CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE & 55% of Black churchgoers say they “are aware of what race they are about every day.” White churchgoers, only 17%. #AmericanReligiousDataArchives #ARDA

by David Briggs, ARDA, 7/29/20.

There is a cavernous gap in attitudes on race in America.

Within the church, for example, more than four in five black Protestants said their race was very important to their sense of who they are; 55 percent said they are aware of what race they are about every day.

In contrast, less than a quarter of overwhelmingly white mainline Protestants attached the same importance to their racial identity; just 17 percent think about their race daily.

This lack of sensitivity to race – and the racial structures that impact the lives of people of color – present special challenges for racially diverse congregations.

A good deal of ethnographic research has indicated people of color pay “the lion’s share” of the personal costs associated with attending multiracial churches, Edwards and Kim noted.

These costs include feeling isolated, not having their religious and cultural preferences met and having only symbolic influence in their congregations.

The recent research involved 121 in-depth, face-to-face interviews with head clergy of multiracial churches as part of the religious diversity project, a nationwide study led by Edwards of leadership in multiracial religious organizations in the United States.

… The findings were not surprising to M. Garlinda Burton, a black woman who is resource development manager at and a former interim head of the United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race.

“Racial justice has gone to the bottom of the list of priorities” for many predominantly white denominations, Burton said.

That is reflected within the church, she said, in ways from discounting the voices of people of color on either side of major issues confronting the denomination to many people considering the appointment of a pastor of color as a punishment to a congregation.

In many ways, even if left unsaid, “There is a sense among white people that white is better.”

Read more at … http://blogs.thearda.com/trend/featured/in-multiracial-churches-pastors-of-color-hitting-the-same-white-wall/

EXEGETE CONTEXT & How NOT to Do It

Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: In a recent class I taught at Kingswood University in Sussex, NB, Canada we discussed cultural exegesis. Kevin, a Presbyterian pastor and one of my students, provided a link to this video. It shows that even the movie industry has noticed that we often culturally exegete insufficiently and/or poorly. Watch this video as a reminder of what not to do:

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AwROL7OBkc

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE & train w/ metacognitive, motivational & behavioral components, not values #research

A New Approach to Intercultural Training for the Global Manager by P. Christopher Earley and Randall S. Peterson, Academy of Management, March 1, 2004, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 100-115

Abstract

The global economy and shifting political tides make the need for intercultural understanding and education obvious. Where historically the focus of intercultural training has been on preparing an individual to work in a new culture, today’s organizations routinely ask managers to work in multinational environments and move from country to country. This challenge has created a strong debate about how to prepare managers for such challenging assignments. How ought people be assessed to understand their readiness for such assignments? Do high intelligence quotient (IQ) people adjust better than others to new cultural challenges? The topic of cultural adjustment and its assessment remains compelling but incomplete. Our focus here is the development and exploration of the concept of cultural intelligence, or, CQ (Earley, 2003; Earley & Ang, 2003), along with its implications for training and education for global work assignments. Our approach suggests that training for the global manager should include metacognitive, motivational, and behavioral components. The CQ approach represents a significant break from conventional wisdom of focusing on cultural values for intercultural education.

Download the article here … http://amle.aom.org/content/3/1/100.short

ASSESSMENT & The 8 Self-Assessments You Need to Improve at Work #HarvardBusinessReview

MANAGING YOURSELF: The 8 Self-Assessments You Need to Improve at Work This Year

by Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review, 1/20/16.

…we’ve pulled together several of HBR’s best assessments and quizzes to help give you a sense of what you need to work on and how to go about it.

Productivity. Time management is a perennial thorn in most managers’ sides… So before you try out a new program or app, take this assessment to understand your own style and discover productivity tips that like-minded people have found most effective. Then, if you want more information on the different styles, read this article.

Work/life balance… In this assessment, you can compare your priorities with how you actually allocate your time and energy. Once you’ve answered questions about four key areas — work, home, community, self — Wharton professor Stewart Friedman provides practical guidance and a useful exercise for addressing the critical gaps.

Cultural skills… This assessment helps you see key differences in eight areas where cultural gaps are most common, like communicating, scheduling, trusting, and disagreeing — and shows you how you compare with the norm for your culture in each area. The questions and feedback are based on comprehensive research by INSEAD’s Erin Meyer, an expert in cross-cultural management.

Emotional intelligence… With this quiz, you can test yourself on five critical EI skills — emotional self-awareness, positive outlook, emotional self-control, adaptability, and empathy. In addition to your score on each component, Annie McKee of the University of Pennsylvania shares an exercise to help you enhance your self-awareness by getting feedback from trusted friends or colleagues.

You might also take this assessment on emotional agility — the ability to manage your thoughts and feelings. Everyone has an inner stream of thoughts and feelings that includes criticism, doubt, and fear. By answering the questions in this assessment, you can identify your own patterns when it comes to avoiding or buying into those negatives thoughts…

Communication skills…The popularity of our grammar quiz shows just how many struggle with writing. Review the 10 sentences and decide whether you think they’re grammatically correct…

Finance skills…This 10-question finance quiz comes from the HBR Guide to Finance Basics for Managers. When you finish taking it, you’ll see which answers are correct, and why, so you can brush up on key concepts you need to learn to become a more effective manager.

Managing your boss. This assessment asks what you would do in five “managing up” scenarios. After selecting your answers, you learn which approaches experts recommend. You also receive links to further reading on how to cultivate your most important relationship at work­ — your relationship with your boss.

Read more at … https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-8-self-assessments-you-need-to-improve-at-work-this-year

DIVERSITY & Diagnosing Your Cultural Intelligence

by P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski, Harvard Business Review, 10/01/04

… Cultural intelligence is related to emotional intelligence, but it picks up where emotional intelligence leaves off. A person with high emotional intelligence grasps what makes us human and at the same time what makes each of us different from one another. A person with high cultural intelligence can somehow tease out of a person’s or group’s behavior those features that would be true of all people and all groups, those peculiar to this person or this group, and those that are neither universal nor idiosyncratic. The vast realm that lies between those two poles is culture…

One critical element that cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence do share is, in psychologist Daniel Goleman’s words, “a propensity to suspend judgment—to think before acting.” For someone richly endowed with CQ, the suspension might take hours or days, while someone with low CQ might have to take weeks or months. In either case, it involves using your senses to register all the ways that the personalities interacting in front of you are different from those in your home culture yet similar to one another. Only when conduct you have actually observed begins to settle into patterns can you safely begin to anticipate how these people will react in the next situation. The inferences you draw in this manner will be free of the hazards of stereotyping.

The people who are socially the most successful among their peers often have the greatest difficulty making sense of, and then being accepted by, cultural strangers. Those who fully embody the habits and norms of their native culture may be the most alien when they enter a culture not their own. Sometimes, people who are somewhat detached from their own culture can more easily adopt the mores and even the body language of an unfamiliar host. They’re used to being observers and making a conscious effort to fit in…

Attaining a high absolute score is not the objective.

Most managers fit at least one of the following six profiles. By answering the questions in the exhibit, you can decide which one describes you best.

The provincial can be quite effective when working with people of similar background but runs into trouble when venturing farther afield…

The analyst methodically deciphers a foreign culture’s rules and expectations by resorting to a variety of elaborate learning strategies…

The natural relies entirely on his intuition rather than on a systematic learning style…

The ambassador, like many political appointees, may not know much about the culture he has just entered, but he convincingly communicates his certainty that he belongs there…

The mimic has a high degree of control over his actions and behavior, if not a great deal of insight into the significance of the cultural cues he picks up. Mimicry definitely puts hosts and guests at ease, facilitates communication, and builds trust. Mimicry is not, however, the same as pure imitation, which can be interpreted as mocking…

The chameleon possesses high levels of all three CQ components and is a very uncommon managerial type. He or she even may be mistaken for a native of the country. More important, chameleons don’t generate any of the ripples that unassimilated foreigners inevitably do. Some are able to achieve results that natives cannot, due to their insider’s skills and outsider’s perspective. We found that only about 5% of the managers we surveyed belonged in this remarkable category…

Read more at … https://hbr.org/2004/10/cultural-intelligence/ar/1