Consultancy program 'cultural intelligence'

"Cultural intelligence is the capacity to make contact with all people. Young, old, Eastern, Western, introvert or extrovert. The aim is to achieve growth, innovation, customer or employee satisfaction, or profit. The latter applies both in a social and in a commercial sense." Esma Choho.

A great deal is expected of managers and professionals: supervision of mergers and acquisitions, responsibility for international teams, reorganizations etc. etc. Achieving your goals requires intensive contact with colleagues, customers, suppliers and other external parties. Some of those parties, including those within your own organization, may not always speak the same language or, even though they may be located in the Netherlands, may possibly embrace a completely different corporate culture. Developing your cultural intelligence improves your capacity to deal with those different (corporate) cultures. esmachoho can provide guidance in this.

Method

The cultural intelligence program is available as an individual training program (1-on-1) or can be customized for a group or department within your organization, for a maximum of 12 participants. Following a first assessment, either brief or more in-depth, Esma Choho presents her ideas and specific recommendations for your company. More often than not based on her vision that change stems 80% from people's behavior and 20% from their way of thinking, and not vice versa. The next step is to set about training and coaching you or your people in order to achieve the defined goal. We oversee the entire course, from concept and idea through to concrete result.

Development of empathic competence and powers of perception are vital to everyone who has contact with different cultures. Cultures can quite easily differ in each department of one organization. Development of these powers will enable you as an executive leader or a professional to understand cultures and people both quickly and effectively.

Further information

For further information and information on costs please telephone us at
+31 (0)20 624 8985 or send an email to info@esmachoho.com. >

Cases

International fund

An international fund is keen to tap into new markets in order to diversify and to attract alternative types of proposals. Together with the board of directors, we review their current procedures, processes, areas of responsibility, and activities such as marketing and PR. It transpires that both the board of directors and the supervisory executives have made a great many assumptions regarding marketing and name-familiarity of the fund. Both the board of directors and the supervisory executives have difficulty with this conclusion and find it hard to accept that their ideas are not entirely in tune with reality. By presenting facts and asking confrontational questions, the client is provoked into thought. A section of the organization, however, rejects our recommended solutions for marketing and product innovation. We advise the board of directors to move forward with a core team of innovators.

Under our supervision the core team assumes our role internally, working on consciousness and enthusiasm in order to achieve growth and the changes involved. In keeping with well-established change models, the board of directors, followed by the core team, and finally the growth-sensitive members of the organization, work their way through the stages of Awareness, Acceptance, Action: The first is awareness, in other words support, necessary to achieve the objective; the second is acceptance of the changes that the objective implies; and finally, the action required to implement the objective. Those individuals who for whatever reason are unable to develop awareness or acceptance will gradually leave the organization, some sooner rather than later. In this instance under strong resistance. We assist the board of directors and the core team in their realization that resistance is a part of change.

Result:

In the space of two years the core business of the international fund has been held against the light, dusted down and completely rejuvenated. The first alternative types of proposal were received after 9 months and have since been successfully completed. The client has increased its range by 22%.

Embassy

An embassy, that represents an internationally influential country, wishes to participate in the fierce discussions on the subject of moslims in Western countries. They would like to do so in a manner that will also include moslims in the discussion. The ambassador sees this as an important project, and his colleague ambassadors across the globe monitor his initiative with avid interest. Given these various factors, the pressure to succeed is great; however
the precise objective is primarily unclear.

Assessment:

The client evaluates the working relationship as 'very successful' and regularly
contacts us for advice.