PRACTICE

7

COMMITTING TO THE WORK OF THE INCLUSIVE LEADER™

It’s my job to be an ally for all. It is critically important as a white male and a white male in power to set a model and expectations that relate to diversity and inclusion. This isn’t just about being a good person. That is insufficient. Leaders make choices that drive equity, and I am learning every day how best to do this.

—Dan Helfrich, CEO, Deloitte Consulting LLP

DOING THE WORK OF THE INCLUSIVE LEADER

The Work of the Inclusive Leader (a framework we’ll share with you later in this chapter) is imperative. Building on your best self work, understanding others and their stories is critical. While this practice focuses on setting the tone and modeling behavior for your team—whether that’s several members or several thousand members—it’s important to start with yourself. Doing the inner work means paying attention and being aware of your own thoughts and feelings and noticing when biases arise. It means paying attention to how others might see things and how this is likely different from how you may experience the same things. Once you really understand others, you can work together to make systemic changes and create an inclusive culture. This work is important for individual success, both because it’s the right thing to do and because it solidifies your leadership journey. In addition, it benefits the organization because you and your colleagues are maximizing your contributions.

Committing to the Work of the Inclusive Leader allows you to supercharge your impact by fully engaging a diverse group of team members. Being an inclusive leader means paying attention to the individual needs of all of your stakeholders and providing them the ample tools they need to arrive and thrive. It also means being intentional about your own understanding and learning, with a focus on the biases that may be affecting your decision making, the systems you are operating in, and how you can help level the playing field. These are the skills and competencies that will be vital for arriving and thriving in the coming years.

We like this definition from inclusion scholar and author Dr. Bernardo Ferdman: “Inclusive leadership is the practice of leadership that intentionally provides ways that allow everyone across multiple types of differences, to participate, contribute, have a voice, and feel that they are connected and belong, without losing individual uniqueness or having to give up valuable identities or aspects of themselves.”

In this final of our 7 Practices you will build on all of the other practices of arriving and thriving, because inclusive leadership is the knowing, the doing, and the being about who you are as a leader.

Inclusive leadership must start with the inner work on your identity, and understanding who you are as a leader, or what we call “the knowing.” The Work of the Inclusive Leader is a lifelong, lifewide learning journey. Continual, consistent. The reason that everything starts with the knowing is that once you appreciate your own identity, you harbor a curiosity about others. Your self-assuredness allows for the murmur within that desires to know more details about another individual to become louder in tone and translate to meaningful engagement, resonance, and unity.

The doing is everyday leadership practices—possessing and living a strong set of values, being fair and transparent, advocacy and allyship. Consider that every day, we wake up and learn something different about inclusive leadership because humankind, by nature, is dynamic and evolving. Nested inside the workplace, this everyday learning and engagement inevitably leads to goals, even dreams, being fulfilled. Fulfilled dreams and goals happen because when we are consciously inclusive, we connect the unique strengths of the people we know to opportunities for them to add value. How do we facilitate inclusive conversations? How do we respect and value someone from a different background? How do we ensure people from underresourced or underrepresented backgrounds are successful? The illumination fuels the doing.

Showing up as your authentic self is the being. So many leaders who want to be more inclusive ask “What should I do?” And doing the right things is absolutely essential. But without showing up in an authentic way, living your values, and connecting with and caring about others, the doing is hollow and won’t result in people feeling truly valued and included.

WHY THE PRACTICE IS ESSENTIAL

Inclusive leadership results in organizational effectiveness and competitive advantage. It makes the organization, the team, and the individual better. Why? Because people are more engaged and they feel like they have a unique and important contribution to make, and that allows you to harness the power of diversity to increase creativity and innovation. Hearing from a variety of diverse voices is also the best defense against groupthink, a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Inclusive leaders tend to make better decisions comprised of creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking. Diverse talent and an inclusive culture led by inclusive leaders are the building blocks to truly advancing equity, which is about results: measurable and meaningful outcomes. Consider research from Deloitte underscoring that organizations with inclusive cultures perform better than organizations without inclusive cultures (Figure 7.1).

