Immerse Yourself in Other Cultures

There is a tactic of effective leaders I want to commend to you. It is a tactic that will give you greater clarity about who you are, greater insight into what your leadership possibilities are, and that will also give you greater wisdom and creativity in leading people.

This tactic is to know your culture and immerse yourself in cultures not your own.

We are all the products of a culture. For our purposes here, culture refers simply to what is encouraged to grow, what is nurtured and developed by what is around you. You can imagine the possibilities here. You may be the child of an Eastern Indian shopkeeper in Toronto. Perhaps you grew up the child of a blue-collar high school dropout from Dallas. Maybe your father was an airline pilot and you spent your childhood moving around the world from assignment to assignment. Perhaps your father owned a roof truss company in Des Moines, Iowa, and you lived there all your life, until you went to college just a short distance down the highway at Iowa State. There are thousands of possibilities.

What is important is the culture around you. Each of these lives came with hopes, habits, values, rituals, received wisdom, disciplines, and heroes. In other words, certain things were encouraged to grow in these lives. These things shape leadership for years after.

The first step I want you to take in this is to understand the culture that produced you. Who were your parents? Where did you live? What was the religious orientation? What was your financial state most of the time? What habits were encouraged? What was rewarded, celebrated? What were your schools like? Your friends? Your jobs? Your dreams?

All of this is your culture. Yet there are many others, and part of the art of great leadership is that you know what produced you but you aren’t limited to it. You understand the soil you came from but you’ve also immersed yourself in other cultures, tried to see the world through other eyes, and thus become a more compassionate, well-rounded, and creative leader in the process.

How do you immerse yourself in other cultures? You befriend people not like you. Through those you meet at church or in a sport or at work or at your children’s events, you step into other worlds. You purposefully involve yourself in other cultures.

You also travel. I cannot tell you how it has changed me to live in Germany, work in the Middle East, spend months in Asia and Latin America, and visit Africa. It has all shaped me, taught me, and made me.

You should also read. I have never been a black man in America, but I have read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. I have never been a Jewish girl in war-torn Czechoslovakia, but I have read Prague Winter by Madeleine Albright. You see how it goes. Every immersion in a culture not my own gave me greater understanding, perspective, and compassion which I then could apply to my leadership roles.

I urge you to start thinking in terms of cultures. What you don’t want to do is simply regurgitate the culture that made you and in an unexamined, automatic way. You want to change what made you—broaden it, add to it, season it, and round it out. Then you want to lead so as to fashion whole new cultures that serve the world well.