COACHING WITH CQ
“Why Would You Want
to Do It?”
Reflect honestly on
motivations that ultimately
will drive your own
reframing and
coaching approach.
“What Do You Know?”
Gather information
about your client’s culture,
norms and practices,
cultural cues and nuances,
values and beliefs, and
cultural orientation.
“What Do You
Plan to Do?”
Piece together your
client’s cultural information
and your own unique cultural
perspective and past crosscultural experiences, and
strategize how to integrate
the pieces together into your
coaching repertoire.
“What Do You Do?”
Adjust your outward
coaching behaviors and
responses to coach more
effectively in your crosscultural conversations.
Adapted from Livermore, D. “Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success,” p. 30.
new and foreign environments, but to
thrive and succeed.
While it is unrealistic for us to aspire
to be interculturalists overnight,
we can strive to increase our
cultural awareness and develop
our cross-cultural competence
to begin integrating basic cultural
components into our coaching
conversations. When we become
more aware of our own cultural
orientation and the associated
emotional filters that come with
our cultural baggage, we begin to
connect more authentically with our
clients and focus on their culturespecific issues and goals.
CQ has 4 dimensions,
interplaying to be effective in
cross-cultural situations:
CQ Knowledge (CQ1) “What do you
know?” (the cultural information you
know, such as local cultures, norms
and practices)
CQ Drive/Motivation (CQ3) “Why
would you want to do it?” (a look at
your motivations that ultimately will
drive your responses)
CQ Action/Behaviors (CQ4) “What
do you do?” (your outward actions
and responses to adapt effectively in
a cross-cultural situation)
At the heart of this model is CQ
Motivation (CQ3), our inner drive to
engage positively in cross-cultural
situations, question our cultural
prejudices and biases, and reframe
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Our cross-cultural competence can
now be measured, evaluated and
Soon Ang and Linn Van Dyne
define CQ as the “capability to
adapt effectively across national,
ethnic and organizational cultures.”
Researchers in the last decade have
proven that CQ significantly increases
cross-cultural adaptation, work
performance and business outcomes
in the cross-cultural workplace.
CQ Strategy (CQ2) “What do
you plan to do?” (your higherlevel thinking processes that help
you to pull together your cultural
information and past cross-cultural
experiences to form your plan of
action, your repertoire and your
perspective)
Coaching World
Cross-cultural
Competence and CQ
quantified like IQ or EQ. It is called
the “Cultural Intelligence quotient,”
or CQ. CQ is touted as the “x-factor”
in differentiating a successful
global leader from an ineffective
one in navigating through crosscultural terrains.