As a young parent, I wasn’t big on bribes. You know—Be good and I’ll let you get a new toy. I wanted my daughters to make good choices for their own right and to think through the ensuing consequences. Yeah—that didn’t work out so great during the toddler years.

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of energy cautioning against behavior modification. I just wasn’t convinced that getting people to artificially change their behavior demonstrated much about who they truly are on the inside. I’ve tried to make my point by saying things like:

• We get all excited when teenagers aren’t doing drugs and having sex. But how is their character being formed from within? You can be a straight-laced kid who is bitter, cynical, and rebellious on the inside. Just because you “behave” a certain way doesn’t mean a whole lot.

• Marital faithfulness means little if it’s simply following the behaviors that are “supposed” to go along with fidelity. Our spouses want faithfulness because we desire them and want to save intimacy for them, not because we’re just forcing ourselves to behave a certain way.

• What’s the point of telling people the politically correct labels for various ethnic groups if they don’t actually view the Other with respect. PC lingo does little to really promote inclusion and effectiveness.

• And knowing the “right” way to hand someone a business card in China isn’t going to have much to do with whether you can actually be effective working with the Chinese.

You get the idea. Whether it’s in religious circles, educational settings, or work place contexts, a lot of energy is spent trying to get people to artificially change their external behaviors without really dealing with what’s going on internally. And frankly, I’m convinced that more than ever, the greatest challenges facing our generation have far more to do with interior issues of what we value, how we think, and how we see the world rather than with external behavior changes and policy reforms.

HOWEVER…maybe our inner currents aren’t as disconnected from our external behaviors as I’ve often made them sound. Ions ago, Artistotle said, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.”

In a pretend, analytical world from which we get a lot of seminar-speak and classroom theories, it sounds great to say—Let’s get people to change from within and their behavior will naturally flow from that.

But as pointed out in David Brook’s new book, The Social Animal, our behavior isn’t nearly as neat, rational, and linear as that!

Of course my wife Linda wants me to be faithful for all the right reasons. But surely she’d opt for the “artificial behavior” rather than the alternatives, even when it seems “forced”.

Or let’s take something a little less intimate than faithfulness to my wife. My youngest daughter Grace (pictured above) has had the lowest “spice tolerance” of anyone in our family. But this year, she decided (on her own—I promise!) to try eating spicier foods. She started with easy stuff life tikka marsala and medium salsa. Now she’s ramping up to various Thai curries. At first, she tolerated it and kept a plate of pineapple nearby to reduce the burning sensation. But she’s just recently announced that Thai food is her favorite.  Full confession—I couldn’t be happier. So maybe there’s been some subversive behavior modification going on by her father. And she certainly hasn’t gulped down a full bowl of authentic Tom Yum soup yet. But what started as some small changes in her eating behavior has begun to translate into what she actually likes and enjoys.

I’m still pretty convinced that character development, effective cross-cultural interaction, or breaking addictions ultimately lies in something that’s both deeply personal and transcendent. But I’m beginning to see that all my energy spent on rants against “behavior modification” could probably be better spent elsewhere…err…like “training” myself to not check my email and other tech inputs every 90 seconds.

Changing behavior alone is not enough. But it often precedes changes in our attitudes and feelings. Like they say at Alcoholics Anonymous, “Fake it until you can make it!”

–An Interview with Guido Gianasso, Vice President of Human Capital at IATA

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) was founded in 1945 as a way to ensure that airlines and governments would work together to guarantee safe and efficient air travel. Today, IATA’s membership totals 230 airlines from 120 countries carrying more than 2 billion passengers annually and 35.2 tons of goods. It’s believed to be one of the most important organizations supporting today’s global economy.

But ten years ago, IATA was quickly becoming irrelevant. They were losing money and it took several days after 9/11 before IATA offered any response to the crisis. Just months later, Mr. Guido Gianasso was asked by the newly appointed CEO to come to IATA to help him in transforming the organization inside out. We recently interviewed Mr. Gianasso to learn about the change process he’s led internally at IATA as vice president of human capital.

Describe IATA’s staff when you arrived 10 years ago compared to today.
Despite the international breadth of IATA’s staff and work, the corporate ethos I inherited was led and dominated by European and North American men. We knew we had to better reflect the fast growing markets in other parts of the world. Today, our personnel represent more than 140 different nationalities. We have men and women leading with us in 74 different countries. We just appointed a Singaporean woman as a director outside of Asia. That never would have happened 10 years ago.

What kinds of challenges do you face in leading your staff to work across so many different countries?
We’ve faced the same kinds of global challenges as many other multinational organizations: How do we operate in global markets that we don’t fully understand? Where do we find leaders able to grow the business locally, communicate with headquarters and manage local teams effectively while implementing global processes, initiatives and strategies? The traditional solution to these problems has been to send out experts from corporate headquarters (usually Western ex-pats) to set up and manage branch offices around the world.

But you decided to use a different approach. Tell us about the leadership development program you created to meet the needs of IATA globally.
We developed a program we call I-Lead. Each year, our top management selects twenty high-potential individuals from our workforce to be in a six-month program focused upon developing their global leadership and cultural intelligence. Half the group is from traditional markets like Western Europe and North America and the other half is from emerging markets like China, Nigeria, and India.

What does this six-month program look like?
At the beginning of the program we bring the 20 I-Lead participants together for a week in one of our emerging markets. We pair each of them up to co-lead a team of junior, high-potential employees and for the next six months, they work together on a real-life business project that is relevant to IATA. So every year we have ten teams being co-led by one Western and one non-Western leader. They work extensively on a set of deliverables in addition to their regular job responsibilities. At the end of the six-month period, the teams present their project results and cross-cultural lessons learned to IATA’s top executive team.

And what are the results?
This has been one of our most profitable leadership development programs. From a business perspective, the projects developed by the teams have been some of our most profitable initiatives. And the program is improving our leaders cultural intelligence. We recently completed an empirical study on the more than 200 participants who have been through this program and found that the program significantly improved their CQ in all four areas (Drive, Knowledge, Strategy, and Action).

The I-Lead program has helped us build bridges across different cultures and has played a direct role in the growth of our business in emerging markets. As a result, we’re developing global leaders from within and simultaneously improving our effectiveness in effective cross-border management.

IATA’s successful use of CQ assessments and training along with other CQ success stories is featured in the new book, THE CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE DIFFERENCE, releasing this next month in bookstores everywhere.

My MacBook Pro makes me happy. Really! I’m a happier man because I’m writing this article on my slick Mac. My I-Phone has the same effect on me. And even though I’m loathe to EVER wait in lines, I did exactly that for 3 hours a few weeks ago so I could be among the first to own the latest and greatest I-Pad 2.0. Apple and innovation seem to be pretty much synonymous these days. With each product launch, they remind us that the new competitive frontier in the global economy is innovation and creativity. And they keep doing it.

Now there’s a new way to up your creativity—Improve your CQ or cultural intelligence. Creativity and innovation are the newest payoffs that have emerged from research on individuals who can be described as culturally intelligent, that is, they’re capable of working effectively across various cultural contexts. For a number of years, the research on cultural intelligence has found some other important and recurring results for individuals and organizations with higher levels of CQ: Superior cross-cultural adjustment, improved job performance, enhanced personal well-being, and greater cost-savings and profitability. But this newest finding—increased CQ correlates with improved creativity and innovation—creates an entirely new impetus for assessing and developing CQ.

In the preliminary studies examining creativity and cultural intelligence, creativity was evaluated by assessing subjects’ creative problem-solving skills and their ability to generate new and productive ideas. It’s not surprising that creativity and cultural adaptability are correlated. A great deal of what’s required to work effectively in a cross-cultural context requires creative solutions: How will I negotiate this deal so that I come home with a signed contract? The way you negotiate effectively with a Japanese firm will be very different from how you do so with a Saudi one. We could make the same argument about negotiating with two firms in the same country given their unique organizational cultures. But creative solutions are especially needed when negotiating across national borders.

The studies on creativity and CQ did not indicate that international experience by itself is what yields greater creativity. There are many globetrotting managers who continue to lead with their gut, unaware that their colleagues or clients in various cultures are the ones creatively adapting to them rather than vise versa. And when we travel widely but not deeply, the demand for creative adaptation is more subtle. When you return to the comforts of the Marriott at night, only certain aspects of your creative impulses have been exercised.

Bilinguals scored better in creativity than mono-linguals. And creativity was found at relatively high rates among first and second-generation immigrants. But there were many other individuals who didn’t have that kind of diverse background whose cultural intelligence still enhanced their overall creativity.

On the whole, creativity was most likely to be higher among individuals who:

• Demonstrated an intrinsic interest and openness to the cultures they encountered
• Could not only describe a culture but could juxtapose it with their own by articulating both similarities and differences
• Could tolerate ambiguity, hold things in tension, and be okay without an abundance of firm, categorical answers
• Were members of diverse teams—not only nationally and ethnically but functionally and ideologically

Creativity is arguably the driving force determining the scope of your long-term impact. In what way does your work make an obvious contribution to your field? Does it add something new and substantial? Does it generate new spinoffs? And/or does it provide new and exciting ideas?

Cultural intelligence is one of many ways to increase your overall creativity. But given the growing importance today of being able to effectively work across a diversity of cultures, why not get the double benefit of improving your CQ and simultaneously improving your ability to be an innovator who makes a long-term impact.