Use Your Difference to Make a Difference

Book description

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, actionable plan 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. 

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Foreword
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction
    1. Why I Wrote This Book
    2. What Is Connection?
    3. How to Use This Book
    4. Note
  5. Part I: Educate
    1. 1 Education
    2. 2 Education of Self (Internal Culture)
      1. What Does Your Bias Say about You?
      2. Understanding Unconscious Bias
      3. Identifying Prejudices
      4. Knowing Your Emotional Triggers
      5. The Goal Here Is to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn
      6. Notes
    3. 3 What Are Your Core Values?
      1. Articulating Your Core Values
      2. How Our Biases and Values Help Us Connect
      3. The Role of Emotional Intelligence
    4. 4 Education of Environment
      1. Learn How to Collect and Gather Information
      2. Become an Active Listener
      3. Be an Active Member of Your Community
      4. Notes
    5. 5 Thinking Like a Sociologist
      1. Develop a Habit of Understanding Why Things Are the Way They Are
      2. Study Melting Pots, Tossed Salads, and the Intersections in between Over Time
    6. 6 Applying LORA to Educate
      1. Listen
      2. Observe
      3. Reflect
      4. Act
  6. Part II: Don't Perpetuate
    1. 7 Don't Perpetuate Systems
      1. Experiencing Stereotypes
      2. The Danger of Perpetuating Stereotypes
    2. 8 Identity
      1. Revealing My Identities
      2. Making Assumptions about Other People's Identities
      3. Insiders versus Outsiders
    3. 9 Privilege
      1. Types of Privilege
      2. Equality and Equity
      3. Barriers to Connection
      4. Notes
    4. 10 The Media
      1. Journalism
      2. Platforms Have to Acknowledge Their Power
      3. Entertainment (Movies, Music, Books, and TV)
    5. 11 Workplaces
      1. The Connection between Diversity and Inclusion
      2. Assess
      3. Arrange
      4. Apply
      5. Accountability and Analysis
      6. Affinity
      7. Diversity and Inclusion Starts at the Top
      8. Note
    6. 12 What about Recruiting and Talent Acquisition?
      1. Talent Search
      2. The Power of Employer Branding
      3. Notes
    7. 13 Education
      1. History
      2. Social Justice
    8. 14 How Allies Can Use Their Privileges and Limit Othering
      1. Understand How History Plays into What Is Going on Today
      2. Understand the Complexities of Your Identity
      3. Understand That Intersectionality Exists
      4. Do Something!
      5. Notes
    9. 15 Applying LORA to Don't Perpetuate
      1. Listen
      2. Observe
      3. Reflect
      4. Act
  7. Part III: Instead, Communicate
    1. 16 Actually, Communicate
      1. Acknowledging Ideological Differences
      2. Silence Is Not the Answer
      3. The Virus of Apathy
      4. Everyone's Voice Matters
      5. Note
    2. 17 No More Binary Thinking
    3. 18 Finding Mutual Purpose and Shared Meaning
      1. Identify Your Feelings
      2. Create a Safe Environment
    4. 19 Receiving Feedback
      1. Ignore the Impulse to React and Embrace the Pause
      2. Understand the Intent-Impact Gap
      3. Acknowledge the Feedback
    5. 20 Practice the “Yes, And”
    6. 21 Communicating Like an Architect
      1. Architect as a Metaphor for Communication
      2. The Architecture of Communication Model for Speaking Out
    7. 22 What Nelson Mandela Taught Us about Seeing the Bigger Picture
      1. Mandela Found Freedom in Forgiveness
      2. Mandela Was Focused on Goals and a Mission beyond Himself
      3. Surround Yourself with People Drastically Different from You
      4. Mandela Knew How to Find Unity in Global Moments
      5. Educate Yourself
      6. Note
    8. 23 The Path to Reconciliation in Rwanda After Genocide
      1. Notes
    9. 24 Healing Our World Today
      1. Avoiding Cancel Culture
      2. We All Need to Be Forgiven
      3. Open Dialogue and Open-Mindedness
      4. Notes
    10. 25 The Importance of Cultural Awareness
      1. The Four Stages of Cultural Awareness
    11. 26 How Parents Can Help Their Children Be Culturally Aware
      1. Encourage Regular Interaction with Other Cultures
      2. Encourage Reading Diverse Books
      3. Encourage Respect and an Appreciation for Different-Sounding Names
      4. Use Food as a Way to Understand Other Cultures
      5. Encourage Critical Thinking as Opposed to Assumption
      6. Encourage Language Learning
    12. 27 How Schools and Teachers Can Help Children Be Culturally Aware
      1. Appreciate and Celebrate the Cultural Backgrounds of Your Students
      2. Be Your Students' Leader and Not Their Dictator
      3. Create a Curriculum That Respects and Includes All the People It Serves
    13. 28 Applying LORA to Instead, Communicate
      1. Listen
      2. Observe
      3. Reflect
      4. Act
    14. 29 Use Your Difference to Make a Difference
      1. Valuing Collaboration
      2. Connecting via Technology
      3. Inclusion Beats Division Every Time!
      4. Notes
  8. Glossary
  9. About the Author
  10. Index
  11. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Use Your Difference to Make a Difference
  • Author(s): Tayo Rockson
  • Release date: September 2019
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781119590699