Cultural Intelligence and Inclusive Leadership webinar – with Q&A.
GatenbySanderson kicked off national inclusion week by hosting a rich and insightful online seminar with Ritika Wadhwa, an internationally recognised expert in Cultural Intelligence (CQ). Ritika has over 30 years of experience working at Board level across three continents and is the Founder and CEO of Prabhaav Global. Her session focused on the transformational power of CQ, an essential capability for effective leadership in today’s diverse world.
If you joined us live or couldn’t make the session, the Q&A replay and resources are below.
Speakers:
- Ritika Wadhwa, Prabhaav Global
- Vicki Haverson, Leadership & Talent Consultancy, GatenbySanderson
- Joe Montgomery, ex-Civil Service Commissioner
Ritika Wadhwa, Prabhaav Global delivered a seminar on Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and its significance in fostering innovation, collaboration, and inclusion. A topic that is increasingly crucial in our interconnected world and across the public, education, and not-for-profit sectors.
Vicki Haverson
, Leadership & Talent Consultancy, GatenbySanderson delivered a session exploring strengths-based development, highlighting how understanding and leveraging strengths can create a more inclusive and impactful workplace. Engage in activities to reflect on your own strengths and discover how to use them to support inclusion and drive meaningful impact.
Joe Montgomery, Civil Service Commissioner & Chairman closed the session with his reflections.
Key takeaways:
- Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is the natural evolution from the well-established notions of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Intelligence (EQ).
- Understanding, embracing difference as a strength within teams, and leading with a level of curiosity is key to set yourself up for success and career progression.
- CQ is increasingly important if you want to harness diversity and gain a competitive advantage in a diverse, divided and digital world.
- When you get CQ right, there’s a much bigger chance of you being the kind of leader that can foster, align, and engaged teams that are much more likely to achieve high performance.
Watch the webinar Q&A:
Closing remarks:
Joe Montgomery: “I ended up taking more notes than I expected and my my pad is full…”
“My closing reflections would be drawn from the work I did as a as a civil service Commissioner, where I spent a lot of my time interviewing candidates for senior public sector roles, and the truth is nowadays, in order to qualify to become a senior leader, you need your domain expertise if you’re a social worker, an accountant, a police person etc, but you also need to be pretty expert in managing difference, managing people who are not like you, managing people who are from backgrounds that you may not automatically feel comfortable with.
The penalties of getting this wrong are organisations that we’ve all seen that are characterised by a fractious culture, grievances and disputes. But the thing I love about what Ritika and Vicki have said to us today is that when you get this right, there’s a much bigger chance of you being the kind of leader that can foster and align, engaged teams that are much more likely to achieve high performance.
And that in any interview context is what your interviewer is likely to be looking for.
The above and beyond your domain expertise, it’s this ability to lead diverse teams, diverse organisations and to make your organisations as a whole sensitive and responsive to a much more diverse range of citizens, customers, clients etc. So we’re in a world where both deference and homogeneity have receded, so we’re always going to have to be better at managing difference and I’m delighted to say that both Ritika and Vicki have provided good and new tools for helping us all get better at this.“
Resource list:
Articles:
• How CQ makes better leaders
• Article on cultural differences and brainstorming
• EQ and CQ
Podcasts:
• With CIPD
• CQ unlocked – navigating cultures
• CQ for communication
• CQ for harnessing diversity
• Webinar on the link between CQ and EQ
• Is cultural intelligence the missing link in our polarised world?
Reading list:
• Culture Map – Erin Myers
• Leading with Cultural Intelligence – David Livermore
• CQ: Developing Cultural Intelligence at work – C Earley, Soon Ang and Joon Seng Tan
• Cultures and Organisations – Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede
• Riding the waves of Culture – Fons Trompenaars
Tedtalks:
1. How to speak bad English perfectly?
2. Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local
3. Weird, or just different?
GatenbySanderson is the UK’s leading people advisory firm delivering executive search, including interim, and leadership & talent consultancy across public services, not for profit and education.
For more information, or to ask a question, please contact Vicki Haverson – vicki.haverson@gatenbysanderson.com