they speak more languages, they do all these things, but, if I ask a group of 100 people that question what differentiates, what sets apart people who can adapt well to other cultures from the ones who don't, I will see, I will receive as many responses in the room as there are people, right? So then the question is, you have these 100 attributes, what do you do with that? You are like a safety manager and you think that cultural intelligence is helpful for your team. And you look at this list and you have so many attributes, like how do you teach empathy? How do you teach open mindedness, right? It's not practical. And if anything, it's overwhelming. How do I start? Is it even possible to develop those skills? So the researchers at my university, at NTU, when they took this approach and they said this is not working, we need to find a better model, a model that can guide that can be used for training and development. And we know, and we need to know that this model directly linked to better relationships and better performance on the job. And so they did it backward and they started by looking at, okay, what is adaptation? And if I ask you, what is adaptation? I've already told you adaptation is getting the job done and building better relationship. Adaptation is. Is define, is actually the definition of intelligence. In psychology, intelligence is adaptation. Is adaptation to the, a particular environment. Yep. Now this is a common misunderstanding. People think intelligence is about, how well you do in school and how good you are, but actually IQ is only your ability to adapt to the demand of an academic environment. Yes, of course. So that's the way it works. So they started looking at this and they say, what define cultural, what define intelligence? Intelligence is about what happened in your head, what happened in your heart and what happened in your body. The head is the knowledge. What do you know? And the metacognition In CQ we call that strategy. It's how do you use your knowledge to respond to immediate situation that are in front of you. Because you can be book smart, but if you cannot remember any of this when you are facing a situation when you need it, the knowledge is useless. So this is a cognitive component of intelligence. And then you have this other dimension. One is that it's a motivation. It's not enough. To have all of this in your head, if you don't want to use it, you're not going to. So you need to have the drive, the motivation. And the last one is about, you need to be able to translate what's in your head into something that other people can see. Because you might be really smart, but if every time you open your mouth, you hurt somebody's feelings, they won't like you very much. So that's the action component. It's the one that you use to communicate with other people. So that's the way the framework of cultural intelligence was developed. That's the thing that, I tell my students, but the, to me, what's really important is, It starts with you, CQ, but the end goal is this is adaptation is getting the job done and building positive, relationship with people around us, even when they are very different from us.

Greg: 12:08

Yeah, absolutely. And that that I guess I've talked about that a little bit in both a leadership context and a cultural intelligence context. And that, yes, we see all these wonderful quotes out there on LinkedIn and other places about what leadership is. Yeah. But actually before it's any of that stuff, it's about you and it's about your professional and personal development. It's about you understanding a lot about yourself. Yeah. And I think the same argument can be applied to CQ before you can get to that end goal of adaptation. Yeah. You've got to understand yourself. Where did I come from? Why do I make decisions this way? Why do I behave this way? Et cetera, et cetera.

Catherine: 12:47

And that's an excellent point that you make Greg in the sense that. For anyone who, if you have lived abroad or if you have gone to study abroad for some time, or if you have spent like some time in a very different cultural environment, that's usually where people recognize, start thinking, oh, There's something cultural about me, and usually there is this first phase. It's not the, we develop this urge to not just learn about the other culture, but actually there's this mechanism that we say, Oh, now I need to learn about my own culture. So I remember when I went to China within a year there, I started like buying all the books I could get my hand on about the French. Because when you are in your culture, when you are in your natural environment, you never question your culture because that's all you know. That's why people say culture is like a fish in water. The fish doesn't know it's in water until you get the fish out. I tell my people in Singapore, I tell them it's like breathing air. We never think about breathing air until we have a big clouds of smoke from the wildfire in Indonesia that come and around Singapore, and we cant breathe anymore, we have to wear a mask and stay indoor, right? So it's the same. So it's like what you say, it starts by understanding yourself. Only when you can put a name to certain things that you do and recognize that these things are not the same everywhere else, then you can go out in the world again and start negotiating these cultural differences.

Greg: 14:16

I think David Livermore in one of his books said that the Anglo culture is unnaturally focused on achievement. Okay. Suggesting that's our key focus is achieving something. And that I guess he was suggesting that other cultures are not necessarily like that. It's just a, just another example.

Catherine: 14:37

Yes, it's true. Although I will say it depends on the culture because I've lived in China, I've lived in Singapore. I think people don't. Very driven to achieve it in this culture.

Greg: 14:47

And so let's talk about that a little bit more. We've talked about the framework. Yeah. And I guess aligned to that framework is a whole bunch of cultural values. Yes. That it's, that's part of that understanding that if I'm talking to a French person, I, might have some idea about some of the key cultural values and how to adapt when I'm in that situation. Let's just talk through a few of those and power distance is probably one that many of the audience might have heard of. I think, the work done by Hofstede, coined that term way back. And so if you think about power distance what comes to your mind in a workplace setting around power distance?

Catherine: 15:31

So power distance, I would say it's is associated with, like any value, any cultural attribute will have both benefits and disadvantage. Okay, so power distance is associated to respect for authority and also a high level of sensitivity to the social order. Yeah. So when you encounter a culture that has a high power distance, People are going to first sense you and they, in their mind, even without realizing it, they have a certain number of criteria that are going to determine, help them determine whether they should approach you as someone who is above them, equal to them, or below them. One example, I am French. In France, when we speak to people who are older, who are more Senior who are higher in, in hierarchy, there is a, we do not address them using the same pronoun than people who are equal. So in French the pronoun you in English would have two different different ways to say it. The one would be tu, which would be the casual like we are friends, we are. We are equal. And then the other one would be vu. Vu would mean showing respect to someone in authority. In Chinese it's the same. Chinese will use ním, which means you as a friend, and nín will be a different a different status. Already power distance It starts by if you grew up in a society that is very hierarchical where there is this power distance, you are already in your mind, even before I know you, I'm going to determine how I need to decide how I should address you. So that's the first thing. And then how I should address you determine as well. How I should behave around you. So in high power distance culture, for example, when you're dealing with somebody who you judge is higher, than you, you don't show yourself fully. You don't, there are some things you cannot say. You act, you may use different words. You may be more polite, more formal. I think in Japan, the Japanese do that like very much. They have different words to say, in, in, when I'm with somebody who is. higher status, I have to show a certain person and that certain person is more reserved, more constrained, my personality, I have to just, who am I? I am, I have to keep it very low versus if I'm with my friends, I can show my own self, right? My personality. So power distance is a very strong determinant of people's behaviors, especially in the leadership context. The other thing is, Power, distance, determine so right now we've spoken about especially if you are lower in a hierarchy, typically when people see somebody is a higher than them, they will be less willing to speak up, they will be they will be more willing to agree with you they will be less willing to challenge the boss authority or whatever the boss say, there will be differences on how they express this based on how, if they are young or older, younger people, it depends from, but you have generational differences but still you will have that level of respect. Now power distance also affects how the bosses behave. Because in the high power distance culture, even though you're supposed to show respect to people above you, when you are in a position of authority, you have a lot more flexibility and leeway in what kind of behavior is acceptable. So you are more, it might be more acceptable for you to be demanding on people. To maybe even sometimes raise your voice or certain, say certain things. There are differences depending on which culture we're talking about and variations. But still, whereas people in power, low power distance cultures, and even in a leadership situation, the behaviors are more constant. People don't feel this need to change and adjust their actions and behaviors because they are with the boss or because they are with their subordinate. There are fewer fewer variations. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's, so that's a source of tension and conflict when you're on your team.

Greg: 19:41

And it's interesting you talk about the lack of willingness to speak up to authority and certainly when We've read books about the safety industry or safety at work. There's a couple of industries that are highlighted in that space and one is the airline industry. So nobody, historically, I think it's changing, but people won't challenge the pilot, yes, people won't challenge the doctor, yes, and sometimes I think also in hospitality, the waiters and waitresses probably won't challenge the chef, maybe. As I say, certainly in New Zealand, I think that's changing. But those are three sectors where that power distance, that hierarchical sort of status thing is showing up quite a lot. Yeah, so another one to consider, and actually before we get into that, one of the things to I think to consider, and you've touched on it is just because we're talking about um, these values and we might talk about particular cultures. It's not a stereotyping discussion. It's not saying that all. Anglos are whatever. It's just saying that typically that's what you might find.