FIGURE 7.1 The Case for Inclusive Leadership

Source: Juliet Bourke, Which Two Heads Are Better Than One? How Diverse Teams Create Breakthrough Ideas and Make Smarter Decisions (Australian Institute of Company Directors, 2016).

To further encapsulate this point, we can understand why the book INdivisible: Radically Rethinking Inclusion for Sustainable Business Results made it as a top pick in Harvard Business School Faculty’s “2021 Summer Reading List.” Authors Alison Maitland and Rebekah Steele make the case that inclusive leadership matters because of performance, preparedness, and purpose. Performance is a wide range of business outcomes from those we listed previously to increased loyalty and well-being of team members. Preparedness is about helping “organizations adapt and prepare for the challenges of digital transformation,” and purpose is about leveraging the “common ground between inclusion and sustainability . . . to give greater meaning and purpose to work, providing motivation for employees and building trust with stakeholders such as customers, investors, and communities.”

For women leaders, there are additional benefits to leading inclusively. Sometimes women think they must go solo and that the reason that they’ve been successful is that they do everything themselves. Women may also suffer from the idea that it’s easier to just do things themselves rather than delegating or asking for help. That is what Susan calls “over-rowing” and it’s a recipe for overwhelm and burnout. She states in her book Mastering Your Inner Critic:

We women need to fundamentally rethink what we are doing, how much we are doing, and ultimately how hard we are rowing at home and at work . . . not only are we exhausted, we are unintentionally alienating those around us with the waves made by our too-fast rowing, and/or we are too busy doing it all to see how much willing and eager help we could tap into to help us.

Being an inclusive leader means you don’t have to be the superhero. You don’t have to know everything and do everything. And actually, you can’t do the work equivalent of carrying a huge boulder by yourself. Isn’t that a relief? As an inclusive leader, you can focus on what you do best and partner with others who are also bringing their best to the table. Together, you will discover more creative, compelling solutions, and you’ll do it from an approach that is much more sustainable. Inclusive leadership means going from the “me” to the “we” and creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

An additional aspect for women leaders is that we often face what is called the double bind, where society’s expectations about what it means to be a woman (caring, warm, nice) conflict with society’s expectation of what it means to be a leader (strong, decisive, tough). If women fail to meet either set of expectations, people of all genders will judge them more harshly than they judge men who behave in a similar fashion.

Summarized in the edifying piece “How Women Manage the Gendered Norms of Leadership” in Harvard Business Review, researchers have identified four common conflicts that women leaders face, all stemming from the need to be both tough and nice. They call these paradoxes:

1.   Demanding yet caring

2.   Authoritative yet participative

3.   Advocating for themselves yet serving others

4.   Maintaining distance yet being approachable

Being an inclusive leader provides you a strategy for navigating the double bind. With it, you are able to build and prioritize relationships and to care for each person according to their needs. In other words, to exhibit many of the six signature traits of the inclusive leader (see Janet’s favorite tool, which follows). By increasing your competency as an inclusive leader, you can be more effective in meeting your goals and objectives in a way that minimizes the impact of the double bind.

ACING THIS PRACTICE AND SUSTAINING YOURSELF AS A ROLE MODEL TO FOLLOW

With the help of esteemed members of its strategic advisory board, and with our insight and direction, our colleague at Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership Elisa van Dam has led the development of a model that provides a road map for this practice. Called the Work of the Inclusive Leader, this model transpires at three levels: becoming aware (for yourself), becoming an ally and upstander (supporting others), and becoming a change agent (advocating for systemic change).

Within each level, there are two actions, as you can see from Figure 7.2:

FIGURE 7.2 The Six Actions of the Inclusive Leader

Copyright 2021 Simmons University.

