Why embracing diversity will improve your leadership skills

A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Triple identity syndrome? Not really, but the central character of the amusing Blake Edwards’ musical film Victor/Victoria. Set in the Paris of the mid 1930s’, Victoria is a starving soprano who decides to sing in cabarets as a gay man named Victor, who in turn impersonates a female. Victoria succeeds immediately attracting the likes of both men and women. “Interwoven throughout the comedy and musical numbers are some surprisingly astute observations about gender perceptions, discrimination and the battle of the sexes”. (1)

Beyond having a very enjoyable time, watching the movie may make us reflect about how we may change our prejudices when we put ourselves in the shoes of a person different to us in terms of gender, culture, race or religion. Have you ever tried seriously to cast yourself mentally into someone else’s identity to better understand their views and opinions? This is a role-playing exercise practiced at some companies and business schools to realize about how to value and respect diversity.

How do we form our identity? We first begin to identify with the family, a group, a country, or a region in infancy. This bond of attachment is then consolidated over the course of our lives, manifesting itself through preferences for the customs, interests, tastes, and even the cuisine of our particular group. For many of us, feeling that we belong to a group is part of our self-identity, of the collection of things that answer the question who am I?

Interestingly, in the case of children who have grown up in different countries, such as the offspring of diplomats or executives posted abroad, this sense of belonging to a single culture or to a group tends to be more tenuous. Furthermore, people who have spent their childhood or younger years travelling are often more interested in different cultures, even those that are distant from their own. Research shows that children exposed to different cultures, or who show an interest in other societies, tend to have a greater capacity for leadership than those brought up in the same place and who feel tied to their domestic environment. (2) A powerful example of this in recent history is Barack Obama, who spent much of his childhood in Indonesia and then grew up in several American cities. Our sense of belonging to a group is fundamentally cultural, a habit we acquire through education from infancy onward, and is something that, curiously enough, can also be seen in the behavior of our primate cousins.

With this in mind, I’d like to discuss three questions related to the relationship between our sense of belonging and entrepreneurial and leadership qualities:

The first is that, because it’s a cultural –not innate- habit, our sense of belonging can be modified. For example, by stimulating awareness that we live in a global community in the early years of education, by travelling or living abroad, or by cultivating in children an interest in different or unfamiliar cultures. Extending this broader sense of belonging, I believe, stimulates our leadership skills and capacity for interpersonal and intercultural socialization later in life.

The second question is that we can continue to modify our sense of belonging throughout life, up to and during adulthood. For example, by studying abroad as part of university exchange programs, or when, during our career, we might be sent to work in another country or continent to do business with people from other cultures.

Another way to overcome the feeling of belonging is to change at some point the sector or company we work in. If I might be allowed to illustrate this with my own experience, I took a Law degree, my doctorate is in Moral Philosophy, and I have also completed an MBA: three very different areas. At the same time, I have taught at university, again in a range of subjects, from philosophy and business strategy, as well as working as a consultant, sitting on boards, and as an academic manager. I don’t consider myself a lawyer as such, nor purely an academic, and am aware that my professional background is blended, unorthodox. When asked my profession, I tend to reply “educator”, an answer people can sometimes find puzzling.

In any event, I believe these different facets of my career have helped give me a multidimensional perspective of an activity I have always wanted to embrace since childhood: teaching. I can also see the advantages enjoyed by professionals with a varied background—in education as well as in other areas—because I believe that a wide variety of professional experiences, particularly in relation to different cultures, stimulates creativity, innovation, and an attitude that encourages out-of-the box thinking.

Rather than going for specialization, my advice to young professionals would be to opt for semi-specialization, an approach that allows us to be open to other professional opportunities. For example, I would say that somebody with a PhD in finance who only publishes in related academic journals, and who only attends conferences related to his or her discipline, and that only talks to other academics in the same field will have an extremely narrow and conventional professional world view that can only inhibit innovation.

At the same time, I’m not suggesting we do away with the traditional channels of recognition and promotion within academia or in other professions, but I do think we need to be open to approaches that can help transform our jobs at the same time as the environment we operate in changes. Excessive standardization of careers based on immutable promotion structures tends to suppress creativity, in turn leading to stagnancy and patterns that can only be disrupted by the appearance of an occasional genius within the system.

The third question here is the extent to which young people’s sense of belonging has been diluted by the internet and the social networks. Being able to communicate with friends and colleagues from different, often distant, places through platforms such as LinkedIn promotes awareness of and respect for different cultures, while at the same time helping us see our own society and its values more objectively.

By this point, the reader might well ask why I am so interested in encouraging us to think about widening our sense of belonging beyond our traditional groups. After all, isn’t the search for sameness conditioned by biology and nature, as shown by the behavior of primates? Isn’t it perhaps normal to look for similarities with others in the world of work, as well as for commonalities in our personal lives?

My belief, which is based on ample research, is that embracing diversity, cultivating a sense of belonging to humanity regardless of other people’s religion, culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or class, helps develop emotional intelligence, in the process strengthening our openness to innovation and creativity and any other number of virtues, all of which can only facilitate personal relationships and professional success. At the same time, this approach spreads tolerance and encourages respect for the many ways there are to understand the world and to live what the Greek philosophers understood as the good life.

As already mentioned, I believe it is possible to cultivate a wider sense of belonging throughout our lives. To do so, we can apply a few useful practices to help broaden our personal horizons:

– Keep up to date with overseas events through international media and by reading books on distant cultures, as well as by watching documentaries that bring us closer to diverse contexts in the World.

– Establish relationships, either in person or through the social networks, with people from other cultures and environments who think, seem or live differently to us.

– Take on a different role or propose alternative ideas to our own in discussions. This approach is increasingly used in education, whereby participants in debates are assigned alternative identities to those they occupy in real life, such as being from a distant culture or assuming another gender or sexual orientation, or by requiring them to defend personal interests markedly divergent from their own.

Embracing diversity will enrich your identity, and enhance your interpersonal skills. The search for sameness impoverishes personality, restricts our knowledge and, moreover, is dull.

Notes

(*) This post is dedicated to the memory of Javier Arturo Camelo, an IE Business School MBA who graduated last Friday, and to his mother Miriam Martinez de Camelo. They were both killed in the terrorist attacks in Tunis yesterday. The memory of Javier as a brilliant student and an outstanding person will remain indelible among us. I here take the opportunity to condemn all forms of terrorism that cause extreme pain and sadness to too many families worldwide.

(1) Jeanne Baker, in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084865/plotsummary

(2) Howard Gardner with Emma Laskin, Leading Minds. An Anatomy of Leadership(New York: Basic Books, 2011); Ch. 2.

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Santiago Iniguez is the Dean of IE Business School.

Image: Painted Matryoshka dolls, or Russian nesting dolls, are pictured in the Centre of Russian Culture in Daugavpils March 21, 2014. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins.