Focusing on Diversity Isn’t Enough: What Is Needed Is Inclusive Leadership
Who has the busiest meeting schedule on your campus? You might think the president or provost, but chances are one of your most in-demand people is your head of diversity. We’ve seen situations where a diversity lead—even at a school level—is responsible for running multiple pipeline and retention programs, delivering workshops, mentoring students and faculty, writing and reviewing grant proposals, and representing the institution both in external venues as well as serving on many internal committees. Your diversity people need help—not just with a team and more budget (although these might be needed too), but with more systemic help to reshape the organization and the culture. “Diversity” should not be delegated to one single person or department. It needs inclusive leadership.
Diversity programs are on the minds of many, and yet many efforts simply don’t work even when the stakes are high. An HBR article that looked at three decades worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms found that the majority of diversity programs don’t increase diversity, particularly top-down efforts that focus on rules and re-education. What does work is engaging managers by increasing their on-the-job contact with women and minorities, thereby promoting engagement, contact, and social accountability—an integral part of programs such as college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces. These activities are integrated, embedded, and personal and are why your diversity team is stretched so thin.
Even the term “diversity and inclusion” can hurt the cause. Diversity is quantifiable and visible—it can be measured and mandated. Inclusion is much more abstract and less recognizable as an organizational trait. When we talk about “diversity and inclusion,” the perceptual shortcut that happens is to focus on the concrete “be diverse” and then define inclusion as “include the diverse people.” This leads to specific interventions and programs intended to “fix” the diversity “problem,” rather than focusing them on tackling the broader cultural shift needed to become a truly inclusive organization.
To achieve diversity goals, organizations need to transform. Leaders across the organization, not just those in diversity functions, need to adopt new practices and build a culture that supports everyone working there. This is a process that is called inclusive leadership.
What Are the Characteristics of an Inclusive Workplace?
Catalyst.org identified five experiences people have in an inclusive workplace. In an inclusive workplace, people are:
Valued: They are appreciated and respected for their unique perspectives and talents.
Trusted: They are supported in making meaningful contributions and able to influence decision-making.
Authentic: They bring their full selves to work and express themselves in ways that may be different from their peers.
Psychologically Safe – Latitude: They can hold differing views and make mistakes without being penalized.
Psychologically Safe – Risk Taking: They feel secure to address tough issues or take risks.
Conceptually, this all makes sense: It sounds like the type of workplace we all want to create. The challenge, however, is in the execution because creating an inclusive environment may also mean letting go of cultural norms that are highly valued. For example, if excellence bordering on perfection is one of your cultural norms, psychological safety is much harder to achieve because there isn’t the organizational capacity to support mistakes. Or if your dominant culture is white American, your version of “being authentic” may not be inclusive (and might even be intolerant) of other races or cultures.
Inclusive Leadership and Organizational Culture
Recent research on organizational politics has reinforced the need to create collaborative and inclusive environments. Women and minorities are often provided “organizational politics” training in an effort to make them more effective in their roles. Specifically, the need to be able to negotiate, influence, engage, and persuade others is a necessity in our flatter and more complex organizations. However, this training is often based on a model and accepted ways of doing things that were set by white men. For minorities and women, this can mean that engaging in political behaviors means adopting behaviors that are not their own, thereby putting them in a “political double-bind.” Adding more training in organizational politics doesn’t help because the problem isn’t a lack of skill, but rather how they are perceived when they adopt these behaviors.
On the other hand, creating cooperative environments where a more diverse range of behaviors is supported will foster greater diversity. This also extends to retaining a diverse workforce—understanding who your workers truly are and what they want, and then creating environments where people can be who they are and where their unique talents and perspectives are valued. This will enhance retention.
Similarly, there is a lot of research that shows diverse teams can come up with better and more innovative solutions, but only if the team and organizational culture allow for diverse ideas and perspectives to be shared openly within the team context. Diverse teams also benefit from training in teambuilding skills that support a “voice” for all members of the team and address decision making and resolving conflict.
Culture cannot be mandated. It is built over time through leadership and shared experiences. Changing an organization’s culture is an adaptive task: It requires learning and engaging stakeholders across an organization in a process that will involve letting go of things that have served the organization well in the past but are not part of an inclusive future.
What Does Inclusive Leadership Look Like?
Inclusive leaders build organizational capacity so that all people are empowered, supported, and treated fairly. Inclusive leaders build and support diverse teams and organizations where people are able to be authentic and where they feel trusted, included, and valued. In an inclusive organization, it is safe to be different, it is safe to take risks, and at the same time, there is strong ownership and accountability for team or organization goals.
Inclusive leadership models include behaviors that are also included in some transformational, servant, and authentic leadership models, including acting courageously, learning, and self-reflection. What is unique about inclusive leadership is the environment that inclusive leaders are able to create. Inclusive leadership is designed to create bright lines that help to ensure everyone in an organization is included, heard, and valued while at the same time holding the entire organization to high standards for performance and accountability.
Deloitte researchers have found that in addition to increasing attendance and decreasing absenteeism in the workplace overall, teams with inclusive leaders are 17% more likely to say they are high-performing, and 20% more likely to say they make high-quality decisions. Deloitte and others have identified a number of inclusive leadership traits, including:
Humility—Taking ownership of mistakes and creating space for others to contribute.
Courage—Acting in accordance with principles, even when it involves taking risks.
Commitment—Challenging the status quo and holding others accountable to make diversity and inclusion a personal priority.
Curiosity—Demonstrating an open mindset and actively working to understand different points of view and different cultures.
Bias-Aware—Including awareness of personal blind spots as well as flaws in the system, and actively supporting people from underrepresented groups.
Effective Collaborators—Including empowering others, attending to psychological safety, and building team cohesion.
Based on our own experience in leadership development and coaching, we would add kindness to this list. Leaders who are kind are more effective at engendering and preserving trust, and also at practicing empathy. These are foundational skills on which the behaviors of inclusive leadership are built.
Like many organizational traits, inclusiveness should be measured, not inferred: In a 10-year study of 122,000 leaders, it was found that those who are worst at valuing diversity tend to overrate their effectiveness, whereas those who are most effective tend to underrate their effectiveness. In other words, you might intend to be inclusive, and think you are inclusive, but for better or worse, this self-perception probably isn’t how others see you.
Taking the Next Step
If you’ve read this far and are hoping we’ll provide a ready and fast solution, we can’t. The work is complex, is oftentimes ambiguous, and requires a multi-pronged, multi-year strategy, coupled with an adaptive approach to action. What we can tell you from our experience is that, as with so many things, you’ll get back what you invest in this process. Tools that will support you in this process include research-based culture surveys, tailored workshops, practice-based leadership development, and 1:1 as well as team coaching. Changing a culture is hard work, but with a long-term focus coupled with a learning orientation, it is doable. It may seem redundant to say this, but we find it often bears repeating: The path to inclusive leadership needs to be inclusive. This is not the work of one “diversity leader” or department. It is the work of the entire organization co-creating its culture—and its future.