CONCLUSION
Creating Inclusive Organizations—Who Has the Last Word?
WE HAVE JUST PERFORMED A BOOK-LENGTH DISSECTION of what an inclusive leader looks like. We have shared the five disciplines and then deconstructed them into the various detailed traits and competencies required to deploy them. We have learned from exemplary individuals and organizations. We have delved into various new trends and hopefully have presented new insights into the issues we face in designing the equitable and inclusive organizations of the future.
But . . .
While we used what we know about leadership and derived new insights with new research, a new and younger generation of inclusive leaders is emerging, with a radical perspective that is already defying our understanding of how transformation will happen.
Our research has been very influenced by the existing hierarchical organizational and leadership paradigm. Therefore, our model serves to activate and develop leaders that are inclusive, up and down the organization. This is a good, powerful, and necessary thing right now. There is much work to do here that will yield very good results in the near and medium term.
Note how we wrote “up and down the organization.” That is simply not how Millennials, and Gen Z right behind them, see things. They are upending this twentieth-century downstream model with a horizontal, crowdsourced, inclusive leadership approach.
And so via focus groups we tested how our assumptions and findings would play out with people in those generational groups—male and female and from a range of countries in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, plus India and the United States.1 These younger generations will make up more than 70% of the workforce in 2025,2 and while most are not yet fully in positions of power and do not have broad influence in critical mass numbers, they will—soon.
We examined how they choose to be inclusive, and here’s what we found. First, like the inclusive leaders we interviewed for the study, they see inclusiveness as about empathy, accepting others for who they are, and seeking out and valuing others’ points of view. One statement by a Ghanaian in our Africa virtual focus group demonstrates their alignment with current diversity and inclusion aspirations: “Being in an inclusive environment makes me feel alive and where I don’t have to act. I can be my authentic self. Where I will not be second-guessed and am invited to contribute. That would feel like home.” In addition, they had an alternate view of how leadership works to achieve inclusive transformation.
CROWDSOURCED INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP
Can you name the leaders of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the student climate strikes, Occupy Wall Street, the Hong Kong resistance, or March for Our Lives? Other than Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, probably not. Yet each of these youth-led movements has had a massive impact on awareness raising and societal change.
Inclusive leadership that seeks equity today and for the future is a major driver behind these movements, so much so that they are redefining the locus of control of leadership. Rather than residing in individuals, leadership resides in the collective. That’s because these movements arose out of a distaste for existing leaders who allowed so much to go wrong: police brutality, climate change, student debt, socioeconomic inequality, pandemics, and the deep-seated systemic racism evidenced by the disproportionate number of incarcerations and killings of young people of color by those who are supposed to protect them, for example.
In corporate organizations, the youth are also dismayed by limited opportunities to advance, minimal investment in their growth and development, and the wide and growing pay gap between those at the bottom and those at the top. Rather than waiting around for their elders to model inclusion in action—since they often see so little of it—the next generation is doing it themselves.
We witnessed this in their spontaneous response after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which felled seventeen students. Just five weeks after the tragedy, students mobilized more than eight hundred marches for stricter gun control measures across the United States and in multiple other countries, including several hundred thousand marchers in Washington, DC, alone.
At the DC march, 100% of the speakers were teens and preteens, though they were diverse in many other ways. They were focused, determined, eloquent, politically savvy, and consistent in their messaging. They expressed a combination of mourning and defiance, with commitments to action and to inclusion.
“We recognize that Parkland received more attention because of its affluence,” said Jaclyn Corin, a White female survivor of the Parkland shooting. “But we share this stage today and forever with those communities who have always stared down the barrel of a gun.”
After meeting with a group of teens in Chicago on the topic of gun violence, Parkland shooting survivor Emma González tweeted, “The platform us Parkland Students have established is to be shared with every person, black or white, gay or straight, religious or not, who has experienced gun violence, and hand in hand, side by side, We Will Make This Change Together.”
This self-awareness has led to the embrace of their message by youth in urban areas strafed by gunfire, such as Chicago and Washington, DC.
Also consider the difference made by one lone protesting sixteen-year-old sitting outside the Swedish parliament building with a three-word sign reading “Skolstrejk För Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate). Within a year, Greta Thunberg inspired more than 4 million students to stage their own climate strike walkouts in 163 countries.3 But she did not lead the effort; she was merely its catalytic conscience. It was the collective who then crowdsourced to mobilize millions.