Level 1

Part of the knowing of inclusive leadership is taking the actions in level 1 and becoming more aware, both of the ways that bias shows up for you and what your personal values are around equity.

Understanding Bias

The first action under becoming aware is understanding bias in all its forms. We all have unconscious biases that can shape our actions and decisions if we aren’t aware of their impact. Your first action is to examine your own belief systems to uncover how bias might be a factor for you, and also understand how biases may be shaping the actions and beliefs of others.

In corresponding leadership development programs, we often suggest that participants take one or more Implicit Association Tests (IAT). Created by Project Implicit, which was founded by three scientists specializing in social cognition, these tests were developed to measure how strongly we associate concepts about social identity (such as Black people, Asian American people, people who are gay, people who are transgender) with either evaluations (good, bad) or stereotypes (athletic, clumsy). Taking several of these tests can be an eye-opening way to start your self-discovery, pointing to implicit biases you may not be aware you have, or even ones that your conscious brain would strongly repudiate. This action also calls for intentional self-reflection. It may also be helpful to think about how to deepen your understanding of how your own identities and life experiences shape how you see others with questions like:

•   What messages did I receive when I was growing up about different races and ethnicities?

•   What messages did I receive about gender?

•   What about sexual orientation, physical ability, and other dimensions of diversity?

•   How might these messages be influencing how I see the world?

•   When and how are these biases most likely to impact my decision making?

Valuing Equity

Remember that thriving is an advanced state of well-being. At your vigorous level of development, the second requirement of individual understanding is comprehensive: increasing your knowledge of the history and the current context around different dimensions of diversity, including gender, race, sexual orientation, ability, and many more. (What we call “social identities.”) This will deepen your understanding of how systems have historically privileged some people and oppressed others, and how those systems continue to create inequity today. Inclusive leaders must move from focusing on good intentions to focusing on good results that can be measured against a demanding standard: equity. This understanding provides a critical foundation for the other actions, helping ensure that your actions have the impact you intend and that you minimize negative unintended consequences.

There are many valuable resources, from reports like Deloitte’s The Equity Imperative to books, podcasts, and articles that will help deepen your understanding. You can also ask trusted friends and colleagues to share their experiences with you, which is an intimate opportunity to expand your understanding of some of the common terms used by diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging practitioners; we’ve provided a key terms list (see pages 175–176) to get you started. Perhaps start by reflecting on why belonging, inclusion, and equity are important to you and how they apply to your core values. You may surprise yourself!

Level 2

In Level 2, you move from individual learning and awareness to individual action. We use the terms “ally” and “upstander” to describe this function. Technically speaking, those terms are slightly different, and understanding those differences can help point to different ways you can take action. The term upstander refers to a person who speaks or acts in support of someone else—especially if that person is being ignored or attacked. The term ally describes a person who supports the advancement of someone from a different social identity: for example, men as allies for women, or white people as allies for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and/or other underrepresented people. At Simmons, “allyship” is defined as using a position of power or privilege to actively support and advocate for members of underrepresented groups. In essence, as an ally, you use situations where you have unearned privilege to amplify the voices and increase the visibility of people who don’t “look like” you. It can also mean educating other people who share your social identity and helping them correct biased and discriminatory behavior. Think of the impact you make in this step alone.

It’s worth unpacking what we mean by “situations where you have unearned privilege.” You may hear the word “privilege” and think, that doesn’t apply to me! I’ve often been the only woman in the room who had to fight to get my voice heard, or maybe, I’m a first-generation college graduate who had to work two jobs to pay my tuition. I’m not privileged! We have certainly learned over the last sets of years that many women do have incredible privilege. However, we don’t want to downplay the challenges that you have faced. They are real and important. When we talk about unearned privilege, we are referring to situations where you aren’t subject to obstacles that impede people from a different underrepresented group.

For example, many of us can recall a time when we expressed an idea that was completely ignored, and then a few minutes later, a man said the same thing and was widely praised. The man didn’t have any problem being heard because he was in the majority population. However, our gender created an obstacle that made our contribution invisible. Although most people in the room were likely entirely unaware of it, the man was benefiting from unearned privilege.

