Use Your Difference to Make a Difference How to Connect and Communicate in a Cross-Cultural World

Praise for USE YOUR DIFFERENCE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

"A truly inspiring read and a must for anyone thinking of creating an inclusive culture within their workplace through understanding the role they can play."
—Asif Sadiq, MBE, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging thought leader and global expert

"Tayo has provided the world with a tool for readers who are interested in diving far beneath the superficial treatment that diversity materials often receive. Anyone intentional enough to read this book will increase their cultural fluency and have access to deeper levels of interpersonal discernment and communication."
—Dr. Tiffany Jana, founder of TMI Portfolio and best-selling author of The B Corp Handbook, Erasing Institutional Bias, and Overcoming Bias

"Tayo Rockson meticulously unpacks the complex barriers to leveraging our 'difference to make a difference' and provides tangible solutions to counter those forces while we hold fast to our core values."
—Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Language of Global Success

"Tayo beautifully acknowledges our differences as super powers, and how our unique positionalities can be used as tools to bridge across divides. He interweaves his global upbringing in a proactive and interactive manner throughout the book; it feels as though you're having a one-on-one dialogue with him."
—Liz Kleinrock, founder of Teach and Transform

"This is a great primer for us all to reflect on our part in the current divisiveness in our workplaces and world with fantastic ideas on ways to connect and create—together."
—Cy Wakeman, New York Times best-selling author, drama researcher, and author of No Ego

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.