Multicultural Leadership

Multicultural leadership now more than ever is a fundamental part of everyone’s life. It has become a great part of my life and other people’s lives due to the fact that it has allowed for several beliefs, customs, and traditions to be able to reside within one community and be able to prosper now more than ever before. It has allowed several countries including the United States to become melting pots of multiple diverse cultures and open to different ways of living. I for one being half Guatemalan and half Czechoslovakian know I have definitely adopted traditions from both heritages and it has made me a much more dynamic and culturally sensitive individual. It has allowed me to adopt the Latin hospitality known as “mi casa es tu casa” which I believe  has made me much more open, friendly, and willing to share with people. I notice that whenever someone says my food looks good, I always offer them some, or if I am out eating and another person does not have money I always share with them. Consequently, the European aspect of me has made me a rather more independent and strategic individual, and thus more frugal with my money and what I like to spend it on. My multicultural nationality has also allowed me to relate to people on different levels since I believe that it has made me a more accepting and less ethnocentric individual due to my combination of nationalities. The idea of multicultural leadership is also great as it encourages us to shift from focusing on each one of us as individuals to people as a collective unit (I to we). I particularly like the idea of sankofa since it focuses on learning from our past and applying it to our future in order to avoid committing the same mistakes. I for one use the concept of sankofa in almost every area of my life; however the one that sticks out for me the most is probably when trying to avoid getting hurt. When I was five years old I was walking to school and I didn’t have my shoes tied, one of my friends started playing tag with me and I started running and stepped on one of my untied shoes laces and as a result I broke my two front teeth, since then I have had a fixation with tying my shoes laces in order to avoid that from ever happening again. Overall, I feel like the core principles of culture and the merging of multicultural values and acceptance of other people’s core values make people greater leaders since it allows them to relate to a greater amount of people and be culturally aware of differences between one culture and another. I think that if we all tried to learn a lot more about one another’s culture and develop more cultural sensitivity we would all be that much closer to becoming great leaders. After all, this world is full of diversity and we are not alone.