Catherine: 20:50

So I think it's also, so these cultural differences or these cultural models they are used, they are, they represent an average. So it's like you sample a population, maybe you interview 1000 people or 2000 people, I don't know, different, those models you find online, they will have different methodology, but generally the methodology is you sample a portion of the population and you look at the average. Of course, it depends, right? If you sample a group of MBA students they will have very different approach to power than if you sample somebody who is working in like on the floor of a factory but still it's an average. So that does not describe precisely how every person you meet is going to behave. That being said, when you cross cultures, when you work with people, so by culture, people who come from a different country, have a different, who grew up, who have been Brought up in a very different cultural environment, because I think school is also a mean of unifying or unique, creating some level of uniformity within the culture, especially when it comes to power, you learn to respect authority in school and in your family, how you behave towards your parents or how you are, the kind of behavior your parents expected from you, and then your teachers expecting from you. This is how you learn what is a proper way. To relate to authority at first. So these models come, are helpful when you go, when you compare other cultures, but it's always relative. Like for example, the French are more high power distance, more hierarchical than the Germans. But when I came to Asia, I think the French are still pretty low power distance relative to, Singapore or China, the cultures I'm more used to. Yeah. So It's more like a mental model that you use to anticipate some problems, but of course then you have to get to know the person better. Yeah, absolutely. Can I make a second point? Sure. The second point is research has shown that even within countries, there are huge variations in power distance and attitudes toward power related to the social economic status of people. Yeah, okay. and the level of education. So if you are more highly educated, if you have more opportunities to change your job, more like what they call economic freedom, then you may also be more willing to challenge authority than if you are an immigrant in a low skilled job who is not sure that it's going to work. be able to, find another job the next day. This is beyond your own cultural upbringing. This is also determined by your life circumstances.

Greg: 23:25

And from a migrant perspective, certainly in New Zealand, that could challenge their ability to stay in the country even. That's right. If they challenge something and get in trouble for it or whatever and lose their job, that's a ticket out of here. So that's another reason. From a safety perspective, what we find is that migrants are less willing at times. To report incidents and accidents, of course, because there might be consequences. Yeah, which could be their job. Yes, which could be their country, and back home and all that. So, and I guess while we're talking about New Zealand individualism and collectivism, we've obviously got a significant Anglo majority in New Zealand Likely to be individualists. Yes. But we've also got quite a diverse migrant population, Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians, who are likely to be collectivists. Do you see this playing out in workplaces? What, how does, what does that actually look like? And I guess, In this part of the world, very collective. What does that look like in workplaces here?

Catherine: 24:35

So a student of mine once complained, he came from Norway and he was, he complained, he didn't complain to me, but he reflected, he said this sentence, he said, people here are so competitive I thought they were collectivist. They should be nice to everyone. And I like to say, we tend to assume that because you are an individualist, you are more selfish. Think only about yourself. Because you are more collectivist, you should be nice to everybody. But I think this is a misconception. Individualism means that Your sense of accountability is to yourself. There's a sense of responsibility that is also based on being an individual on its own that is independent and do things for themselves. Your survival does not depend on others. Your survival depends on your ability to survive on your own. In collectivistic society is different. In collective society the accountability and a sense of responsibility is towards others, towards the referent group. Because this reference group is in charge is your life insurance, is if something goes wrong for you, these are the people who will have your back, who will support you no matter what. But this is not everybody. These are only a group of people select around you that you feel that you can lean on to. In the workplace, it depends. In some cultures, people will see in some collectivist cultures, they will see their team as these people who will have your back and will help you survive. It's easier for this sense of collective connection to develop when that team is made of people who have similar cultural background because they have a, because of their similar cultural background, they have similar life experiences and expectations of one another, so they might cling on to each other more tightly. If your team is diverse, even if you are a group of immigrants who are all collectivists, but they come from different parts of the world, they may have different ways to build those relationships and that trust. That is the key. But that doesn't mean that, so these people may not be attached to your organization, the ultimately is about what, which group we call the reference group is a group that give them the sense that they can lean on, that will give them the sense of safety. I've heard stories in other parts of the world where people were totally disengaged at work, even though they were from a very collectivist society, because their reference group was a family. And they had their allegiance, their their accountability was to the family, less to the job. So the job, you go there, you do it, you do what your boss tell you, whether the company grow or not, or whether People don't feel that sense of attachment. And actually the sense of accountability towards a group, because in collectivistic society is so strong, in individualistic society is less strong. It's, you it's not always that collectivist societies tend to be like, would bind together around this goal of a company or an organization. So it creates some, it's not, that one is not very straightforward.