A fitting metaphor is that unearned privilege is like a tailwind that pushes you forward in ways you may not even recognize or notice. People who don’t benefit from that unearned privilege face strong headwinds that impede their progress.

Understanding Key Terms

Partner for Success

The first action in Level 2, becoming an ally and upstander, is partnering with colleagues from underrepresented groups to support their success and allow them to arrive and thrive. Using your awareness of how people and systems inadvertently (or sometimes deliberately) create obstacles for people who aren’t in the majority, you can intervene in many different ways to help manage and remove those obstacles. We call this “partner for success.”

Once you understand what it means to partner with someone to help them be more successful, opportunities to take action will present themselves virtually every day. Start small, experiment, and learn from your actions. Above all, make sure that you are truly partnering with the person you want to support by ensuring your actions are always grounded in an informed understanding of their ambitions and what they would find helpful.

Advocate for Belonging

Belonging is a fundamental human need, crucial to our life satisfaction. As a result, most people need to feel like they belong at work to feel happy and be successful. A useful way to think about belonging is by considering how it interacts with another fundamental human need: to be seen as unique. As you can ascertain from Figure 7.3, you can only truly be your best self and contribute at your maximum capacity if you both are seen as unique and feel that you belong. If one of those dimensions is missing, you will feel excluded, alienated, or invisible.

FIGURE 7.3 Uniqueness and Belonging

“Inclusion and Diversity in Work Groups,” Journal of Management: Shore, Randel, Chung, Dean, Ehrhart, and Singh, 2011

Being an advocate for belonging happens at the individual level. It means listening to their voice, valuing their voice, and valuing their success. Belonging encapsulates creating a community where I’m invested in you, you’re invested in me, and we believe in each other’s success.

The action of advocating for belonging is about creating an environment where everyone feels like they are appreciated and respected for who they are, and where they don’t have to hide aspects of their identity. This practice involves creating a sense of trust and psychological safety as we discussed in Practice 6: Creating a Healthy Team Environment. It also means making sure that everyone’s contributions are seen and valued.

Level 3

Clear vision. Patient yet persistent. Courageously asking tough questions. Knowledgeable and leads by example. Strong relationships built on trust. Who does this sound like? A change agent.

You may have seen the calculation from the United Nations that it will take the next 257 years to close the global gender pay gap, and the American Association of University Women and many others have cited that the United States won’t achieve pay equity until 2093. Or maybe you’ve seen research by noted social scientists from the National Academy of Sciences that shows that progress toward gender equity in the United States has slowed or stalled—and that was even before the impact of Covid-19. We must do better. And that’s why our final level is all about leading and accelerating the pace of change.

Sponsorship

The first activity of Level 3 is sponsorship, defined as “using relationship capital to support the advancement of someone else.” Sponsors are generally one or more levels higher in the organizational structure than the person they are sponsoring, providing sponsors with the opportunity to be in “conversations of influence” where opportunities are discussed. As a sponsor, you put your reputation on the line to actively advocate for someone from an underrepresented group.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, Rosalind Chow defined sponsorship as:

a form of intermediated impression management, where sponsors act as brand managers and publicists for their protégés. This work involves the management of others’ views on the sponsored employee. Thus, the relationship at the heart of sponsorship is not between protégés and sponsors, as is often thought, but between sponsors and an audience—the people they mean to sway to the side of their protégés.

This definition then provides a useful way to identify sponsorship actions, including sharing a protégé’s accomplishments, vouching for a protégé who is seeking a new opportunity, making strategic connections, and/or defending or “providing air cover” when things don’t go as planned.

Making Change

Our final action as a change agent is making organizational change, which involves initiating and driving changes in systems, policies, or procedures to level the playing field. To build an equitable future, leaders must activate the full breadth of their control and influence across all parts of their organizations and beyond: from relationships to products, services to spend, governance to external interactions—essentially three spheres: workforce, marketplace, and society (see Figure 7.4).

