As an investment in your coaches and a tool for your corporate training toolbox, ICI Certification soon shows its value in a number of ways.
In the last article, we looked at how ICI Certification changes your view of the world –– you may never be the same again! In this article, we look at the significance that ICI Certification can have for coaches, team managers or HR personnel.
Unleash innovation in your coaches and team leaders
One great return on investment into ICI Certification is that, as a result of the ICI framework, participants are better able to analyze situations, especially intercultural situations. As a result, they become more innovative and more precise in designing adaptation strategies or engagement strategies in intercultural situations. This is significant. Doors are discovered and unlocked, where previously coaches, managers, and HR personnel could see only walls.
Participants are constantly expressing that, as a result of the Inter-Cultural Intelligence certification training, they just glean so much—and not just a deeper understanding of things that have happened to them in various cross-cultural and intercultural contexts, but they are also much better at articulating how they might handle situations differently next time. In the light of new intercultural insights, past dealings and experiences can be leveraged to create better future strategies.
Granted—participants universally agree that the week is exhausting!—and yet rewarding. The ICI Certification program is a four-day intensive with a few hours of eLearning up front where people gain a preliminary glimpse into theory and assessment methodology. But the four days themselves are intense. If you are going to deep-dive into culture, even in a classroom full of fellow participants, it will likely be an extremely personal journey.
A "multi-level" Experience
The study of culture really touches you at all levels—at the emotional, the spiritual, the physical, and the intellectual level. And it starts to really rattle all your presuppositions and paradigms.
On Day 2 of one of the trainings, a lady approached the lead trainer and said, “I feel like I’ve been pulled apart. Do you promise me that you’ll put us back together again?” While that may seem extreme, it can feel a little Humpty-Dumptyish—getting shattered and needing every aspect of our beings (physical, spiritual, intellectual, emotional) to be glued back together again, piece by piece. Culture is one of those deeply evocative things that affects us at our core.
Although that four-day experience is challenging and intense, at the same time it’s incredibly enriching to go through that process. Tired or not, the participants unanimously agree they feel incredibly energized and inspired by the journey that they’ve been taken on.
Use Inter-Cultural Intelligence to connect different facets of life for even richer understanding
Another incredibly helpful and powerful experience from which participants benefit during the week is the constant connecting of the ICI framework to all facets of life. Participants forge unexpected connections between many areas of life, as they link their experiences and the experiences of fellow participants with new-found insights. So ICI is not just applicable as a business framework, or only as a job-related framework—it’s not just for NGO, academic, or commercial sectors.
Rather, Inter-Cultural Intelligence is a framework that applies to every aspect of our lives, because culture influences every aspect of our lives! So in these ICI Certification trainings, nobody shies away from talking about raising kids, or discussing generational gaps that could very easily be explained through intercultural lenses. Depending on the group, other topics and subtopics would be marriage, intercultural marriage, the intercultural engagement of our children with other children. Of course, there is naturally a strong emphasis on intercultural engagement at work, but also in social life—in relationships, in shopping, in getting your car fixed, in resolving a conflict in the neighborhood, in interactions while you’re traveling, while you’re on holiday—the list could go on and on.
There truly are many insights and applications—especially in today’s globalized world—for the Inter-Cultural Intelligence framework. And that kind of broad spectrum of possibility makes the study of ICI fun, as well. Participants are gaining skills and competencies, not merely for work life, but for every part of life—skills and competencies that have direct bearing on life itself. But these rough gems need cutting and polishing. Since ICI touches all areas of our lives, no matter where we go—it is incredibly valuable to join the journey.
Everyone who has joined the ICI Certification course thus far have only contributed to its richness; and that richness has carried on in the stories and in the case studies and in the fine-tuning of the material. The content is reevaluated and fine-tuned at least every six months. Supporting the whole curriculum is a rich library of articles on this website and on our KnowledgeWorkx ED website. Often, these articles originated with stories collected during ICI trainings, or with stories that our certified practitioners have shared with us once they have begun applying ICI in a coaching, learning, and/or consulting capacity.
Here’s the strongest indicator of what’s so special about the ICI Certification training. Most people, when we follow up with them after they have had occasion to put what they learned into practice, say something like this: “Well, since I took the course, I haven’t been able to view the world the same way. I don’t see people in our world the same way as I did before the ICI certification.” And that’s what this is all about; the ultimate end goal truly is transformation. Help your teams thrive by unleashing your coaches. The ICI Certification journey could potentially be a long-overdue brain-rewiring.
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