David Livermore Global Thinker and Author

It’s widely known that Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, frequently leaves one open seat at the company’s most important meetings. It’s there to remind his fellow executives and managers of the most important person in the room—the customer.

Forbes reports that Amazon tracks its performance against five hundred measurable goals. Nearly 80 percent relate to customer objectives.

But if the people at the meeting don’t have cultural intelligence, it’s unlikely the chair will be of much benefit. The participants will simply assume the person represented by the empty chair values what they do. And if everyone in the meeting comes from the same cultural background, it’s going to be tough to get a grasp of preferences and opinions of the customer.

So go ahead and add an empty chair to your most important meetings. But don’t stop with that. To make the most of this creative practice, follow these “empty chair” guidelines:

1. Break the Golden Rule: Remind everyone in the meeting that their own values and perspectives can’t be applied to all customers. Treating everyone with kindness and respect is an aspect of the Golden Rule we can all embrace. But there are a thousand different interpretations of what kindness and respect look like, largely shaped by one’s cultural background. It’s an elementary point, but one that is quickly forgotten: Don’t assume everyone wants what you want.

2. Focus: Most of our organizations aren’t trying to become the earth’s largest retail machine (a.k.a. Amazon). So who is the primary target related to today’s conversation? Who isn’t? How much do you know about them? The days of mass marketing are long over. Every choice is a renunciation. To focus on one type of customer is to renounce a thousand others. What are the specific needs and desires of this target audience and how will today’s agenda address those?

3. Perspective-Taking: The empty chair assumes people in the meeting are adept at perspective-taking: the ability to step outside their own experience and imagine the perceptions and motivations of another. This means being able to predict:

• What does our customer (or prospective customer) value?
• What’s going on in her mind?
• What would she say about the ideas we’re discussing right now?

As you improve CQ Knowledge—an understanding of how culture influences the way people think and behave—your team can more accurately predict the perspective of culturally diverse customers. And this understanding needs to be based upon empirical research. Avoid letting meeting participants describe the behaviors of all teenagers based upon their child’s behavior or declaring what Indian women think based upon what their friend is like. What does research reveal about the dominant norms among these various subcultures?

4. Adjust Perspectives: Make this a dynamic, ongoing process. Based upon further observations, emerging trends, and real-life interactions with customers, move beyond broad assumptions to more specific insights about your target group. Norms about Hispanic men, Chinese-American women, or millennials provide a good hypothesis for predicting what these customers will want. But be open to adapting those insights.  And find ways to fill the chair with live customers from time-to-time to get their first hand input.

The obsession to understand the customer gives Amazon the confidence to innovate freely without fretting about short-term results. Bezos says. “We don’t focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers.”

Without cultural intelligence, there’s little benefit from adopting this Amazon practice. But an empty chair + cultural intelligence is a smart, strategic way to keep your meetings focused on the most important people your organization exists to serve.

Talk to most anyone who has worked on getting a deal in China and they’ll tell you stories about people who insisted on getting them drunk. In a culture where relationships can make or break you in business, getting drunk with a potential business partner is often viewed as a crucial way of solidifying that relationship and showing that you are, in fact, friends.

What’s behind this custom and what’s a culturally intelligent way of responding to it? First off, before I go any further, all the usual cautions about not stereotyping apply here. There are roughly 1.5 billion Chinese people in the world so far be it from me to make broad sweeping descriptions about all Chinese officials or business people. At the same time, those traveling to China are wise to recognize that some recurring drinking rituals are often a part of doing business in China.

First, business dinners start with an invitation. Typically, the person doing the inviting should be of at least the same level as the person being invited. Furthermore, the person doing the inviting pays for dinner. Chinese individuals who follow more traditional norms will make the dinner invitation in person or by phone, not by email or text message. Email is considered too impersonal and it allows a tangible record of those with whom you do business.

Unlike most Western business dinners, business itself is usually the least talked about topic during a Chinese business dinner. If anything, it’s saved for a sliver of time at the end of dinner, although at that point, most of the people involved are so drunk that no real business decisions can come out of it.

But don’t think this means it’s a waste of time. The point of the dinner is to solidify relationships. It’s a big part of determining whether you’re trustworthy. Expect personal questions and don’t be afraid to talk about your personal life. And if you keep drinking, it will be seen as a symbol of friendship.

But beware. Chinese wine is generally about 40-60 percent alcohol and it’s poured into small cups, which resemble miniature wine glasses. Basically, each cup is like taking a shot of hard liquor. The more you drink, the more pleased your cohorts will be, because it shows you’re willing to get drunk with them, just like you would with your friends.