Greg: 27:52

And so that's a couple that we've covered off on the power distance and the individualistic and collectivism. And as there's a bunch more. And I'm sure we could spend all day talking about them. I guess I just wanted to ask you you, you're originally from Europe. Yes. And you've been living here for 20 years. What's one cultural value that is existent in Asia that really you struggle with or that you have a conflict with in terms of mixing your French heritage with the Asian culture here?

Catherine: 28:22

For me it's the communication. Okay. So in, in Asia I don't want to say in Asia because it depends, but in, in Confucianist cultures, there is a high level of face is a big thing. Yeah. You have to save people's face. Your communication is always directed towards others. If I say things this way, is it saving face for the other person? So French people can be quite indirect when they have to say things. But, generally, there is still a certain level of directness, especially when it comes to giving negative feedback, or when people are unhappy with others they, I feel like they tend to say it a little bit more directly than people would do here. Yeah. Yeah, this is this is the, being, This is something I struggle with, is learning how to be tactful. The other thing is, it's also related to the communication and saving face. In many cultures in Europe, I would say in most cultures in Europe, and this is common of individualistic cultures, truth and transparency are very highly valued. A lot more than preserving the feeling of the other person. So if I feel that wrong and it can cause some damage or just because it's just wrong. I will be more willing to say it, even if it's potentially going to hurt your feelings or make you look bad. Whereas. In Confucianist societies that have a strong emphasis on preserving faith, truth is less important than relationship. And so even if I see something being like really wrong being done, I read, I'd rather hold it back because I don't want you to look bad. So I'll always give the example of one of my friend who's German and she had the Singaporean boss and then the boss would say something, let's do this or that. And she would tell the boss, this is a really bad idea. Oh, you don't talk to your boss like this. Yes. And she would say, but I don't know why you let me, okay. He got mad at me. I get it. I'm too direct. But at the same time, I know that if he does this, he's going to hit a wall, like he's going in the wrong direction and then he wouldn't make him look bad in the end. Now that's not to say that in these cultures, people don't say when things sometimes they do, especially in Singapore, people have a very high sense of personal responsibility, but they will not say directly. They will find some other ways. They would go and find somebody else that is trusted and say, Hey, I have some reservation about this or that. So they will use more sideways. Yeah. Yeah, I come from a culture which is like, why go all the long way if you can go the short way, right? So that's a problem. Yeah. For me, it's a work in progress and it's something really difficult.

Greg: 31:11

Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. So I guess just as we start to wrap this up, I know you're not a safety professional. Yes. I think this whole cultural intelligence thing, my focus is on safety professionals, but actually I think you can swap out the word safety professional and replace it with leader. Okay. And so I'm really interested in a couple of gems a couple of bits of advice that you could give to the listeners about how they can start down the path of being more culturally intelligent. What are a couple of steps they can take? Yes. I want to say that, first of all, if they are listening to this podcast, it means that they already have some level of awareness that culture can really affect the behaviors and potentially the attitudes. outcome of safety, safety cultures and safety initiatives.

Catherine: 31:59

So that already is really important. The challenge I found is that, before you can go into training yourself, you first need to have the awareness. Now there are people like you, Greg, who have more than the awareness, I think. When you tell me your stories and you share with me your examples, you have the awareness, but you also have the cultural intelligence. And what I tell people is cultural intelligence is not something that you buy off a shelf and then you learn it. It exists in natural form in the world. Researchers do not develop models out of thin air. They develop a framework and then they go out in the world and they see Do I see these things, I think, make a difference? And do they really make a difference? They collect it. They look at the performance, the relationship, the, all these things that I've described of those people who have high cultural intelligence or low cultural intelligence. But these people, they don't even know what cultural intelligence is. So the first thing is to, I want to say is that if you're already listening this, you're already on the journey to develop those skills. Maybe you already have those skills. Now, I want to say what makes you a culturally intelligent leader is not just your ability to develop those skills for yourself, but it's your ability to bring that awareness to the people around you. Because safety culture is not just one person. It's not about the manager. It's about the leader and how the leader develop the sensitivity in his team so that eventually people can take over, they will grow and they will become managers themselves. So if they have one advice for your listeners, and especially people like you who are already aware and have already developed the skills to, a very good level, even if they don't know how to say this. Begin by telling your stories. Greg, you have so many interesting stories about small things, cultural things about that differences that you have observed between people from different groups in the safety context and how you can fix this problem really easily. These stories They will help someone who has no clue, someone who has never encountered another culture or has never thought about those differences. By listening to those stories, they will start seeing things they didn't see before. They will start thinking about other people's behaviors in a way that They had never thought of before, and then once they have that awareness, then they will be prepared, to learn more, to read the books, to learn about this cultural dimensions, the theories and all of this. So I think for leaders, what's really important is recognize when you have really, if you have, I say, if you have had some success at leading across cultures, you have a culturally intelligent story to tell that can help others. I And to me, this is leadership. It's your ability to elevate the skills, the talent of the people around you to your level and beyond. Tell your story.

Greg: 35:03

Hey, it's been absolutely fantastic, as you say, to meet in person for a start. That was it was a great opportunity that we've managed to achieve that. Really appreciate you putting some time aside to come and have a chat. Where can people get in touch with you if they want to follow you? I know you're really keen to spread the word around the world. Where can they connect with you? Yes the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. Dr. Catherine Wu. Yes. On LinkedIn. I write stuff. I try to write regularly. I used to write every day and now I had to take a step back, but I write at least several times a week about my thoughts and and I'm especially I'm working on a book right now.

Catherine: 35:49

And so if you follow me on LinkedIn, you may have a first taste of some of the thoughts and ideas that I'm developing in my book. I also have a podcast, The Cultural Quotient podcast, where I talk about cultural intelligence through my life with my partner Ting Claraval, who is a manager in a consulting company. She's Filipina. And she talks about also her life of working in a international organization as an Asian. So these are the two best way to get in touch with me. I just want to highlight, I have two more podcasts that I am more the producer and Made by my students, my MBA masters students who are professionals, diplomats, managers, people from all walks of life who have deep experience in working all over Asia. So if you are interested to learn about what people from different Asian cultures think, it's really going down into their minds. Yeah. This two podcasts are great. One is called CQ Leading with Culture and the other one is called CQ Weesdom. W E E S. D O M. And this one will give you like real case studies from people who have worked in organizations all over Asia.

Greg: 37:00

Yeah. Excellent. Okay. So three podcasts. Yeah. The the cultural quotient CQ Weesdom. Yes. And the third one was? CQ Leading with Culture. Excellent. Okay. We'll put those in the show notes and a link to your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn. And and we'll keep an eye out for the book. Is that out shortly?

Catherine: 37:23

No. That one, I'm hoping for next year.

Greg: 37:28

Excellent. Excellent. We'll keep an eye out for that. And look, just again, thanks so much for spending some time with me.

Catherine: 37:34

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Greg.

Greg: 37:36

What a highlight to meet and speak with Dr. Catherine. Wu, an expert in cultural intelligence, some real gems on that discussion. Just to reflect we covered off on Catherine's approach to explaining the four components of cultural intelligence or CQ, those being drive, knowledge strategy and action. We explored Power distance and we looked into collectivism versus individualism. And we also discuss the challenges in cross-cultural communication. Catherine shared her personal struggle with communication styles between her French upbringing and her life in Asia particularly in navigating the balance between directness and saving face, a common challenge in Confucianist cultures like those in Asia. We wrapped up with some practical steps for culturally intelligent leadership. In essence Catherine highlighted the importance of cultural sensitivity and effective communication in navigating diverse cultural landscapes and urges leaders to share their experiences to promote greater cultural understanding and collaboration. So we've come to the end of this episode, thanks so much for listening. I hope you found something valuable that you can take away that might enhance aspects of your own cultural intelligence. I'll add the transcript from this episode to the show notes, and there'll be some other resources as well. If you'd like to talk about cultural intelligence get in touch with me via LinkedIn. I'm posting content regularly so keep an eye on your feed and comment if you see something that resonates. If we aren't connected, send me an invite. If you want to hear more about CQ you can follow and subscribe to this podcast I would really appreciate it if you did that, and keep an eye out for the next episode. Next week's guest is Jodhi Warwick Ponga, Jodhi is a trustee of Te Ropu Marutau O Aotearoa and she's just coming down from the highs of running another successful health and safety conference held once again in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. Jodhi is head of programs and apprenticeships at Vertical Horizons and her career has spanned various aspects of training and education. I'm looking forward to that one. Thanks again for tuning into the Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional. Ka Kitei.