Why your CQ can make or break your future in ministry

• Why can some leaders effectively serve rural, urban, and suburban youth all within the same ministry?
• What gives ministries the greatest edge in effectively reaching out to youth and families from a variety of ethnic backgrounds?
• Why do some leaders consistently organize short-term missions projects that empower the local communities served and others struggle?
• Why do some leaders seem to work just as effectively with adults and parents as they do with adolescents?
• Why do some youth leaders thrive in the face of a multicultural, globalized world while others flounder?

The answer lies partially in their cultural intelligence, or CQ. Cultural intelligence is defined as the capability to function effectively across national, ethnic, and organizational cultures. ¹  And research demonstrates a leader’s CQ may easily be the single greatest difference between thriving in today’s shrinking world or becoming ineffective and obsolete.

The continually shifting landscape of youth ministry can be disorienting. Experience and common sense alone are not enough. When working in our own cultures, we intuitively use a set of social cues to lead effectively. We have a wealth of information, most of which is subconscious, which helps us do our work (e.g. managing and motivating volunteers, casting vision, teaching, addressing conflict, etc.). But those rules change once we start leading in a different cultural setting.

Cultural intelligence is a set of capabilities and skills that enables leaders from outside a culture to interpret unfamiliar behaviors and situations as if they were insiders to that culture. It can be learned by most anyone. In testing leaders’ CQ across the world, there’s a consistent set of strategies and practices proven to enhance anyone’s CQ. The findings consistently demonstrate a strong connection between leaders’ CQ and their effectiveness in reaching their goals. Our model stems from rigorous academic research on intelligence and cross-cultural interaction across 30 countries and includes four steps toward becoming more effective cross-culturally. The four steps can easily be applied to any cross-cultural situation (ethnic cultures, organizational, and generational subcultures).

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the first two steps in the process.

1. Soon Ang and Linn Van Dyne, “Conceptualization of Cultural Intelligence” in Handbook of Cultural Intelligence: Theory, Measurement, and Applications (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 3. [↩]

©2010 Fuller Youth Institute