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How to bridge cultural differences with ease
Emotional Intelligence – The Basics for Professional Success
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As a leader, you already know the pandemic led to many workforce and workplace changes.
Back at the Karmic Ally Coaching blog, I’ve been sharing perspective and guidance about it as this is a critical leadership challenge.
Your ability to adapt is crucial if you are to remain relevant to your organization.
We’re not just talking about technological advances or how to use Artificial Intelligence in business.
That’s an important skill to develop not only for yourself but also your team.
But your soft skills matter more.
Leaders need to show care and concern for employees and focus on their well-being.
Understanding and applying emotional intelligence becomes a key leadership skill.
I was reading about the top leadership challenges for 2023 and beyond this weekend. The survey from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology known as SIOP caught my attention.
They noted the top 10 trends and clearly while leading the changing workplace is important, the ability to engage and retain employees and ensure their psychological safety has come to the fore.
This also means leading a diverse and inclusive culture.
Dealing with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion is an important leadership challenge for today and for the future.
As a leader you need to give priority to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion to provide for a supportive and harmonious work environment.
This seems to have become a buzz word, but it requires more than just lip service to look good to the stakeholders or shareholders.
It’s an area worth revisiting while planning your professional development goals for 2024.
More importantly, it is something you should already be practicing while demonstrating your emotional intelligence skills.
I have a question for you.
Does your organization have a Chief Diversity Officer or policies on diversity and inclusion with the appropriate training?
Back in July ‘23, I read a Wall Street Journal article about layoffs for chief diversity officers being on the rise.
This topic was quite hot in the days following George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020. The article talks about companies scrambling to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite.
In 2018, less than half the companies in the Standard & Poor 500 (S&P 500) employed someone in the role. By 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from the executive search firm Russell Reynolds.
I can confirm that because in January 2022, my Institute ran trainings for Chartered Accountants on diversity and inclusion. We were told that every accountant could help encourage inclusion in the profession.
I experienced it on an even closer level when I got a call from an Executive Search firm partner who I knew asking me to submit my resume for a chief diversity officer at a multinational client.
I’m guessing she had just come out of some meeting and was driving because of all the car noise in the background. It was really a knee-jerk call from her.
The fact that I was not an HR person didn’t matter to her. She needed to clinch a deal and remembered me!
She knew of my international financial experience, and I had many of the job requisites from my corporate work experience.
Despite the badgering on the call and complete lack of sensitivity that I was passionate about Karmic Ally Coaching, I declined to send the resume.
Instead, I offered to come and give paid talks. My intuition told me to say no and focus on my business instead.
It looks like I was right, according to the Wall Street Journal article.
New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.
I have a better idea, that can be initiated at an individual level rather than have management hammer in diversity and inclusion just because it’s politically correct.
Or shareholders want to see it in the company’s annual report.
That’s making an effort to understand and respect cultural differences in our organizations.
Having diversity in leadership is important but it is even more important that we take initiative to be inclusive and accepting.
I’ve provided guidance on how to bridge cultural differences in business with ease in my video post and I’ll share the link with you in the description.
Providing quick win tips isn’t enough unless you understand the relevance of those tips and how it will improve your leadership skills in uncertain economic times.
Be an inspirational leader who builds healthy diverse relationships.
An inspirational leader surrounds themselves with highly skilled and diverse people who aren’t afraid to speak up. As a committed leader, you know that hearing information from various sources only makes it more useful and better.
While most people want the same things out of life, such as happiness, not everyone starts on the same footing.
For example, you may dream of a city penthouse, and someone else may dream of having a farmhouse away from the city. It’s the same thing, just a different location. The dream is simply happiness.
An inspirational leader wants to know more than information about the dreams or goals the people around them have. They also want to know what the journey is like for each person and how the problems each person faces can be mitigated for the people who come after them. Inspirational leaders are analytical people.
Now, Organizations that desire to create more opportunities and solve more problems can accomplish this by developing diverse leadership.
When you have diversity in leadership, you can provide a wide range of positive impacts to your organization and grow them into innovative and admired (inside out) organizations.
The positive impact of having diversity in leadership is manifold and includes the following aspects.
Reveal a Wider Range of Skill Sets
When you focus on diversity in leadership, you will bring in a larger range of skill sets from which to draw. Finding people who graduated from different schools, who don’t fit the typical mould of your industry will bring forward any skills you may be missing and help your organization become even better problem-solvers.
Bring In More Experience
There are always more ways to tackle a problem, but people often get accustomed to one method. This tends to limit innovative critical thinking skills.
Bring in people who learned unusual skills and ways to tackle similar problems. This will introduce new experiences to your organization which may change your entire culture for the better.
Gain Valuable Perspectives
As much as a good leader like you tries, you may not be as open-minded as you think. This may be blocking you from understanding truly transformed solutions that you can implement.
An experienced perspective from someone willing to show you all the ways they work can be enlightening. After all, there will be some things you don’t or cannot fully comprehend or understand if you haven’t been there.
Experience Innovative Thinking
Bringing in new people is one of the best ways to deal with the need to modernize any organization. If you feel stagnant and directionless, a diverse new leader can make all the difference.
Different, fresher, younger people who aren’t all the same sex or race who aren’t caught in your organization’s methods already can help everyone think in a new innovative way.
Create More Positive Change
Having more diverse leadership also leads to a more diverse operation in its entirety. Doing so will uncover new opportunities and diverse ways of thinking, and that experience will lead to fresh ideas.
And, what about a Growth Mindset?
Attract top-notch professionals with the ability to think creatively and generate new ideas and methods. Recruiting more diverse people in your leadership models will help you grow and change in ways you may never have considered before.
To positively impact your organization, focus on building diversity up and down the food chain, including typical titled leadership positions, and remember to look where you may not typically by avoiding focusing on titles but instead on experience, skills, and actions.
Leaders can come from all areas of life and business. They don’t need a particular title to become an amazing leader for a project or vision.
You’ll get more information on how to build cultural differences and, rather not build but bridge cultural differences and encourage diversity and inclusion at your leadership level in my video blog on the subject.
The link is in the description. (Click here)
You’ll also find other useful resources in there.
This is Vatsala Shukla for Karmic Ally Coaching signing off. Bye for now.
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