Cultural intelligence: the competitive edge for leaders | Julia Middleton | TEDxEastEnd

my father was a merchant, he traveled the world, he traveled to every corner of the world and I watched him do it and he used to come home and we used to talk about whether the world, as it got smaller, would keep its promise and the promise was logical . that if the world got smaller it would become more coherent and he always swore it wouldn't be like that. Never would north and south and east and west and men and women and young and old and people of all different religions remain so incoherent. As always, part of his theory was that there would be too many people who would follow him and that the

leaders

of the world would become more and more like the flying dead.

I used to talk about the flying dead, a lot of people who fly around the world. and who land for a day, a week, a month, a year or an hour in a place and are expected to deliver it and have no idea what is going on around them. It was a pretty miserable version of the world and I became increasingly interested in the idea that we all needed

cultural

intelligence

or CQ. Cultural

intelligence

to me is the ability to cross borders between different cultures and actually thrive by doing it, I love doing it and never want to not do it.

I don't think the world had changed that much when I started, everyone kept telling me that IQ was the secret to everything, you had to be very smart and pass every test they threw at you and that IQ was absolutely crucial and if I had a penny to all the idiots over the years who have told me that if you could get people out of this trouble, Julia, there wouldn't be a problem and you think, what an idiot, I mean, just impressive, but luckily the EQ is became emotional. Intelligence wasn't very good for us women because we were all supposed to be awfully good at it, but we'll miss that dad, but EQ started to take hold and people realized that there were things called human beings in this. and that in general it would be a good thing if

leaders

had a little EQ, unfortunately, then you started getting people who would say I'm very good with people and then forget about those two extra words that should come after it, which is like me and I think now you're starting to see more and more people who know that you need CQ.

The ability to work with people and lead people who are not like you is crucial. I think we will continue to appoint people for IQ because no one had the imagination to break with that and unfortunately I will still fire some people a few years later for a complete absence of EQ, but I think in the future we will promote people for

cultural

intelligence as well that for a long period of time I wandered around there. I myself was one of the flying dead and I went around the world trying to talk to people who I thought had more cultural intelligence than most and it seemed to me that there was something very clear that most of them had in common, which was that they would order to discover what parts of them were central and what parts of them reflected which parts of them were calm when I say parts I mean your behaviors I mean your values ​​I mean your beliefs almost everything you have there what parts are absolutely central and without them , it's not you, what parts are central and absolutely crucial, that you are incredibly inflexible about them and the more inflexible you are about them, the more people trust you and then there is this huge area called your flexibility, which is almost everything the rest and the more flexible you are in that, the more people will trust you.

The first one where he's supposed to talk to me about being a salesperson and how hard it is to be a salesperson, that you actually become so flexible about almost everything that you lose the sense of having a core and no one trusts you at all because if you don't Do you have any idea what point you would stop at, yes, and the next one, the purple one, are my grandparents, yes, they came from the northwest of England and all on the street. I was just like them and there was absolutely no need for them to adapt to anyone and, frankly, everyone else could adapt to them and in fact, that little green patch at the end is just me being nice to them.

There really was nothing. there, if it was them and that was them and that was them and they all got caught and I wouldn't trust them any more than I could throw them. I think cultural intelligence arises in the kind of line between the two, between the core and the flex, that's where it lies and it moves it moves very carefully but it moves because it's called life you learn the more things you mean the more people you move it as someone pointed out to me that one my kids drew that big blue thumbtack or at first because you get it from your parents and your Nick and then most importantly it diminishes significantly when you become a teenager and play you will do almost anything and that helps you figure out what your flex and core are. and then towards the end it starts to drag I'm 56 now it's getting bigger I'm becoming a lot more intolerant of everyone um and you have to keep yourself under a story A few years ago I worked or was invited to work in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and I spent a lot of time thinking about this because everyone was telling me I had to wear an abaya and I thought about it a lot and I have three daughters who were deeply horrified that I was even thinking about that given what my whole life was supposed to be about and my belief in women and what? how could you even consider this?

