Nutshell: Putting inclusion into action

Inclusion is not just a theoretical concept; it’s about what we do and say on a day-to-day basis to build our inclusive awareness and practice.

Inclusion has a role to play in everything we do as leaders. It’s about being open, approachable and able to build trust with others. It’s about making sure that everyone feels able to speak up and offer an opinion, whatever their background, world view or approach, even if we sometimes find that uncomfortable or challenging.

It’s not always straightforward or easy, but we also know that recruiting, enabling and harnessing a diverse range of voices is not just the right thing to do; it also makes good business sense.

But even when we know the theory, it can sometimes be hard to make inclusion a reality on the ground. We need to be mindful that inclusion doesn’t just happen; it needs to be actively cultivated and nurtured.

Equality legislation has given us a clear steer when it comes to more obvious forms of discrimination and exclusion, and (thankfully) deliberately hostile behaviours intended to offend are increasingly rare.

But that still leaves plenty of grey areas where we need to use our judgement about what to do for the best, when to intervene, how to overcome our biases and be as inclusive as possible. It’s not always easy to make the right call.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to try. Like so much we face as leaders, inclusion is about practice, developing and honing what we do through continuous learning and development.

Inclusive leadership: six golden rules

And – as with so many things - it starts with awareness. We know that there are no silver bullets when it comes to workplaces where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and we can benefit fully from those diverse voices. But there are some key principles we can bear in mind to be more conscious about leading inclusively.

That’s why we’ve created six golden rules we can follow as we develop as inclusive leaders:

Curiosity and dialogue are key
Psychological safety is an inclusion driver
Try immersive experience
Context matters
Be a role model
Get comfortable with healthy debate and dissent

1. Curiosity and dialogue are the key

We can do nothing to change our own background and experience as a leader, but we don’t have to limit our perspective to what we already know. We need to stay curious, to want to expand our worldview, to find out more about other people and how their own unique perspectives can add value.

That means being open and open-minded and understanding the crucial role dialogue can play in broadening our horizons and embracing new thinking and ideas. Dialogue is also an essential tool when we need to address and explore those grey areas of behaviour in others.

Curiosity and dialogue start with asking the right questions. This questioning might be more strategic or wide-ranging. In its first inclusion report, for example, the inclusion team at media giant, Netflix, exhorts each and every one of its employees to deploy what it calls an inclusion lens, asking questions like: whose voice is missing, or who is being excluded?

It also means learning to listen actively, and without judgment, and using our empathy to understand and relate to the people around us. This kind of dialogue with colleagues is a fertile ground for more inclusive practice, and it’s crucial to learn from our colleagues about their (different) experiences.

One simple practical way to do this is to have one-to-one meetings with each member of our teams and ask them what specific kind of situations at work they find particularly difficult, where do they tend to ‘cover’ or mute themselves and what could you do, as the team leader, to make it easier for them in those situations to feel more at ease.

It’s hard to lead inclusively if we’re not prepared to be open-minded and curious about people who are not the same as us.

Curiosity and dialogue help us to challenge the biases and assumptions we may – unconsciously or not – bring to work. And that is a fundamental building block for inclusion.

2. Psychological safety is an inclusion driver

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has pioneered the use of the term psychological safety as a shorthand for cultures and behaviours that encourage “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”.

In inclusion terms, psychological safety is a key enabler. It’s difficult for any of us to feel a sense of inclusion or belonging when we feel psychologically unsafe. Equally, it’s much harder to have that dialogue we need if people feel they cannot speak up openly.

Edmondson herself believes that learning is at the heart of feeling safe at work. The more people are prepared to take risks and be vulnerable at work, to be prepared to speak out, to learn from both success and failure, the more everyone will feel able to bring their whole selves to work and to contribute fully.

She’s also clear that it’s not just about making people feel better about themselves (although that might be a positive outcome too). It’s also about performance, creativity and innovation.

In 2012, Google set out to identify what makes a successful team. Their #1 factor (by a mile)? Psychological safety. Interestingly, in terms of how psychological safety manifested itself, this typically involved the more psychologically safe teams opening team meetings with a few minutes of free ranging social conversation where they got to know each other and shared stories on a more personal level.

3. Try immersive experience

We all have a whole host of cognitive biases, those thinking shortcuts or errors that affect how we interpret the world around us and the decisions and judgements that we make. They’re simply part of the human condition.