Now take the recent demonstrations in Hong Kong to protest China’s encroaching control of the territory. While many young people ended up in jail, there was no leader. In fact, most faces were covered by bandannas, gas masks, and even the mask of Anonymous. And they succeeded in getting parliament to rescind extradition to mainland China, and other policies.
The Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the Summer of 2020 and ongoing have been led by young people as well. Some of the largest marches in various cities were organized by teens.
These events happened on the street, far from the hallways of corporations and other organizations. But the same marchers and protesters are also working inside those organizational walls. They want to like their organizations, they want them to do better, and they are expecting more as their leaders say they seek to be more inclusive. Their expectations are high. And every year they move into more influential leadership roles.
The next generations are questioning inclusion at a meta level. They are saying that the system is not just flawed within the organizations (organizational structural inclusion) but also within society (societal structural inclusion). Wherever they look, they see institutions that have failed to deliver inclusion. No wonder the children of capitalists are embracing socialism in massive numbers. They are questioning a world run on fossil fuels that are leading to the warming of the planet. They are questioning education that puts many of them in lifelong debt. They are even questioning how we measure economic success.
In fact, the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced in 2020 that the country is going to use a new measure of economic growth, the genuine progress indicator (GPI), to measure how well the economy is working for all groups, not just the dominant ones.
According to Investopedia, “The GPI indicator takes everything the GDP [gross domestic product] uses into account, but adds other figures that represent the cost of the negative effects related to economic activity (such as the cost of crime, cost of ozone depletion and cost of resource depletion, among others). The GPI nets the positive and negative results of economic growth to examine whether or not it has benefited people overall.”4
THE HEAD AND HEART INCLUSIVE LEADERS
Transformational leadership guru Brené Brown, PhD, has had a particularly strong influence on Millennials and Gen Z. Her TED Talk on vulnerability was one of the most watched of all time, with more than 5 million views in 2020. Brown, who also authored Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, believes that the times demand that courage be demonstrated by being vulnerable.
While a growing number of inclusive leaders today, including those interviewed for this book, have succeeded in modeling vulnerability, Brown and her followers take it to a whole new level. This more vulnerable, psychologically present, and heart-centered perspective is what the next generations are craving. This is where they are taking the discourse of inclusive leadership—and don’t expect them to make it easy for those of us who are uncomfortable with this approach.
Which leads us to one last key finding of our inclusive leadership research: this work is about marrying the head with the heart. In our sampling of twenty-four thousand broad-based leader assessments taken between 2015 and 2019, we unearthed a clustering of traits and disciplines around two types of inclusive leaders: those who led with the heart and those who led with the head.
The heart-led cluster stood out for its high average scores on the people-related traits of authenticity and emotional resilience and the disciplines of optimizes talent, integrates diverse perspectives, and builds interpersonal trust. The other cluster had high average scores on the enabling traits of flexibility and inquisitiveness and the disciplines applies an adaptive mindset and achieves transformation. This more mindset- and action-oriented cluster exemplifies leading with the head.
Even those who are inclusive have to learn new ways of leading. Heart-centered leaders must develop an approach to D&I that leads to organizational impact, while head-centered leaders must work on not only achieving greater diversity and inclusion but also leveraging it for business and organizational results. Their impact will be limited if they are not emotionally connected with the diversity of people they are leading.
These findings around head and heart reinforce what Millennials and Gen Z are telling us.
Millennials and Gen Zers all over the world are setting a higher bar for their leaders and themselves. Without the need of any research of their own but rather from their values and lived experiences, they told us in no uncertain terms what they already knew: to be truly inclusive, they must lead with head and heart.
In the Latin American focus group of Millennials and Gen Z professionals, participants told us how different their lives and societal experiences are compared to their bosses and their parents. Their parents don’t understand why a straight woman would join the gay pride parade in Santiago. Their bosses wonder why people need to be “valued,” since they are getting paid to do what they are supposed to do. Or why corporations need to be mindful of being inclusive of indigenous or Afro-Latin talent. Or why it’s wrong to think—and say out loud—that they don’t want their children to have female or Black teachers.
