How Diversity & Multicultural Thinking Can Drive Innovation

We know that diversity drives innovation, but how do we leverage differences to drive positive business impact?   

A recent Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report shows that a company that injects global diversity as part of their DNA is “2.2X more likely to be a world class innovator” and “2.5X more likely to be a fast growing company.” But what are the steps between forming a multicultural team and seeing measurable positive impact? What does it take to incubate this next stage innovation? The answer lies in being effective at recognizing and adapting to cultural differences, a skill that we call cultural fluency.

Additionally, research from Harvard has shown that focusing on diversity in a superficial way could potentially alienate employees and deprive the organization from including the perspectives of non-dominant culture groups. So, while it is important to have the right mix of people in the room (demographic differences), you need to fully utilize the differences that are represented.  Yet, too often, diverse teams fall short of their full potential because their leaders lack the capability of integrating those perspectives into their decisionmaking and leveraging the cultural differences that are present in their teams.

How do we move beyond surface level difference and become a nurturer of diversity-powered innovation?

To Harness the Benefits of a Global Team, You Need Intercultural Skills 

As an interculturalist, I work with organizations to diagnose gaps in business practices in multicultural settings, then identify what needs to be done to help facilitate collaboration in cross-cultural settings. We help people see the benefit of using two or more cultural perspectives to identify alternative solutions to complex problems. For example, we might find that simply translating a product’s offering into Spanish or Korean may not be sufficient to sell an existing product to a new demographic. We may need to understand the underlying cultural value preferences of the ethnic community or market demographic.

A large pharmaceutical company once encountered challenges implementing a large-scale project across 3 continents. After a comprehensive assessment, we discovered that many of the delays were due to strained relationships resulting from divergent cultural conflict styles, not a process or technical issue. In the East Asian countries, there was a preference for a more indirect conflict style, while their counterparts in North America preferred a more explicit, direct conflict style. By addressing such differences intentionally and identifying what they could do together to create shared understanding, the project was implemented more smoothly. Each country leader built cultural self-awareness while learning to bridge their communication to meet their colleagues in a different country.  Once this was addressed, the project progressed more efficiently across the enterprise.

The Missing Ingredient in Diverse Teams 

In a conversation I had with two HR executives who lead high-growth businesses, they confided that cultural fluency is sorely missing in their internal leaders’ skill sets. They shared that while it is necessary for high performance across multiple geographies, it was often undervalued by the senior leadership team. I agreed with them. We have conducted cultural fluency assessments of thousands of leaders inside global Fortune 500 companies, and we find that most of them only receive cursory training and are often oblivious to what they’re missing.

Cultural Self Awareness and Curiosity are Critical  

Leading global, dispersed teams requires a recognition of difference (awareness) at every stage of a team formation, and an intentional focus on harnessing the perspectives of all team members. It’s not enough simply to have people from different ethnic/cultural backgrounds present; their insights need to be adequately heard  in every aspect of the process. They need to surface those potential conflicts to the discussion table, and have created a safe environment to bring issues to the forefront early on. This, of course, is only the start. Leaders must monitor the processes and interactions continuously at each lifecycle of a project.

Three Questions to Help You Practice Multicultural Thinking  

A culturally fluent leader needs to not only hone the reflective skill and curiosity, but have a willingness to take action and adapt her approach when needed. It requires willingness to pause and evaluate when making decisions about how to work together and navigate across the siloes.
Here are  three questions you might consider if your goal is to be successful at capturing new markets or engaging a new way to introduce your product/service:

💡 What questions do you think to ask when engaging in unfamiliar business or global setting?
💡 Where are you looking (and who are you looking to) for the answers?
💡 What perspective are you missing in order to make the decision?

To fully leverage the differences in a global team, we may need to re-think our “default” behaviors and pay attention to cultural norms that are divergent from our own.

Written by Jane Hyun.

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