Tina Merry of Cultural Intelligence Center: How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Business leaders must focus on communicating the WHY and the purpose of the business. Help employees understand their role in achieving that purpose. This alignment of context is critical to building and maintaining motivation and engagement.
As a part of our series about “How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tina Merry.
Lead Consultant with the Cultural Intelligence Center, Tina applies over two decades of global leadership and team development experience to help organizations leverage the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) framework to accelerate innovation, excellence, and productivity. Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is defined as the ability to relate and work effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds, and the academics are backed by over twenty years of research across over one hundred countries. Tina is passionate about building more inclusive and collaborative workplaces in which everyone can thrive by leveraging the CQ framework, and by developing cultural intelligence capabilities in leaders and teams. Extended periods living and working in over a dozen countries all over the world provide Tina with unique cultural insights and experiences which enhance effectiveness as a global leader, public speaker, facilitator, and coach.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive into the main part of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you share a bit of your “backstory” with us?
I am a first generation Canadian and always wanted to explore my European roots. After working with large, globally distributed teams in the video game industry for nearly a decade, I was excited to take on some international assignments and began my journey as an expat in Argentina, Romania, then lived in Sweden and UK. I became deeply immersed in local cultures and customs and observed interesting differences. As a project leader, I began to see how my leadership style needed to flex, and I also needed to establish better systems and practices to help my culturally diverse teams work together effectively.
For many years, I relied on the work of Gert Hofstede, a Dutch social psychologist. His Cultural Dimensions framework started to answer questions I had about how different individuals on my team felt about competition, praise, hierarchy, risk avoidance, and so on. I facilitated discussions with diverse teams to raise our mutual cultural awareness, challenging them to consider how to act upon this knowledge, what processes to put in place to mitigate our challenges, and how to leverage opportunities for different preferred approaches to work as we sought to become more effective.
In early 2018, I came across the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) framework. This was the more complete answer I had been seeking to help my diverse teams! Most cultural training focuses on teaching information about different cultures such as Americans versus Germans, or Millennials vs. Gen X., but CQ was something different …
The CQ framework allows us to assess and develop the four capabilities (Drive, Knowledge Strategy, Action) which we need to work in any culturally diverse context, including nationality, ethnicity, gender, generation, organizational culture, professional culture, geographic region and so on. CQ is relevant to nearly everyone!
Once I understood the applicability, benefits, and scalability of the CQ framework, I invested in myself and flew to Los Angeles later in 2018 to meet Dr. David Livermore for a one-week program to achieve my Advanced CQ certification. This began my journey partnering with the Cultural Intelligence Center the rewarding work which I do today as full time Lead Consultant. I love what I do, feel blessed to be where I am at this stage in my life and am fortunate to be able to make an impact in my work.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us the lesson or take away you took out of that story?
I was on a business trip back to Bucharest Romania with my Swedish colleague. As we took the taxi from the airport to our hotel, I felt excited to be back in the country where I had lived for two years. I chatted with our driver, using my limited Romanian language skills to greet him and ask, “Hello, how are you?” (“Buna! Ce mai faci?”)
I explained to my Swedish colleague what I was saying, and he exclaimed, “Tina, you are so Canadian. It would never have occurred to me to ask my taxi driver how his day was going!” Until he said that, I had not spent much time thinking about my own cultural preferences and those of my fellow Canadians.
We both laughed and it led to a great conversation and reflections on cultural differences between Romanians, Canadians, and Swedes, especially how relationships are established. These lessons we learn from multicultural experiences and getting out of our comfort zone are key to developing tolerance and respect for different ways of working and relating to others. I have never forgotten the experience.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you tell us a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
There are two, but they are related:
Don’t lose the forest for the trees. I can hear my dad saying this to me. I excel at taking care of details but need a reminder at times to step back and look at the broader viewpoint. The WHY is critical to consider as we seek to view our forest. Too often we focus on micro actions, and in the case of diversity work for example, this might include increasing the diversity of our talent bench or reducing bias in our interview processes. These are important steps, but we need to also stay connected to the mission of WHY we are taking certain actions and strategically prioritize our efforts.
Begin with the End in Mind (7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey) This entire book was impactful to me but beginning with the end in mind reminds me to focus on what matters most. Why am I doing certain things? What do I hope to gain, where am I going and most importantly, what is the desired impact or outcome? With three young children at home, I was at times overwhelmed by ‘urgent’ obligations as a mother, wife, and career professional when a senior director shared Covey’s book with me. By focusing on tangible, measurable goals (I could define and ‘tick off’ them off my list) I could envision my path forward and began to achieve more, with less stress.
