Use Your Difference to Make a Difference

How to Connect and Communicate in a Cross-Cultural World

Tayo Rockson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119851912, 9781119590699
• eBook ISBN: 9781119590736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Become more culturally competent in an increasingly diverse world

Recent years have seen dramatic changes to several institutions worldwide. Our increasingly interconnected, digitized, and globalized world presents immense opportunities and unique challenges. Modern businesses and schools interact with individuals and organizations from a diverse range of cultural and national backgrounds—increasing the likelihood for miscommunication, errors in strategy, and unintended consequences in the process. This has also spilled into our daily lives and the way we consume information today. Understanding how to navigate these and other pitfalls requires adaptability, nuanced cross-cultural communication, and effective conflict resolution. Use Your Difference to Make a Difference provides readers with a skills-based, actionableplan that transforms differences into agents of inclusiveness, connection, and mutual understanding.

This innovative and timely guide illustrates how to leverage differences to move beyond unconscious biases, manage a culturally-diverse workplace, create an environment for more tolerant schooling environments, more trusted media, communicate across borders, find and retain diverse talent, and bridge the gap between working locally and expanding globally. Expert guidance on a comprehensive range of topics—teamwork, leadership styles, information sharing, delegation, supervision, giving and receiving feedback, coaching and motivation, recruiting, managing suppliers and customers, and more—helps you manage the essential aspects of international relationships and cultural awareness. This valuable resource contains the indispensable knowledge required to:

• Develop self-awareness needed to be a cross-cultural communicator
• Develop content, messaging techniques, marketing plans, and business strategies that translate across cultural borders
• Help your employees to better understand and collaborate with clients and colleagues from different backgrounds
• Help teachers build safe environments for students to be themselves
• Strengthen cross-cultural competencies in yourself, your team, and your entire organization
• Understand the cultural, economic, and political factors surrounding our world

Use Your Difference to Make a Difference is a must-have resource for any educator, parent, leader, manager, or team member of an organization that interacts with co-workers and customers from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Part I
Educate

1
Education

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

—Nelson Mandela

To me, true education involves a few things—IQ, EQ, and CQ, or intelligence quotient, emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence—that allow us to get a better sense of who we truly are, how others see us, how we fit into the world around us, and the implications of our actions. Essentially, what we are after here is the education of ourselves and education of our environments.

If we don't know who we are, we won't be able to know what to work on in order to become better connectors, so let's get into what makes up your internal culture. Education of self has to do with understanding your internal culture and education of environment has to do with understanding your external culture.

Both of these cultures involve listening and observing. Gaining mastery of your internal cultures is about listening and observing your biases as well as your core values, and gaining mastery of your external cultures is about listening and observing what is around you.

2
Education of Self (Internal Culture)

What Does Your Bias Say about You?

The first thing to understand about your internal culture is your bias. Bias is an inclination or prejudice for or against one person or group. Unconscious bias is the unconscious feelings we have toward other people and groups. Being biased doesn't automatically make us racist or sexist. Biases are human inclinations and ways for us to make decisions in life. Biases allow us to make shortcuts as we go about our days and act as a filter. They are the ways we categorize, view, perceive, remember, connect, and learn about culture.

Although this emotion is not always negative, examining your own possible biases is an important step to understanding the roots of stereotypes and prejudices in our society today. These biases inform every decision we make (what we teach, who we hire, who we fire, who we promote, the marketing programs and policies we create and/or support).

Understanding Unconscious Bias

As a diversity and inclusion consultant, I lead a lot of unconscious bias workshops. One of the things I do is to list out the most common types of biases that influence our everyday lives. I go through them because it is important for me to show my clients how their inherent biases translate ambiguous pieces of information into meaningful thoughts. I want people to see how our biases impact connection in the following ways:

• Our worldviews: how we see people and the world.
• Our attitudes and behaviors: how we react toward certain people or groups of people based on our worldviews.
• Our attention: what we pay attention and listen to, consciously or unconsciously.
• Our comfort level: how safe or unsafe we feel in certain situations.

As you can imagine, all these will affect your drive and desire to connect, so it is important to paint the picture of what is going on in your mind before you make decisions.

That being said, the following are the most common unconscious biases that influence our world today.

• Affinity bias: Affinity bias occurs when we see someone we feel we have an affinity with (e.g., we support the same teams, we attended the same college, we come from the same place, or they remind us of someone we know and like). For example, I am obsessed with Harry Potter, Lebron James, and Manchester United, so if I come across anyone who shares an affinity for those things, the chances of me wanting to connect with that person are probably high.
• Attribution bias: Attribution refers to how we explain behavior or the cause and effect of something. It's attaching meaning to something, so attribution bias would be attributing someone's behavior to their intrinsic nature. For example, say you're driving and someone cuts you off. You notice that the person has a New Jersey license plate, so you immediately assume that the driver is is careless because he's from Jersey. Now anytime you see a driver from Jersey, your bias is activated. What is missing in this scenario is the failure to assess the situational factors that led to your getting cut off. Instead, a leap was made to attach a meaning to the intrinsic nature of someone.
• Beauty bias: This refers to how we judge people based on their physical appearance, especially when they are considered attractive. Unconsciously, many of us associate appearance with personality, so, for example, a tall person might translate as a good leader to you or a beautiful person might be perceived as more trustworthy.
• Confirmation bias: This refers to the tendency to gather and process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with your existin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Educate
• Part II: Don't Perpetuate
• Part III: Instead, Communicate
• Glossary
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement