CQ Action
Jun flagged down a couple of taxis to get everyone from the university back to the hostel where they were staying. They had just finished their second day of teaching. Jake and Jun ended up in the same taxi together, so Jake used it as a chance to get some feedback from Jun. “So, Jun. How’s it going, bro? Are we doing okay? Are you happy with the team?”
“Everything is okay,” said Jun. “It’s fine.”
“Well, what’s that supposed to mean?” asked Jake. “That’s a very noncommittal answer. ‘Okay’? ‘Fine’? C’mon, bud. Shoot straight with me. How do you feel the team is doing?”
“It’s okay, Jake. We will talk about it.” Jun immediately started pointing out the Chongqing Harbor, where the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers meet.
Jake was a little frustrated by Jun’s nondescript feedback, but he decided not to push it any farther. Instead, he feigned interest in the places Jun pointed out along the way.
Meanwhile, Mandy, one of the other team members, struck up a conversation with her taxi driver. His English impressed her. It turns out he had spent several years in Hong Kong. Knowing the prevalence of the British influence in Hong Kong, Mandy purposely used the hard o when she said the word process. She had some Canadian friends who always said it that way. She also said words like library really fast, as she had often heard Brits do. She referred to it as the “libree.” As Jenny and Brian listened to her talk with the taxi driver, they began to laugh as she forced British pronunciations of English words.
Jenny, the ever-reflective one, wondered what Mandy was doing. Is that really more effective than just speaking English the way we typically speak it? I wonder if it sounds as forced to this driver as it does to me. Was Mandy’s behavior a good demonstration of cultural intelligence? Is that what it looks like to be high in CQ Action?
The team got together to discuss their first two days of teaching. Jake, the infamous storyteller of the group, shared a few of his greatest blunders. Jenny, the ever-reflective one, bombarded Jun with questions: “Why won’t anyone respond when I ask the group a question? Will I offend them if I ask them not to call me Miss Gilmore? Some of them are older than me! Should I try to make things more participative, or is it better for me to use the lecture-style that they seem more comfortable with? Or am I even right in assuming they’re more comfortable with lecture?” For each of Jun’s responses, Sarah, the cross-cultural expert, had her own two cents to throw in.
Once we improve our CQ Drive, Knowledge, and Strategy, can we behave in a way that demonstrates our love for Christ and others? That’s what CQ Action is most concerned about.
What Is CQ Action?
CQ Action is the extent to which we change our verbal and nonverbal actions when interacting cross-culturally. Everything from how fast we talk to our topics of conversation are a part of CQ Action. Cultural taboos such as pointing or talking with our hands in our pockets are some of the behaviors avoided when observing CQ Action. CQ Action is being sensitive and appropriate with our actions and behavior as we engage in a new culture. The point isn’t to act as chameleons wherever we go. Rather, in an attempt to relate to the people we meet, we strive to interact in meaningful and appropriate ways.
The other three capabilities of cultural intelligence are vitally important for all the reasons we’ve just explored. At the end of the day, however, our cultural intelligence and, more importantly, our short-term missions endeavors will be measured by our behavior. The things we actually say and do and the ways we go about our work become the litmus test for whether we’re doing short-term missions with cultural intelligence. As we’ll see shortly, the other three capabilities are essential in nurturing CQ Action, but cultural intelligence is not just a mind game of having the right motivation, gathering information, and learning how to interpret cues. Eventually, we have to act and engage. Our ability to draw on what we learn from the other three capabilities to act appropriately is CQ Action.
The biggest problems for most short-term missions teams are not technical or administrative. The biggest challenges lie in communication, misunderstanding, personality conflicts, poor leadership, and bad teamwork. These are all parts of CQ Action. The difference between short-term trips done with CQ Action and those done without is significant. Short-term missions trips without CQ Action look more like a typical tourist experience. The tour group sticks together as a group of outsiders, stays in cushy places, seldom veers into the local cuisine, and views the culture as a sporting event rather than actually playing the game.
An important part of CQ Action is seeing the ways behaviors can have different meanings in different places. Behaviors such as laughing, shouting, smiling, and talking quietly are some universal behaviors we share as humans. However, culture programs our minds to interpret those behaviors differently. Smiling is expected in certain situations and assumed to mean certain things in one place but has entirely different uses elsewhere. Nudity is crude in public and intimate in private for most North Americans, but it has very different meanings in many tribal cultures. Students sitting still and nodding their heads can mean something entirely different in one culture as compared to the next.
An individual with high CQ Action is not necessarily someone who masters all the unique habits and behaviors of every culture visited. That’s next to impossible, especially during brief immersions such as short-term missions trips. Instead, flexibility and adjustment are the crucial components that accompany CQ Action. A person high in CQ Action will use nonverbal cues as a silent language to learn in various places and will be careful not to quickly assign meanings. The goal is to reduce misunderstanding and communicate respect more than it is to mimic others’ behavior.