FIGURE 7.4 The Equity Activation Model

© 2021 Deloitte Development LLC

It starts by examining cultural orthodoxies and flipping those that may be getting in the way of pursuing equity. This can be at the team level, like creating norms around how meetings are run to ensure all voices are heard. This can also be at the department level or even organizationwide, like changing how performance evaluations are done to minimize the impact of unconscious biases. Although this is the highest level and most complex practice of the model, leaders at all levels (even individual contributors) can and should suggest and engage in these activities. You can lead change from any position in the organization, whether that’s at the senior leadership, grassroots level, or somewhere in between.

Deloitte suggests a systems-based view for how your businesses can activate equity within and outside of their own organizations, structured around three primary spheres of influence within the reach of every organization: workforce, marketplace, and society. Each sphere, in turn, includes multiple activators—key areas of activity and everyday choices—through which your organizations can exert their influence to activate equity.

In the book Positive Organizing in a Global Society, Lynn and her coauthors explore how to approach this work by identifying individual and collective strengths that lead to positive outcomes, processes, and attributes of organizations and their members. As a starting point, Lynn suggests considering questions like:

•   What makes employees feel like they’re thriving?

•   How can I bring my organization through difficult times to be stronger than before?

•   What creates the positive energy a team needs to be successful?

While making change may sometimes involve organizationwide change efforts, there is a lot of power in “small wins.” These are changes that you can make within your own sphere of influence that either minimize an obstacle or make it easier for everyone to have equal access. One example is changing a meeting time to make it easier for everyone to attend. Or updating a job description template to minimize the number of requirements, which has been shown to increase the number of women who apply. The great thing about small wins is that they often gain momentum and lead to larger changes across the organization.

We’ve addressed the significance of courageous conversations, which can arguably nestle in with all the practices described, from your leadership position. With that, doing this systems-level work—consisting of numerous principles or procedures according to your organization—means that you will need to have some courageous and fierce conversations about inclusion.

We also need mental models of change that we try, test, and learn from. Longtime educators and researchers on diversity Dr. Terrence Maltbia and Anne Power suggest that we think intelligently about systems and how systems create opportunities and barriers. This entails:

•   Context and stakeholder mapping

•   Conceptual clarity, having a theory of change and logic model to execute

•   Informed actions through data

•   Engaging continually in organizational learning

RAISED TO BE AN INCLUSIVE LEADER: LYNN’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT

I’m so grateful that my parents inspired me to be an inclusive leader. My father was a clinical social worker and very progressive for his time. He made sure to expose me to people from different backgrounds so I could hear their stories and understand how differences add value to society. He also wanted to show me that in some ways what we perceive as differences are very much similarities. My mother taught me about the service aspect of inclusive leadership, about creating welcoming spaces so people feel like they belong. They were my first role models for inclusive leadership.

Maybe you have heard of a symbol from Ghana called “Sankofa.” Sankofa is symbolized by a bird pointed forward while turning its head back. The translation of the word is “go back and get it,” and the symbol is often associated with the proverb that says, “It is not wrong to go back and fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” In other words, if we don’t understand our history, we can’t learn from it and know what we want to carry forward. I think that’s what the Work of the Inclusive Leader is all about.

Professors Richard Bolden and Philip Kirk of the University of the West of England, Bristol (2009) pointed out that the relational view of leadership relates well to the collectivistic and humanist values of Ubuntu, stating that Ubuntu “bridges the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective.’” Inclusive leadership, similar to Ubuntu, involves relational practice, collaboration, consensus building, true engagement, and creating inclusive work cultures. The major focus of both Ubuntu and inclusive leadership is on collective relational practice, the entwined nature of our relationships, and increased inclusion of interconnected systems. Ubuntu can thus be considered not only relational but also inclusive in nature and centers on the interdependence of the individual and collective.