Alcohol has a very long tradition in Confucian society. Confucius, who advocated only eating at meals times and not in between made an exception for wine. He said, “Only wine drinking is not limited.” Today, drinking is a standard part of most Chinese social engagements: birthday celebrations, weddings, and of course Chinese New Year. So to drink with a new business associate is to be brought into their inner circle.

It’s believed that drinking together deepens and strengthens friendships because it loosens people up and helps relieve misunderstanding, no matter how tense the situation might be. Granted, there are certainly times when excessive drinking is being used to wear you down. But the primary orientation behind this practice is social.

So while the heavy drinking that often occurs in Chinese business settings might seem like it violates the Confucian concerns for moderation and etiquette, it centers around the Chinese ideals of building relationship and promoting social harmony.

What do you do if you don’t drink or are unwilling to get drunk? First of all, Caucasians can typically handle more alcohol than many Chinese can so if you’re a Caucasian, you at least have an advantage there. If you decide to drink very little or not at all, just realize that you’re going to have to work extra hard to develop the kind of bonding and relationship building that would otherwise come from the drinking ritual. And if the reason you’re not drinking is health-related, just state that upfront. But work extra hard to enjoy the food you’re served.

Cultural intelligence doesn’t mean you have to be like whomever you’re with. There are things I refuse to do, whatever the cultural norms of a group. But a culturally intelligent person will at least consider how not adapting may be perceived in the other culture, and account for it accordingly.

We know what a culturally intelligent individual looks like. We have more than 15 years of research that answers that question. And we can predict someone’s global potential in light of their CQ scores. But what does a culturally intelligent organization look like?

This is one of the key frontiers in the cultural intelligence research. And we can learn a great deal from others’ insights and research on organizational factors that promote effectiveness in our globalized world.

In his book Love and Profit, James Autry famously argued that “profits” are like “breathing”—absolutely essential but not something you spend much time thinking about. People develop habits, circumstances, and environments that effect their health and wellness (breathing!). And organizations develop disciplines, environments, and circumstances that influence profits. An organization without revenue dies. But it’s the invisible environment that often makes the difference of whether an organization is profitable or not.

Here are some of the key characteristics of a culturally intelligent environment:

1. Trust
The people in the New York office just don’t understand us…The team in Mexico just won’t follow through in time. Mutual distrust is one of the first things to occur when cultural differences are present. Trust is built intuitively among people from similar backgrounds. But follow-through and reliability are the key determining factors for creating trust among multicultural teams—especially when they’re dispersed geographically.

Culturally intelligent organizations create structures and cycles where members deliver specific results in a coherent sequence. And they’re places where leaders know how to build trust among people with different value orientations.

2. Engagement
Team members from culturally intelligent organizations are more fully engaged in their work. When you work at a place where your manager understands how to motivate you, gather your input, and support you to do your job, it drives you to be far more productively engaged.  And when you interact with team members who value what your different perspective offers, it causes you to lean in and speak up more fully.

Culturally intelligent organizations provide multiple ways for team members to participate and offer input. And they’re places where leaders know how to leverage the diversity on their teams to produce innovative results and solutions.

3. Influence
Culturally intelligent organizations are places where employees have learned how to wield influence on their peers. And they can even find ways to positively influence supervisors, vendors and clients, regardless of the cultural backgrounds involved.

Culturally intelligent organizations promote individuals who are effective working across cultures. And they make a point to highlight the individual’s effectiveness working across cultures when they announce the promotion.

4. Authenticity
Working in a culturally diverse environment can often be fatiguing. It sometimes feels like you have to continually adapt to everyone else’s preferences. But a culturally intelligent organization is a place that encourages people to be comfortable in their own skin while learning which behaviors and procedures need to be adjusted.

Culturally intelligent organizations have a strong sense of their own identity. They’ve identified the non-negotiable aspects of their corporate culture and policies. And they’ve learned how to enact those values and policies in various cultural contexts.

5. Positive Intent
Psychologists say we’re naturally inclined to view others suspiciously. It’s called the fundamental attribution error: If my cell phone rings during a movie, it’s because I have a family emergency going on. If yours does, it’s because you’re an inconsiderate jerk. We’re most susceptible to this line of thinking when interacting with people who are different from us.

Culturally intelligent organizations create a culture of positive intent by hiring managers and associates who are committed to assuming the best first. They’re places where people stop to consider whether an “inconsiderate behavior” might be a result of a cultural difference before assuming something else is going on.

 We need to continue the quest of researching what makes a culturally intelligent organization. But these factors are a few of the essential characteristics of a culturally intelligent environment. And there’s no better way to create this kind of environment than to hire and develop culturally intelligent people.  I’d love to hear your additions to my list!