Hannah Elise Jones - Cultural Intelligence Reflection

What intercultural challenges are you currently facing?: Professionally, I am not experiencing
significant intercultural challenges currently. My current multicultural work is surface level at best, as I
do interact with international employees of multinational companies to transact information related to
their employee engagement surveys. I think I face more challenges in dealing with the multiculturalism I
experience in my urban environment domestically than I do in working internationally. Most of those
challenges are related to differences in ideology, experience, or values, that shape our views of what is
important. However, these challenges rarely emerge for me in a professional context, that I am aware of
at least.

What global opportunities do you want to pursue?: I would like to travel and explore the world my
whole life. Travel has always played a big role in my life and I want that trend to continue. I hope to also
integrate more international work and travel into my business and career. Thus far, I have had the
opportunity to work with diverse teams, both diverse in the sense that we come from different
backgrounds here in the U.S. and diverse in that we are located around the world and represent many
cultures and nationalities. In my international work I have never had to directly collaborate with or
deeply partner with people who were culturally different from me in a significant way. I am usually in
the position of delivering some pre-determined resource, presentation, or information, so I am not often
in the situation where I have the opportunity to deeply collaborate with these multi-cultural teams. This
is something I would like to bring in to my professional experience in a meaningful way at some point in
the future. I would also like to live abroad at some point for a period of time. I am not interested in
moving full time, but I would take the opportunity to explore a new country in a deeper way.

Describe your CQ in your own words: I am not surprised that Action is my highest. I am generally
good at reading behavior and adapting to various situations. My Drive is my second highest, and I am
surprised that within that dimension my intrinsic interest was the lowest. I experience myself as having
very high internal motivation for culturally diverse experiences and I derive a great deal of motivation
from them. Knowledge is my lowest dimension overall and the lowest sub dimension is socio-linguistic.
I am curious if this sub dimension is mainly driven by not speaking another language, or what else goes
into that category. I think that I obtain knowledge of areas I feel are important to me and my travels, but
not necessarily business contexts which many of the sub dimensions are related to. This is an area I
expect will develop over time as I have more intercultural experiences that are related to business, as
opposed to just travel for pleasure. Finally strategy is my lowest dimension compared to others, and
planning is the lowest sub-dimension within Strategy. I am surprised about this as planning is generally
a great strength of mine. I generally think ahead about my interactions, and plan my moves based on the
knowledge I have of the situation. I do tend to reflect after interactions, particularly if I feel they didnt
go well, and I want to do better in the future. Based on my own self view, I am surprised that strategy is
low compared to others, as I would have, just based on reading the categories, expected Knowledge or
Action to be my lowest categories comparatively.
Your strongest CQ - Write down one example of how you have used Action: I believe that much of
my behavior in this context is unconscious. My natural habits are to mirror others and that serves me
well in unfamiliar or diverse contexts, as it helps me to act in line with the cultural and social norms of
my environment. One recent example of this is my speech acts while in France. French use a lot of
general social phrases in a more predictable way than Americans. For example, saying good day
whenever you leave a grocery store. This phrase is very common and is used quite consistently. In the
U.S. that is not something I would say after all of my interactions, but in France it is part of the common
culture and way of speaking, so I adapted to it quickly, including it in my exchanges with others during
my trip.

Your weakest CQ - Write down one example of how Strategy may have caused you problems:
Somewhat ironically, I feel that I have too many strong strategy habits that sometimes cause me
problems. Planning, my lowest sub dimension in the area, is so natural to me, that there are times where
I rely on it too much. One example from my recent trip to France relates to me planning my
communication. Knowing that speaking French in France, even just a few simple words at the outset of
the conversation, signals cultural respect and is well received by the French, I try to speak French in all
my interactions. Because my French is a little rusty, I feel the need to plan and rehearse what I am going
to say and how I am going to approach the situation. There was one instance on this recent trip, where I
figured out how to begin my conversation and ask my main question, but did not plan further than that.
When the woman I was having the conversation with then launched into her answer to my question, I
was struggling to understand. My planning and rehearsing helped me present my languages skills as
possibly greater than they were, leading the woman to launch into a response that I couldnt understand
and had to struggle with later. In these situations I get nervous, which hurts my ability to understand
what is being said.

Like planning sometimes my checking undermines me during my travels. In the same situation
described above, I went over and over and over what had happened in my mind, and in hindsight
understood what she was trying to tell me, and identified the phrase that threw me off initially. This is
helpful for me to learn from in the future, but I have a habit of not being able to move on from the
checking process. Instead of taking the learning and reintegrating it, I just replay my mistakes over and
over again. I critique myself for not having planned better, or for having misunderstood a simple phrase
or exchange. In this way I believe I possess many of the skills required for strategy, but do not always
use them to my advantage.

Cultural Values reflection: My cultural values profile is pretty distinct, in that I am not in the middle
often, but am instead closely aligned with a value in each dichotomy. I am also frequently not aligned
with Anglo values. The non-Anglo values I am aligned with are collectivism, cooperative, and long term
orientation. The Anglo values I am aligned with are doing, low power distance, low and low uncertainty
avoidance. The only value I sit somewhat in the middle on is low vs high contact, where I align with
Eastern European and Latin cultures. Overall, I agree with the way my values were assessed, with the
exception of being vs doing. The description of doing is emphasis on being busy and meeting goals
while the description of being is emphasis on quality of life. I believe that my actions might indicate
that I align more with doing, but the reason my actions are aligned with that description is because my
values are inline with being. In an American upper middle class life I feel a certain degree of pressure to
work hard and meet goals in order to preserve my quality of life. In my modern experience, those two
values are not as mutually exclusive as this spectrum makes them appear. I was pleased to see that I fell
under low uncertainty avoidance, as opposed to high. I have a tendency to plan and structure things well,
and I dont like dealing with uncertainty if it is not necessary. I have been working to become more open
and flexible so it was good to see that my scores landed me there, indicating that even as I try to live into
it, my values are aligned with it.