Behaving in a way that’s culturally intelligent is clearly easier said than done. For years I’ve understood theoretically that it’s not uncommon for men in many cultures to hold hands with other men without it meaning anything beyond a display of friendship. I’ve often explained this phenomenon to other people as a clear example of our need to beware of making quick judgments based on the same behavior in our culture. It was another thing, however, when I was walking down the streets of Chiang Rai, Thailand, and John, an Akha man, slipped his hand around my waist. He put his hand in my left rear pocket as a North American high school boy might do with his girlfriend. John left his hand there as we walked for several blocks. I desperately wanted to pull away. It was one thing to read about such behavior in a sterile environment back home; it was quite another to experience it while walking through the streets of Chiang Rai. So what does it look like for us to nurture CQ in the ways that we behave on our short-term missions experiences?
Nurturing CQ Action
Many resources are devoted to helping us act appropriately when we travel cross-culturally. Several authors give helpful information about the kinds of gifts to avoid giving. We’re told how to entertain, gestures to avoid, how to exchange business cards, and the kinds of greetings to use. “Don’t point. Never pay with your left hand. Kiss both cheeks. Don’t hug. Be sure to use her formal title.” The lists are endless. If we move to a culture for several years, we may be able to master many of these behaviors, but what does it look like when we move in and out of different cultures all the time? There are several things to consider in nurturing CQ Action.
See CQ Action as the Outcome
At the risk of being redundant, the most important way to nurture CQ Action is to nurture the other three CQ capabilities: drive, knowledge, and strategy. This is the irony. The success of our short-term projects is judged mostly by our behavior because actions demonstrate most clearly whether or not we’re culturally intelligent. However, trying to change our behavior itself is the least effective way of nurturing CQ. Our actions are so ingrained into our habits that it takes far more than a book or several training sessions to teach us CQ Action.
However, as we nurture the other aspects of CQ, they have inevitable implications for how we behave. In a sense, CQ Action is the outcome of the other three CQ capabilities. For example, CQ Drive will help align our motivation with doing the hard work that comes with interacting as an outsider in a new place. We can use CQ Knowledge to understand the different ways cultures approach power distance; this will inform how we interact with people of different status. And CQ Strategy will help us tune in to the cues coming from our interactions and organize those cues within our growing sense of cultural intelligence as a whole. These work together toward helping us adjust our behavior.
Some of our behaviors can be modified and manipulated, but most of our energy should be placed on the other three capabilities of CQ. CQ Action is perhaps the most helpful way to expose our need for cultural intelligence. As we seek to change our behavior, we don’t have access to each other’s thoughts, feelings, or motivation. We can rely only on what we see and hear in others’ verbal, vocal, facial, and other bodily expressions. Nurturing our CQ Drive, Knowledge, and Strategy is the best way to make behavior changes.
Practice
There is, however, value in practicing some basic habits used in various cultures to make them part of our behavioral repertoire. For example, because people in so many places where I travel consider it offensive to hand someone something with the left hand, even when I’m home, I often try to avoid using my left hand. Ninety-nine percent of the people with whom I interact in the United States don’t give a second thought to whether they receive my change at the cash register from my right hand or my left hand. However, I want it to be second nature for me to use my right hand to avoid offending an Arab acquaintance.
I speak very fast, especially when I teach or preach. This is another area where I have to practice—slowing down. Frankly, many of my North American audiences would be happy if I’d slow down a bit when I speak. When I speak overseas, I often do so with people who speak English as a second language or where an interpreter is translating on my behalf. Because my rate of speech is so ingrained in how I communicate, I have to work hard to slow down. It takes a lot of effort and writing all over my notes “slow down.” But these are the kinds of things we can work on to improve the way we behave. Practice. Practice. Practice.
Adaptability
Some of us are naturals at interacting socially with people, even if they’re complete strangers. We find it easy to initiate conversations, listen to others, and bring other people into the conversation. Others struggle desperately to master a conversation. Having a natural ability socially can be a real help cross-culturally, but we must beware of thinking we can rely on those natural skills when interacting with someone from a different cultural background. The very thing that breaks the ice with someone in our own culture could be irrelevant or offensive in another. Appropriate topics for small talk, humor, and even if and how we should ask questions are all things deeply impacted by our cultural background. We often need to develop new social skills to interact effectively in new cultural contexts. This is one of many reasons why the most important characteristic to develop for CQ Action is adaptability.
