Cultural Values Profile - Cultural Intelligence Center (2024)

Cultural Intelligence (CQ®) is becoming a ‘must have’ for working and leading in the 21st century world. Understanding cultural value preferences makes the difference in whether you thrive or struggle in today’s multicultural contexts. The first step toward developing your CQ is to understand your cultural values, sometimes known as Behavioral Preferences.

Simply put, Cultural Values (CVs) are preferences people have for how they navigate life. These values indicate how people prefer to interact, communicate, plan, and complete tasks. By understanding and comparing your preferences with the preferences of others, you will develop insights that can help you improve your own interpersonal effectiveness.Cultural Values (CV) preferences are neither good nor bad, rather they describe how you prefer to do things.

Your cultural values feedback report (see sample report) shows your preference with a triangle along a continuum. The triangle indicates how you rated your preference for each cultural value. The triangle indicates which part of the continuum you prefer (toward the left/right, or in the middle). This is descriptive information. It is not better to be toward the left or the right of the continuum, or in the middle. If you scored toward one end of the continuum, that doesn’t mean you can’t work effectively with people from the other end of the continuum. But it does mean that both of you need to be flexible and understand the differences in your typical preferences.

Those in the middle of the continuum are not necessarily more adaptable than those on the extremes. Scoring in the middle shows that you prefer a more moderate approach—somewhere between the two poles.