As we said at the beginning of the chapter, this is lifelong and lifewide work. The road won’t always be easy, but the rewards are immeasurable.

LEARN, REFLECT, CONQUER CHALLENGES, AND ASCEND IN THE PRACTICE

The foundation of the Work of the Inclusive Leader is learning and self-reflection. Scholars Scott DeRue, Susan Ashford, and Christopher Myers talk about learning agility: We have to learn and then we have to quickly pivot and adapt. To do this successfully, we must have an ongoing commitment to deliberate practice and to evaluating our impact. That includes requesting, accepting and processing feedback from others on how we are doing. As we discussed in Practice 3: Cultivating Courage, having a “learning mind” and embracing a growth mindset is essential for all aspects of arriving and thriving.

As rewarding and important as the work of the inclusive leader is, we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that it is challenging as well. Our approach to these challenges is to look at them through the lens of positive psychology and to ask how we can build on our strengths to solve tough problems.

One aspect of this approach is Lynn’s strong belief in the power of “calling in” instead of “calling out.” To quote Loretta J. Ross from her piece, “Speaking Up Without Tearing Down” in Learning for Justice:

Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating or gossip to dominate others. . . . Calling in is a technique that does allow all parties to move forward. . . . Calling in is speaking up without tearing down. A call-in can happen publicly or privately, but its key feature is that it’s done with love. Instead of shaming someone who’s made a mistake, we can patiently ask questions to explore what was going on and why the speaker chose their harmful language. . . . Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and it can stop it from happening again.

Ross goes on to note that calling in isn’t the answer for everyone or for every circumstance. But whenever it is possible to use this technique, we believe it is far more effective and likely to result in all parties feeling better about the outcome.

On the other side of the equation, when we are the ones who have made an inadvertent misstep or been less than 100 percent successful in leading inclusively, we work hard to give ourselves grace. That means both taking responsibility for how to recover (more on that in a minute) and reminding ourselves that we are human, and we are always learning. As we stated earlier, this is a lifelong, lifewide learning process, and learning requires putting yourself in situations where you might get things wrong. (Remember our thoughts around the power of not knowing and growth mindset in Practice 3: Cultivating Courage.)

Although it’s in a somewhat different context, think about Daniel Kahneman’s reaction to being wrong. To reference again Adam Grant’s book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, when the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist discovers an aspect of his research or thinking that is wrong, his reaction is akin to joy: it means he’s now less wrong than before.

So what do you do when you get things wrong? First, acknowledge the harm, and if you have impacted a particular person, make a sincere apology. Second, strive to learn from the experience: What happened? Why did it happen? What was the impact? What will you do differently next time? Paying attention and committing to being aware as an inclusive leader means you will need to get used to being in “learner mode” more often than not. This way of thinking (wanting to better understand from a place of assuming you don’t) can and will deeply enhance your ability to manifest inclusion—and ultimately equity in leadership.

THRIVER’S WISDOM

POWER RECAP Committing to the Work of the Inclusive Leader™

Key Points About This Practice

•   Inclusive leaders understand others and their stories.

•   Being an inclusive leader means you don’t have to be the superhero. You don’t have to know everything and do everything.

•   Hearing from a variety of diverse voices is the best defense against groupthink.

•   Part of the knowing of inclusive leadership is becoming more aware, both of the ways that bias shows up for you and what your personal values are around equity.

•   Becoming an ally and upstander is partnering with colleagues from underrepresented groups to support their success and allow them to arrive and thrive.

•   Belonging encapsulates creating a community where I’m invested in you, you’re invested in me, and we believe in each other’s success.

Suggested Actions

•   Take an Implicit Association Test (IAT).

•   Reflect on why belonging, inclusion, and equity are important to you, and how they apply to your core values.

•   Work with the Six Signature Traits of an Inclusive Leader tool.

•   Complete the Inclusive Leader’s Playbook and Assessment.