A focus group participant said, “We have gay friends, and women are going to college and getting jobs to get ahead, and not just get married. We are also not accepting the growing economic inequality our parents grew up with and did not question.”
In this focus group, one young professional said, “I wouldn’t be able to work at a place for very long if I don’t see the upper-level people adhere to the value they preach.” But others added that they expect everyone around them to exercise inclusive behaviors; they do not see it as being just the domain of a handful of leaders. Cecilia Pinzón, Korn Ferry’s diversity and inclusion leader in Latin America, agrees. “When we first started in D&I in Latin America, many of us were observers. D&I was seen as being about others. Now it’s about all of us. We just can’t only be observers anymore,” she says.
Another person in the same focus group declared that, given his generation’s values, it was only a matter of time before the new norms would kick in: “As more Millennials come into leadership, it means more people supporting diversity, so it will change.”
In the Indian focus group, several participants gravitated toward the areas of socioeconomic inclusion. “It is the lowest level of workforce that does the cleaning work, but it belongs to the largest population. They do this work because they want to make sure that their children will not have to. Organizations need to create a level of equality among their employees by washing the plates after you eat and not having different areas for them to sit, or cutlery to use.”
They agreed that even in India’s highly traditional and hierarchical culture, dynamics are changing. “If you join an organization at a midmanager level and contribute good, innovative ideas, the leaders are open to these types of suggestions, creating a better place to work.”
Both the Indian and African focus groups mentioned technology as an enabler of inclusion. A member of the India group said, “[With digital,] the systems are getting more decentralized and more horizontal. This will lead to more inclusion.” Someone in the Africa group noted, “Due to AI [artificial intelligence] and technology, people will be asking for much more transparency, because they will already have a lot of information available to them. And leaders will need to follow the needs of the people.”
For the African professionals, respect for the environment is an important aspect of inclusion. “An inclusive society doesn’t just talk about inequality, race, et cetera, but is also a society that respects the environment. Climate change is a new trigger which will make us go back to fighting among humans, so we will need to talk about climate change in a way that is inclusive of all.”
The group also explained how much their view of leadership has changed from that of past generations. “It used to be that when a military leader came into town, everyone would be excited by his very presence,” said one. “But today, you don’t see this reaction. Their leadership will be defined by whether they are doing the right thing.”
Another stated, “With our generation of young leaders, there is the need of understanding that a position doesn’t make a leader; the leader makes the position.”
The need for heart-and-head leaders is strong and will only grow as these younger generations step into greater positions of influence in the workplace. But we have a long way to go.
In our quantitative look at nineteen industries in our global database, we found that only 1% to 10% of leaders are skilled inclusive leaders. Furthermore, no leader had scores in the top 25% of all the disciplines and trait clusters. This staggering data pushed us to think bigger than just developing individual leaders. We must develop whole organizations.
While helping leaders fill their individual gaps, organizations need to approach inclusive leadership in a collective manner—as teams, groups, and the organization as a whole. Together, everyone in the organization needs to practice the head and heart of inclusive leadership if they want to reap its benefits. It’s going to require a systemic approach.
COURAGE AND WILL
We know what the issues are around diversity and inclusion, and in many ways we know what needs to be done. We know the root causes, and that addressing them requires addressing legacy inequities through structural inclusion, behavioral inclusion, and inclusive design principles.
Yet, as with climate change, we remain paralyzed in truly creating equitable organizations. Why? What’s missing? What does it take to achieve the deeply desired yet elusive transformation toward greater diversity and inclusion?
At a profound and human level, it requires more courage and will.
Courage to even ask the question “Do inequities exist?” and, when they are confirmed, to confront the past wrongs and make them right. Courage to walk in the shoes of those who are different from oneself. Courage to go to their environments, to see things from their perspective. Courage to sit in the crucible of conflict and listen deeply to what is not being said. Courage to be curious and exploratory about what makes those unlike us different in how they think, feel, and act. Courage to share stories of our own journeys and how they have shaped our view of the world.
And the will to see the changes through, since transformation takes more than one cool training experience or high-profile initiative. It’s a long journey to get to sustained cultural change. It is not for the faint of heart.
Do you have the courage and will to unleash the power of all us?
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