The other subtle benefit of this concept of ‘Begin with the End in Mind’ is that it helps you sort of trick your mind into accepting and believing in the positive goal state you have set for yourself. Micro actions and decisions you make support your efforts without even realizing it. Personal examples I can share with pride resulted in me achieving two significant outcomes: 1) After two plus decades as a smoker, I gave up cigarettes and never looked back. 2) I taught myself to juggle, pushing myself to do something I was skeptical I could ever achieve and had been attempting for years. This second example may sound irrelevant, but the confidence boost was amazing, plus juggling is very good for mind and body.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
I will never stop being grateful to my father who was an early adopter of technology in his public accounting practice and pushed me to become a lifelong learner. I have achieved everything in my career due to those foundations provided while working with him.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Make the World a Better Place for All — this is the mission of the Cultural Intelligence Center.
For more than a decade, we have been helping CQ practitioners around the world implement the Cultural Intelligence framework to support diversity and inclusion efforts plus improve multicultural organizational effectiveness across corporate, government, faith-based and education sectors. When it comes to addressing the serious issues of racism, privilege, and intercultural understanding, we have seen the importance of programs which focus on developing the skills needed to help facilitate safe conversations versus fostering a culture of shame and blame. I am proud of my organization and the impactful work we are doing.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
I am delighted to be partnering with several globally distributed and diverse organizations. As more companies continue to grapple with implications of a hybrid workforce and the overall employee experience (some in the office and some working remote) CQ will make a major difference in establishing a strong and strategic foundation for inclusion and organizational effectiveness.
One project example is a comprehensive and customized training program specifically aimed at building cultural intelligence (CQ) in a group of global leaders across USA, Canada, UK and Asia. This is an important step to supporting my client’s efforts to develop a culture of respectful inclusion across a highly diverse organization, and we are targeting training for executive leaders first, then all people managers.
What excites me about this specific project is we are embedding storytelling into the program; the CEO will make a series of short videos to be incorporated in our sessions helping contextualize and personalize the content. We hope this will spark more sharing of stories and shared cultural experiences with participants to elevate the entire group’s learning journey.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
One of my core values is service. I feel strongly about giving back to the world around me. I have been blessed with good health, a wonderful career, a loving family, and a safe place to grow up plus raise my own children. This idea of bringing goodness to the world is therefore very important to me and has taken different forms at various times in my life including work with charities. More recently, I have been active as Ambassador for Women in Games Jobs (WIGJ) and offer my support as a mentor and coach to help others grow their careers; video game development is a sector which continues to struggle with attracting and retaining diverse talent and I feel my experiences provide clear benefits.
Ok. Thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main part of our interview. This may be obvious to you, but it is not intuitive to many people. Can you articulate to our readers five ways that increased diversity can help a company’s bottom line?
To answer this, I want to begin by ensuring readers understand there are numerous related studies conducted by organizations such as McKinsey, Deloitte, Forbes, and BCG which explore the business case for diversity. What we understand from this body of work is that cultural diversity has incredible potential to deliver results which positively impact the bottom line.
However, there are a couple of distinct caveats related to this notion that Diversity = Improved ROI
(1) It is key to define diversity as it means various things for different leaders, organizations, and regions of the world. What concerns us in a practical context is identifying how diversity influences the way we work and relate to each other, and thereby impacts our bottom line.
(2) Diversity alone is not enough. Inclusion is critical to leverage the potential benefits we gain from diversity. Once we define diversity and understand its impact to our ability to collaborate and get things done, we can develop the needed skills and establish culturally intelligent systems and practices to foster inclusion and effectiveness.
David Livermore, PhD describes related research in his book Driven by Difference, and notes without Cultural Intelligence (CQ), a homogenous team will in fact outperform a diverse team. But once we have CQ, we can unlock the true potential of diversity.
Given an assumed foundation of an inclusive and culturally intelligent organizational culture, we can predict the impact of diversity on the company’s bottom line.
Here are five specific examples:
1. DIVERSITY DRIVES INNOVATION If everyone at the table has a shared viewpoint (we have a lack of diversity) can we truly innovate? Increased diversity creates the opportunity to explore more perspectives and more opportunities for innovation, given we create a safe environment for this to occur. The more diverse ideas we come up with, the better the odds of identifying something very compelling for our business. Having worked in the video game industry for over 15 years, I saw the critical need for innovation in all areas of the business, from coming up with new and compelling game designs, to addressing key technology challenges, to establishing refined tools, systems and processes which allowed globally distributed teams collaborate more effectively. Diverse perspectives were needed to be successful.
2. ATTRACTING AND RETAINING TALENT Hiring requires reaching out to potential candidates and building your employer brand. How are you attracting and developing your talented employees? If potential candidates cannot identify with or see themselves as part of your team, you will have difficulty finding and keeping your diverse talent. And if a lack of diversity is noted within the existing company, others may not wish to become the token member coming from a ‘diverse’ background. My first meeting in the games industry in 2003 involved a group of thirty men and I was the only woman in the room. Although I stayed with the company for many years after that experience, gender balance remains a concern for the industry. Despite 50% of gamers being female, women continue to be significantly underrepresented in games development and the companies directly tackling this issue are seeing clear success in the numbers.
3. BETTER BUSINESS DECISIONS = HIGHER REVENUE/LOWER COSTS Diverse leadership teams are better equipped to consider more culturally diverse options and are less susceptible to the risks of groupthink where we find the loudest voice versus the best business idea “wins”. Diversity combined with CQ empowers leadership effectiveness including the ability to identify strategic cultural risks and leverage opportunities impacting the organization’s bottom line.
4. INCREASED EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY As mentioned, research shows culturally intelligent, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams on virtually every scale we can measure including employee productivity, employee engagement, strategic thinking, negotiation effectiveness, adaptive performance (dealing with cultural changes), navigating and achieving success in global markets etc. I personally observed I could leverage the diversity of work styles to achieve better outcomes — for example, assigning work well suited for collaborate efforts to my collectivist teams, whereas tasks with limited dependencies were more appropriate assigned to individualistic teams and employees.
5. STAFF/CUSTOMER LOYALTY More customers speak out today against social injustices, making buying decisions related to what is happening in the world around us. Employees are increasingly looking to employers to make a commitment related to Diversity. Loyalty can be affected by the diversity of our company. Why would a customer return if the service, product, or marketing lacked respect towards one or more aspects of their identity? Diverse and culturally intelligent organizations can deliver outstanding experience to customers and employees in a manner makes everyone feel welcome, gives them what they need and does it in a way that feels respectful.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees to thrive?
Business leaders must focus on communicating the WHY and the purpose of the business. Help employees understand their role in achieving that purpose. This alignment of context is critical to building and maintaining motivation and engagement.
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” — This quote from Aristotle led researchers to use the code name Project Aristotle to describe their work discovering the secret behind effective teams at Google.
This brings me to my second piece of advice to help employees thrive: Google researchers discovered the number one predicter of high-performance teams is psychological safety. They applied a comprehensive definition of team effectiveness which included qualitative evaluations at executive, team lead, team member and sales performance vs quota outcomes.
Psychological Safety conveys extent to which we feel safe taking risks, being vulnerable in front of others and feeling respected and trusted. This influences much of what we do in teams, including information sharing, learning, and innovating. Psychological Safety allows team members to feel they can act authentically with others. Business leaders need to prioritize the work of inclusion and belonging, creating a safe place for teams to achieve their best results.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this :-)
I have never been very good at answering questions of these sorts, but I would love to meet my fellow Canadian, Margaret Atwood. Her story and her writing inspire me greatly. She challenges us to explore our beliefs related to gender identity, traditional gender roles and human relationships, and does so in very thought-provoking but respectful manner. She also consistently gives back as a teacher and mentor to young authors who are also inspired by her works.
What advice would you give to other business leaders about how to manage a large team?
There are two key points here:
First: Large teams are diverse teams so the first step is to remove or at least reduce assumptions; define explicit processes to align expectations such as how decisions will be made, how work will be tracked, how performance will be measured and reported, and so on. Trust you hired the right talent, then provide them with the tools and context needed to be successful to leverage their diversity.
Second: Leadership is not, and should not be, “one size fits all”. Situational leadership and cultural agility are key attributes when leading a large and diverse group of employees. What works well for Jose may not be impactful for Karin. And while Amir may appreciate respond well to your very direct feedback style, Sandy could find it very uncomfortable and wonder if you like any of their work, responding more effectively to a more balanced and nuanced coaching approach.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Thank you for asking! Please check out our blog posts here:
https://culturalq.com/about-cultural-intelligence/blog/
And for those interested in the research and science behind CQ and some of my comments, please contact me directly.
Thank you for these excellent insights. We wish you continued success in your great work.
