David Livermore Global Thinker and Author

My 15 year-old-daughter is preparing to travel to Thailand by herself next month. Emily has often heard me say that international travel is more likely to increase adolescents’ cultural intelligence (CQ) when they travel without their parents or friends. So she decided to see if my wife and I really believe that. I’m thrilled and her mother is a little freaked out. But we all agree this will be a great learning experience for her. In a few weeks, Emily will be flying to the other side of the world without us.

• Many companies rotate high potential leaders from one global assignment to another, as preparation for being senior leaders in the organization.

• University and high school students study abroad as a way to get an edge on others in the college and job market.

• And volunteers travel overseas with the hopes that they can combine service with a life changing opportunity.

But is there any evidence that international travel will increase CQ? Absolutely! But there’s also evidence that international travel can decrease CQ. What makes the difference?

Few things have greater potential to increase CQ than the hands-on experience of international travel. But it’s a correlation, not a causation. How you travel, where you spend time, the nature of your interactions, and the way you make meaning from the experiences makes all the difference in whether international experience improves your CQ or not. In fact, international experience can actually decrease CQ and perpetuate ethnocentrism if not done well. Have you ever met an expat or short-term missionary who didn’t have high CQ? Enough said.

It starts before ever leaving home. I’m actually not too worked up over whether people should spend vast amounts of time doing pre-departure training and orientation. It can certainly be helpful. But what’s most important is some thoughtful anticipation about the cross-cultural experience and how to learn from it.

Emily scores pretty high on our CQ Assessment when it comes to CQ Drive—the level of interest, drive, and confidence to adapt to intercultural situations. She grew up traveling internationally, she loves to be immersed in different cultures, and she’s been learning about Thai culture and studying the language. But our way of orienting her for her overseas experience has been a bit different. I’ve been throwing her a series of “What if” questions.

What if you arrive at the airport and our Thai friends’ who are supposed to meet you aren’t there? “That’s easy” she said. “I’ll just text them.” To which I said, “Okay. But what if your phone doesn’t work?”  “Then I’ll use a payphone,” she replied.

My next challenge: “Okay, but you don’t have any Thai money.” To which she said, “I’ll just exchange some.” But I kept pushing her: “The person at the currency exchange tells you they aren’t allowed to exchange money to minors. Then what?”

I’m trying to get her to come up with solutions for the kinds of things she could experience cross-culturally.

Emily is crazy about animals. In fact, at some point during her visit to Thailand, she’ll be joining a group to learn how to provide veterinary care to animals after a natural disaster. I asked her, “What if you’re visiting a hill tribe village and they serve you dog? What will you do?” She decided she would push the meat around for awhile and make it look like she had eaten it. But she couldn’t live with herself if she actually ate it. I’m not sure that strategy will work but it’s not a bad response. I want her to know that cultural intelligence doesn’t mean abandoning everything she values and believes.

“What if a group of your peers start making fun of a Buddhist monk walking by. What will you say?” We talked about the importance of applying cultural intelligence to both her peers and the local culture. And she practiced some responses of what she would say and how they might respond.

I’m less concerned about the precision of her answers. And I’m more interested in getting her to see that there are very real cultural dilemmas she’s likely to face and to give her some practice anticipating how to respond.

This has been a fun, engaging way for our family to interact together about Emily’s upcoming trip. And it taps into our research findings that cultural understanding is more likely to be improved and applied when it’s relevant to the individual and situation. This is why groups like McDonalds have reduced the amount of training they do before their global leaders are assigned overseas; instead, they provide them with a CQ coach after they arrive who meets with them regularly to interact about the real-life cultural dilemmas they’re encountering.

We continue to research how business travelers, study abroad students, and charitable volunteers can best use international travel to increase their CQ. If they simply stay in establishments where the staff have been trained to adapt to our every whim, it’s unlikely they’re getting a true glimpse of the local culture. And when they travel with friends, peers from school, or family, it takes extra effort to have any meaningful interaction with people outside the built-in networks brought along. And if the people they spend time with when they’re abroad offer a skewed interpretation of what’s going on, they can come home with a very inaccurate perspective.

But when international experience is combined with active engagement (e.g. jumping on public transit, walking through the market, and having dinner with locals at their favorite haunt) and thoughtful reflection (e.g. looking for what is similar/different from home; suspending judgment about what certain behaviors mean, having a cultural coach who accurately helps you process what you experience), it’s the most powerful way to improve CQ.

How do you leverage the potential of international travel?

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.