I thought about it a lot and in the end I came to the conclusion that what I use is actually in my apartment. I've never used much. I was worried about what I wear or how I look for that look and therefore I would dress in a Bayern. I went to Jeddah and did the work there and I learned a lot because I discovered that I had always thought that anyone who wore an abaya must be a coward and I learned how stupid it was an extraordinary experience, but the interesting thing was that coming back to London the People say it's typical, they demand that you buy when you go to Jeddah, but when they come to London, do they wear Western clothes properly?

Actually, in this context, it's a perfectly stupid question because, for the women I met in Jeddah, what they will do is at their core and what I wear is in my Flex. I found it more and more as something that helped me begin to understand. the world, but as you moved forward, you needed the courage to then look at the next, the bad, because as you try on your purple, you shape your essence, you meet new people, if you are like me, you discover little fragments in your essence of the ones you're not very proud of are not based on judgment they are based on prejudice if you think you have no nuts I said I would like to suggest that you are probably not human and You are probably deluding yourself, we all have knots in our core and it seems to me that you discover them, you dust them off, find them curious and work on them, you can move them to your Flex or if you can't at all. because they are so deep inside you then at least make them your problem and not anyone else's.

It helped me. I remember years ago I went to speak to a group of about a hundred business women from the United States and, as always, I was late, we have many. things in common I was late and I was running to the shop knowing I was late I was jumping on the train at Liverpool Street I fell and tore my pants so I got on the train I got there as fast as I could I ran when I got there using Cambridge and I ran to the platform and I started talking to this extraordinary group of about a hundred U.S. business women and about two minutes later, I suddenly said, wait, let's stop because none of you are listening.

In a word, I'm saying you're just looking at my knee and I understand that you're looking at my knee, but I need to be very clear, my values, my core says that if I say, I'll be here to talk. I will do it under any circumstances, holding my pants or not, we never finished the speech, we had the most wonderful conversation and I discovered: to what extent what they really told me is that if we did what you are doing now, Julia, it would be the end of our careers, as good as we were, and I think a lot of cultural intelligence needs to be thrown out or not and having those brave conversations that you'd generally rather not have.

There is something curious about cultural intelligence and I would say that it is a kind of It is a paradox that you only really develop cultural intelligence if you, sir, decide to give it to me. I can only really understand what's going on if it reveals things to me, and the paradox is, of course, that it will only reveal things to me if it thinks. I have enough cultural intelligence to receive them, and I think that cultural intelligence is deeply rooted in a care for other human beings and such a deep care for other human beings that you won't judge them with yourself as a reference point.

I think it's coming. of the determination to undo the knots and to move on and to keep doing it full of yourself because, wow, you do it full of yourself and to get into the habit of apologizing freely. I think it comes from the ability to remember that flexibility if you flex again and then flex, it's extraordinary how quickly things become sclerotic, it's a word, they know they start to tense up and you say, but that's your flex or flex and I think that the last one I actually think is that you. You'll probably trust that I have some cultural intelligence if you occasionally observe me standing in the presence of the opposite of cultural intelligence, which is cultural intolerance, and in those moments when it would be easier to say nothing at all, It's better to say something even.

If you're a bit of an idiot, but in the end what fascinated me was that the more I talked about cultural intelligence with people, the more I realized that everyone assumes that cultural intelligence comes from understanding other people's cultures. people and the further I went, the more I began to realize that there was one of the most difficult cultures to approach, which is yours, that is the sect that you really have to understand understand when it helps you and understand what prevents you from understanding what that opens things up for you when it closes friend and closes when it causes other people's problems, when it gives you knots and when it loses your opportunities, for the rest, really, ultimately, culturally terrorist fascinates me.

I think people will be promoted for it because the world requires us to do it in a smaller way. but a more complex world, I think it gives us hope to be those kinds of leaders that make the world more coherent and I think it also gives us hope to be that kind of leader. I want to be a leader, I want to change things, I know it. There are some leaders who want to keep things the same but I want to change and I believe that cultural intelligence will help you produce the change you dream of producing.