It is no secret that we live in a globalized world. We no longer see anywhere as being too far and anyone too foreign – especially while doing business. Being successful in your local market is no longer enough. Everyone wants to expend their business internationally and it can be tricky to achieve success in different markets.
The first step to global success is having a global mindset. A global mindset can help you develop necessary skillset for doing international trade and your global mindset will create an organisational transformation, resulting in organisational global mindset.
Global mindset can be defined as ability to recognise and adapt to different cultural signals from different backgrounds and be able to collaborate and work them. Developing a global mindset requires you to comprehend both yourself your surroundings. Once you understand your sense of work, your style of leadership and your team, and develop cultural awareness, you can easily adapt to diverse working environments and eventually achieve success. In short, global mindset is related to self-development.
The three steps below will help you understand how this whole process works in practise and develop such mindset, after all it is a skill that can be learned.
#1 Be aware of your own cultural preferences
We are all a product of our surroundings, environment and families. Everything we experience and learn throughout years shape our preferences which is totally normal. Whether be a business culture, family culture or national culture, there are several factors affecting our biases and shaping our understanding of style. Although it can be quite difficult to understand and feel comfortable with our own cultural preferences, it can be a useful practice to learn about other people’s cultural preferences and differentiate what makes them different from or similar to our own. Having a clear definition of our cultural preferences can be an excellent step towards a global mindset.
#2 Recognise that other cultures will have different values than your own
There is no right or wrong when it comes to culture. Some cultures value loud and warm interactions while some prefer distance. In some cultures, the family is the centre of the whole society and valued above all while in some cultures, individualism is widely recognized as a valued trait. None of them are better than the other, they are simply different from each other. And with billions of people on this planet, it is not difficult to figure out that there are as many cultures as there are people walking on this globalized world. Keeping an open mind and welcoming different cultures with enthusiasm and curiosity rather than judgement and prejudice is highly important for personal development and a global mindset.
#3 Develop a strategy to learn and adapt to different cultural styles
Even smaller units like family and friend groups can have strong impacts on shaping our cultural understandings let alone bigger factors like nation and country. It is same for everyone else and that is what makes us feel different from the rest of the world sometimes. Once you learn about your cultural preferences, understand different value systems throughout different cultures and process your knowledge and start to recognize culture-based actions, you need to develop your own strategy to adapt to various cultural styles. Some cultures might be closed while some are open to interactions, some may find the way you do business to be strange while some think that it is perfectly normal. Once you recognize the reasons as cultural differences and nothing personal, you will likely adapt to different cultures a lot faster and be much more successful.
A global mindset requires open mindedness, understanding and curiosity. Leaders with global mindset are usually very curious about different cultures, their surroundings and how to use all these information to improve themselves as more successful leaders. They usually appreciate differences and celebrate diversity. Global learning comes with constant learning and development and leads to a global mindset and international success in the end.
