The following excerpt is from Glenn Llopis’s book The Innovation Mentality. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Recognizing the distinction between your different target audiences and what makes them special is what you need to understand to connect with them or any “cultural shift” population. Does your organization know how to answer these four fundamental questions about your employees and customers, which directly connect to the six characteristics of the innovation mentality?
Related: Taking Advantage of Cultural Changes in the Workplace to Grow Your Business
- How does cultural upbringing (i.e., heritage) shape their mindset?
- What strengths and capabilities fuel their desires?
- What are their ultimate goals and ambitions (i.e., what matters most to them)?
- How do their core values and beliefs (i.e., what they stand for) affect their lifestyle choices?
Today’s changing workplace requires a strategy that every employee, external partner, client and customers can embrace. Simply put, we need the wisdom to connect to the people and cultures that don’t look and act like us without undermining who and what we are and stand for. That’s what many of our corporate values tell us we should be doing, but we really don’t. That would require leading with diversity of thought and the six characteristics of the innovation mentality, which allow for the evolution for our businesses. For example, anybody in a service or sales business in any industry is responsible for managing and maximizing opportunity with clients. They can take the first steps by asking these questions: How do you greet people (employees, external partners, clients/customers) that don’t look like you? How do you make them feel important? How do you set expectations? Generate leads? Deliver reports and evaluations? How do you get them to come back again?
The objective should be to stop unknowingly creating tension when we ask these questions and start strengthening the people who can help build momentum to answer them in bigger and better ways. They can help us make the right investments that will capture new market share using the six characteristics. And if you don’t act to do it and keep doing it, some other company will — domestically and internationally. This is already happening. Look at the “American” beer companies Budweiser and Miller; they’re no longer owned by Americans. We’re losing control of our marketplaces because we’re not managing the shift.
How are successful companies doing it? By embracing the innovation mentality and differences to form genuine connections. As Fred Diaz, Nissan North America Inc.’s vice president and general manager of North American Trucks and Light Commercial Vehicles, once told me, “Multicultural is not a flavor of the month. We embraced it by being aware, adapting to changing mores, aggressively executing and being authentic.”
Yet there is still work to be done by many companies. I still see ads that are designed for the general market and someone simply translated it into a Spanish spot with a Spanish voice-over. That is the most disrespectful, inauthentic thing you can do to this audience. Why does it still happen then? The reality is, according to surveys done by my company, 78 percent of leaders have difficulty understanding the consequences and effectively articulating the requirements to…