Inclusive leadership requires us to become more aware of the biases we have and to look to manage and mitigate them as best we can. But that doesn’t mean that much-used unconscious bias training, on its own, is the answer; it can actually lead to more anxiety and division.

Alongside curiosity and dialogue, immersive experience, simply spending time with people who are not like us, is one of the best ways to foster a more inclusive culture. Creating project teams with as a wide a mix of people as possible is one great way to do this.

4. Context matters

Even the most self-aware leaders do not operate in isolation.

Like leadership itself, inclusion – or, more particularly, exclusion – is situational. We need to understand the particular inclusion challenges our own organisations, industries or sectors face. Do we tend to prioritise people with particular accents, for example, or extroverts, or physically attractive people?

Context-specific barriers to inclusion might not always be obvious, but they can be a serious impediment to more diverse and inclusive workplaces. Gender and ethnically diverse organisations may still share a narrow set of traits or characteristics in terms of education or class for example.

As inclusive leaders, we need to take time to understand our own contexts and cultures and how these might either facilitate or hinder inclusion. Armed with that knowledge, we can take an honest look at ourselves and start to build strategies and practices to do better.

5. Be a role model

It’s hard to hold others accountable if we can’t be held accountable ourselves.

Inclusion is a matter for everyone in organisations, but leaders have a special responsibility to make inclusion a personal priority.

It’s important not just to make a theoretical commitment to inclusion; we also need to walk the walk, to take every opportunity to evidence that commitment, whether that’s encouraging everyone at a meeting to take part, giving those who need it the time to frame a response or reminding Dave in Accounts (again) that his universal “Hi, guys” greeting might grate with some of his female colleagues.

This can be tough. It might involve challenging the status quo, making a tricky call about the line between banter and offence or being humble enough to admit our mistakes and change tack when we’ve got something wrong.

It also means being aware that how we behave, what we say and how we say it has an amplified impact because of the positional authority we have. We need to stop and think before we speak and act; be sensitive and aware; to understand and demonstrate that language matters.

When British tennis player, Andy Murray, was congratulated on being the first tennis player to win two Olympic gold medals at the Rio games in 2016, he was quick to respond that his fellow tennis players, Venus and Serena Williams, had already garnered four, reminding his interviewer politely but firmly that women play tennis too. That’s being a role model for inclusion.

6. Get comfortable with healthy debate and dissent

The thing about being part of a team that looks and feels the same as we do is that it can feel, well, nice and comfortable. And nobody wants to be part of a team that’s constantly bickering and conflict-ridden.

But there’s a world of difference between destructive conflict and healthy debate and dissent that helps us to interrogate, refine and improve what we do at work and how we do it.

Journalist and author Matthew Syed champion of cognitive diversity in organisations, is eloquent about the limitations, even dangers, of cosy, insular teams of people who look and think the same. But he is also clear that cognitively diverse teams can also be challenging.

For Syed, proper inclusion often means the polar opposite of those nice, self-validating groups where debate is minimal and decisions arrived at quickly and unanimously. Inviting a diverse range of views and opinions can be awkward, challenging and difficult to manage.

True inclusion, then, brings with it the potential for greater levels of dissent.

As leaders, we need to guard against reverting to a dissent-avoiding comfort zone or closing down discussion just because that discussion is inconvenient or doesn’t align with our own views. Instead, we need to remain open and open-minded and to remember that, to create an oyster, we need some grit.

That can mean treading a fine line between that healthy debate and destructive conflict, and there will be times when we need simply to get on with things and act. But, if we are to lead inclusively, simply having a diverse range of voices at the table is not enough; we also need to encourage those people to use their voices, and to make sure they are heard.

Inclusion is a matter for everyone at work; we all have a role to play. But leaders have a particular responsibility to be alert to the opportunities and challenges of making it a reality. The road to inclusion is not always easy or straightforward. But the rewards are many and significant.

Cultures, behaviours and actions that facilitate inclusion are worth the time they take to cultivate. Another inclusion icon, American political activist the Reverend Jesse L Jackson reminded us that “when everyone is included, everyone wins”.

We couldn’t agree more.

Test your understanding

Explain why Amy Edmondson considers psychological safety at work to be about learning.
Outline why heathy dissent and debate are so crucial for inclusion.

What does this mean for you?

Consider any context-specific barriers to inclusion you might be facing. What could you do to acknowledge and mitigate them?