As we learn to become adaptable and flexible, we’ll gain the CQ Action needed to interact with unique individuals and in unique situations. The challenge lies in gaining some general skills of adaptability so that we can adapt instantly to specific people, cultures, and circumstances. “Cross-cultural skills are not fixed routines but flexible abilities that can—with the guidance of mindfulness—be modified to meet new or changing conditions.”[119] The challenge is to expand our repertoire of skilled behaviors needed in different places and knowing how to use them. The skilled routines we master in one culture may be counterproductive in another, to the extent that we have to “unlearn” them in a new situation. Again, this is why adaptability is crucial to CQ Action.
As in several of these areas, some cultures program individuals to be better at this than others. For example, cultures that feel less threatened by uncertainty—such as Indians, Brits, and Jamaicans—typically achieve CQ Action more easily. In addition, learning to be adaptable is directly connected to our CQ Strategy. It’s a part of the interpretive process in which we learn to read cues and change our plans based on what seems to work and what doesn’t. Having a plan so we don’t fly by the seat of our pants is an integral part of interacting with CQ Action, but just as essential is the process of holding to those plans loosely and being willing to toss them in a split second when necessary.
And once again, cross-cultural experiences themselves are one of the best ways to improve our adaptability. Cultural blunders are inevitable. That’s okay. Grace abounds. Just use the mistakes as a way to improve the way you interact in future cross-cultural encounters so that you don’t keep repeating the same mistakes. As we persevere through the continual challenges confronting us in cross-cultural communication and interaction and gain understanding about cultural values to reframe our assumptions, we begin to behave more appropriately and effectively.
Behavioral Training
Many of the short-term missions training tools that exist focus on building CQ Knowledge and Action. Continue to use the valuable techniques offered by many of these resources. The key challenge lies at the point of applying and integrating the material to what you will actually do on your cross-cultural experience. Find ways to use role-playing or, better yet, real-life cross-cultural immersions closer to home rather than simply studying material theoretically in the fellowship hall of your church.
One of the most effective ways to train yourself and your short-term team in CQ Action is through exposure to uncomfortable situations. For example, you could begin having a conversation about the challenges of CQ Action by walking up to a friend and purposely violating her personal space. Keep within two inches of her face, and as she backs away from you, keep moving with her. Have the whole group try this with each other. Or suddenly put your hand on your friend’s shoulder and leave it there as you talk. Or talk in a way that eliminates nonverbal expressions as much as possible. Or choose an unusual, unfamiliar food and insist that everyone eat it. These kinds of experiences help to train people in CQ Action. More than anything, they help reveal the need for CQ as a whole.
It’s easy to speak confidently about our ability to act appropriately, but when we become uncomfortable, it’s another thing to act appropriately. As a result, one of the most significant times for developing CQ Action is when we first enter a new culture and when we first return home. These are our most pivotal learning times. The first impressions and the immediate dissonance experienced both in leaving home and coming back are filled with opportunities for learning adaptability. Be sure to check out the cross-cultural training resources listed in the appendix for more guidance on training for effective cross-cultural behavior.
Back to Shanghai
Jake is a natural conversationalist. He can talk to complete strangers on the street and put them at ease. The highly relational context of Mexico where he grew up has really helped him be a natural leader and networker most places he’s been. So far, however, he doesn’t seem to have connected with Jun. In particular, he violated the social practices of Chinese culture when he asked Jun for a direct evaluation and assessment in the midst of a very informal setting—riding in a taxi. Jun just wasn’t going to go there. He gave Jake a very indirect, seemingly ambiguous response. Jake knew what it would mean if he had been the one saying, “It’s okay” or “It’s fine.” That would be code language for “I’m not very impressed” or “It’s okay but . . .”
Meanwhile, Mandy wants so hard to speak appropriately that she’s trying to use British-style pronunciation rather than just saying words as an American would. What she doesn’t realize, however, is that her attempts at acting appropriately may in fact have the opposite effect. The taxi driver could easily be insulted. Why does Mandy think he isn’t smart enough to figure out what she means when she pronounces words the way she typically would? Inevitably, the taxi driver has seen lots of American television and movies throughout his years in Hong Kong and now in Shanghai. Does he really need Mandy to force herself to pronounce words differently?
Actions speak louder than words. This cliché, though overused, really applies here. Most of the short-term participants I studied said the right things before going to a new culture. They demonstrated a desire to learn, they realized they may come off as loud and brash, and they were well aware of their shortcomings when it came to cross-cultural work. Yet when they actually went on their trips, much of their behavior didn’t line up with what they had said.
Our tendency is to use all our energy to change our behavior, but we can’t possibly anticipate the endless situations and encounters that will arise. Therefore, the full-orbed approach of CQ is essential to getting our actions to speak a message that reflects God’s glory through our postures, behaviors, and dispositions.
Strategies to Improve Your CQ Action
Anytime:
On Your Short-Term Trip: