How do you gather diverse perspectives to shape your vision and strategy?

Diversity is essential in hotels industry. It broadens understanding by considering cultural differences, local knowledge, and languages. It also reduces biases, ensuring fairness and better decision-making. Diversity drives innovation, fostering creativity and adaptability. It aligns hotels with customer needs and values, boosting satisfaction and loyalty. In a concise way, diversity is not a buzzword; it's a strategic asset for hotels, enabling them to thrive and connect with diverse guests, improving their reputation, and staying competitive.

A truly diverse perspective is one that crosses your organizational hierarchy. While its good to be cross-functional and incorporate different cultural perspectives, it is most insightful to understand your organization and its problem by hierarchical position. To give a clear example, EMT's and ER nurses have a different (and useful) perspective they can bring to bear about serving customers (saving lives) than hospital executives. This is easy to agree with, but hard to action against because it is expensive to collect and analyze. Making diverse perspectives feasible means identifying new and better ways to capture continuous insights in a low-effort way from the lowest level in your organization's hierarchy.

When I think about diversity, I consider 'perspectives and experiences.' It involves individuals who are willing to bring opposing ideas to the table while being able to discern when it's the right time for exploration and ideation versus execution. Diversity is not only essential for a team's innovation during the early stages of problem analysis but also for an organization's ability to expand internationally. So, what can you evaluate and think about when you are trying to build a diverse team? Is your team coming from different universities, countries, or upbringings? Are they willing to disagree with the highest-paid person in the room? Do they have different perspectives, experiences, and knowledge? Can the team learn from each other?

Diversity isn't just about compliance—it's a wellspring of innovation and resilience. Embracing varied perspectives broadens understanding, sparks creativity, and prevents biases and blind spots. It aligns strategies with diverse needs, values, and aspirations, benefiting all involved.

Partners are like customers. If you work in a partnerships or business development role that interacts with both small and large-scaled partners, getting their inputs to help shape your strategy will ensure what you build can quickly create economic value around you. Your ecosystem benefits. Business compounds. You also get to stress test your action plan and make it more rigorous. After collating inputs from partners, share them with your internal cross-functional partners across both customer and non-customer facing teams. This fluid exchange of insights internally and externally enables you to be more agile, responsive, and sharper in how you operate.

Clear and transparent communication is the key for growth, success and learning from mistakes. I lead a team of busy mental health professionals and to bring about a vision, I would engage with each and every member of the team, obtain their perspective on shared vision and goals, collaborative with successful individuals or organisations to see them achieving the strategy and once I have put together the objectives, values underpinning growth and vision and action plan I would like to engage with members together using visual aids, examples, group work and creating consensus action plan.