Achieve Success Through Diversity: Watch

At its core, social awareness is an ability to empathise—to view the world as others do, and anticipate how certain situations may be experienced differently by different people, based on the sum of their experiences.

Previous steps offered strategies for tuning into differences related to things like personality and style. In these steps, Advanced Social Awareness, we go a level deeper, and examine demographic differences like ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, etc., what’s sometimes referred to, in sum, as “diversity.”

Hector Ruiz rose out of poverty to lead a Fortune 500 company. As a person who grew up in another country with a different background, he is acutely aware of the importance of diversity in the workplace. In this lesson, Ruiz details some diversity-based business principles for international success.

In this step, Ruiz explains a mistake he made while running a communications business for Motorola. In order to promote a certain consumer product in China, Ruiz and his team put together an advertising campaign they were proud of, only to find out that the Chinese people were offended by it. “It really taught me a hard lesson,” Ruiz says, “because it’s something I should have known better, especially [as someone who] came from another country and another background.”

Principles for International Success

• An awareness of what customers and consumers think
• An awareness of what customers and consumers like
• An awareness of customers’ and consumers’ culture and behaviour

Build a workforce that includes people with different perspectives.