Culture Boleh Global Training PLT is licensed to administer and conduct debriefing for CQ Self-Assessment Pro, a cultural intelligence (CQ) assessment developed by Cultural Intelligence Center, LLC. As a part-time blogger for Culture Boleh, I was given the opportunity to take this assessment and am excited to be documenting my experience of the whole process in a 3-part series, starting with Part 1 – taking the assessment.
The CQ Self-Assessment has been taken by about 60,000 professionals worldwide, most of whom are from existing leadership roles or have been identified as potential leaders of tomorrow. The assessment is an online survey and focuses on how individuals view their own CQ capabilities (Drive, Knowledge, Strategy and Action) and cultural value orientations. Upon completion, individuals will receive a 16-page feedback report which includes their scores for the four CQ capabilities, comparisons with the CQ worldwide norms, personal preferences for seven individual cultural value orientations and a personalized development plan for enhancing their cultural intelligence.
In short, this assessment will help us gain insight about our existing cultural values and capabilities, and then develop a plan to improve our intercultural performance to prepare us for leading global teams or multinational companies in the near future. It’s important to be in the right frame of mind for the results to be most accurate so before the taking the assessment, I mentally prepared myself by focusing on the fulltime job I had and then proceeded to answer the questions based on how I would react in everyday situations at the workplace.
To begin with, I received an email with a link to the assessment along with a unique reference number. Upon registration, I began the assessment. It is recommended to complete all 66 questions in one sitting, so I allocated at least 30 minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time to do so. The first section requires me to enter my personal details – name, age, number of years of fulltime work, number of languages spoken, number of countries lived in, and cultural background. This is followed by a disclaimer that my name will be kept confidential for research purposes, so there is no need to worry about the misuse of personal details.
The assessment is divided into 3 sections and begins with section A consisting of 8 questions, each with 2 sets of responses that potentially describes me when I am in situations characterized by cultural diversity. For example, the questions revolve around how I would react to someone from a different culture and if I prefer to spend time understanding cultural differences or on other pursuits. This is then followed by Section B, consisting of 37 questions with a range of 7 options to choose from as answers (Strongly Agree, Moderately Agree, Slightly Agree, Neutral, Slightly Disagree, Moderately Disagree and Strongly Disagree). While going through these questions, the encouragement is to answer them relative to my peers. So with my peers in mind, I come across specific questions addressing my comfort of working in culturally diverse teams, understanding on differences in management styles and ability to navigate through them, anticipation of situations where differences in culture may present different interactions and my flexibility in adjusting to these circumstances. The remaining questions are grouped under Section C and these touch on my beliefs and values system. For example, there are queries on my attitude towards company hierarchy, types of communication, importance on maintaining good relationships, and the degree of comfort in openly expressing emotions at work.
Overall, I felt the assessment was easy to understand and touched on a variety of different scenarios in which cultural diversity exist. The questions were straightforward and did not take long for completion. I found that answering the questions was easier if I pictured myself in some of the scenarios that are described in the assessment (especially if I have been through such experiences before) and then chose the answer that best reflected my preferred course of action. After completing the assessment, the feedback report will be available online 20 minutes later. In some cases, the feedback report may go to the facilitator instead of the participant but otherwise, participants can log onto the same link to view their feedback report. Additionally, CQ Group reports can also be requested for organizations interested in obtaining aggregated results for a group of participants. Following this, a debriefing will be conducted to explain the meaning of the results to the participants and this will be covered in the following blog.
By: Boleh Blogger
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