Inclusion means creating an environment where each of us feels valued and accepted, without the need to conform or pretend to be someone we are not. It’s about providing equal access to opportunities and resources, supporting diversity, and encouraging individuals to bring their whole selves to work.
Indeed offers some valuable insights in this article. As they highlight, the very first step toward a more inclusive workplace is getting Leadership educated and onboarded. One of the fascinating challenges with this is asking people who have succeeded quite nicely iunder the present system, to help change the system -it can be a struggle. We need Leaders who embrace change with a vision for a better future of work.
The Centre for Creative Leadership makes a compelling case in this article and identifies specific actions all of us can take such as:
- Foster meaningful and authentic participation – gather a diverse team from within our organisation and give them psychological safety and decision making to create real change
- Invest in our employees – train, coach and develop our people effectively. Make sure you ensure equitable access to opportunities and avoid HIPO (High potential) programs like they are a very bad and out dated idea.
- Commit to diverse representation – this is critical as Mark Samuel highlights in his brilliant article “Why Representation Is More Important Than Inclusion Alone” – drive diversity and inclusion into our recruitment and beyond (onboarding etc).
- Be intentional in your communications and actions – communicate clearly and with D&I in mind
- Remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and you must keep evolving – it takes commit and time to drive change. We need to make D&I part of our DNA. Researching and publishing data regarding why it matters and how it helps business success is a big winner here.
Inclusion is often joined at the hip with diversity and yet they are quite different concepts. Diversity is about having people in your organisation with different backgrounds, identities and abilities. In this report from May 2020, McKinsey advises that “the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time”. This research is backed up again and again to the point where it not an opinion, it is fact – diverse teams are more creative and produce better outcomes in almost all business cases. If you CEO advises they simply have not been able to find talent in [insert your preferred example here] then please feel free to call bullshit. Thereare talewnted people with huge potential all over the place. The only reason you haven’t found them, is you aren’t trying hard enough.
As a Leader, attracting and sustaining a diverse team is a critical part of your success, even if you inherit a non diverse team you can start working on improving diversity of thought through the pursuit of what Amy Edmonson refers to a “Psychological Safety” – by encouraging everyone to share concerns, ideas and proposals without fear of ridicule or retribution, you can take advantage of the diversity that already exists in your team (remember, everyone is unique).
The benefits of psychological safety are huge:
- Increased happiness and engagement among employees, as they feel more valued, trusted, and motivated.
- Improved performance and productivity, as employees can work with more passion, focus, and creativity.
- More innovation and growth, as employees can experiment with new ideas, methods, and solutions without being restricted by rigid rules or supervision .
- Enhanced learning and development, as employees can receive feedback, coaching, mentoring, and other resources to grow and improve their skills.
In parallel you can lay the foundations for improved diversity through simple but effective techniques such as
- Ensuring role descriptions in any hiring are free from bias and describe the role requirements objectively.
- Enure the hiring process is as diverse and bias free as possible.
- Ensure the onboarding and working experience is tailored to each unique individual to maximise their sense of belonging.
- Follow the deliberate leadership wheel advice.
When leading a team, encouraging people to share their ideas, feedback (positive and critical), proposals etc is critical. In order to achieve this, we need to start earlier by creating teams that feel safe sharing without fear of
So how do you as a Leader create safe teams where people know their opinions matter?
- Be constantly curious – this takes practice. Leaders often feel the need to know the answers, or have a solution – park this and instead ask questions, listen carefully and build on input and ideas. Encourage everyone to share their ideas and perspectives. Building good facilitation skills really helps.
- Be vulnerable with your team – share how you don’t have the answers and need their input. You are going on a journey together as a team and need everyone to share their ideas so we always make the best decision at the time.
- Make sure everyone understands that it’s ok to make mistakes, and even expected. What matters is we learn from them and iterate to better decisions in the future. We all intrinsically know this is how humans learn and yet people fear failure at work. This fear will limit your team’s ability to improve, so remove it. I have found sharing some of my enormous mistakes and what I learned from them is a good way to help people see work as a learning experience rather that a binary win/lose.
- If you have not already, start asking your team questions – I love Gallup’s Q12. Remember to publish the results openly and build inclusive teams to tackle the problems the survey reveals, before running it again a few months later.
Creator, actress and author Lilly Singh thinks we need to build a better table. She offers four ways to build a more inclusive society where girls are encouraged and empowered to do great things.
Next: Why we should try to make fewer decisions and support our people’s Autonomy.