My Ongoing Journey to Inclusive Leadership

I was recently asked to present to a small audience of senior leaders at the UN Women Centre of Excellence 2024 Seoul Dialogue Conference.

It was quite a daunting task sharing my thoughts on Inclusive Leadership with senior leaders from many top Korean companies, such as Doosan Corp, GM Korea, POSCO, as well as a 2 star general from the US military and the Irish Ambassador, all of whom had their own fascinating journeys through leadership to share.

However, despite my nervousness, I hoped that many of them shared my own philosophy that there is always something new to learn through sharing of experience. Luckily, the ensuing conversations that followed by talk, told me that my ideas had resonated and given many of them food for thought and ideas to take forward themselves.

Hence, I thought it worth sharing a key part of the talk. My 9 steps for leaders to take to continue on their journey to creating an inclusive culture:

1. We need to show our vulnerability and accept that we are all learning, we are all human and we all make mistakes. As a leader, one of the most powerful things you can do is let others know its ok to tell you if you haven’t quite got it right. The script maybe goes something like this. ”I want to be an inclusive leader / colleague but sometimes I will get it wrong and someone will feel excluded or uncomfortable. And when I do, you have my express permission to call me out and let me know. You don’t have to do it in the moment in a large group but come up to me afterwards and tell me one to one (or drop me an email). And when you do, I won’t get defensive and say, “It was a joke” or “you misunderstood”, I will listen to your feedback with the respect it deserves and try and do better next time.”  By showing people in your team that you are willing to be told when you have got it wrong, will hopefully encourage them to do the same thing too.
2. Discover more about diverse experiences.  Look at all your immediate team members and ask yourself “Do I know them all equally well?  Do I spend the same amount of my social capital with all of them?”  And if the answer is no, make it a deliberate plan to spend more time getting the ones you know the least and create a better understanding of their lived experience.
3. Normalise inclusive group situations. At the next meeting you chair, start by saying “We are going to run this meeting in an inclusive fashion.  We will try to make sure that everyone has a chance to be heard, we will try not to interrupt each other; we will try to credit everyone for their ideas. If there is disagreement, we will deal with it respectfully.  We will all attempt to politely point out when we don’t quite meet this inclusion standard”.
4. Continue to learn.  Plan for and prioritise further learning in this area.  This is where you lead from the front.  You need to be visible at events like this.  You need to show that you are contributing, you are there to learn and you are prepared to share your learning.
5. As leaders, think about who we give micro moments of opportunity to; like who deputises for us when we are on holiday; who goes to the important client meeting that we can’t make; who chairs our meeting that we can’t attend.  If that is based on our affinity bias, the answer is, the person that’s most like us.  So, you can see how we inadvertently create a little bit of a performance gain for those people.
6. Differentiate between allyship and being an inclusion leader. There is definitely a need for allyship in business. When someone actively sponsors, coaches and mentors those from under-represented groups, that can have a massive impact.  However, 2 things.  One, make sure it is not simply coaching them on how to simply survive in the current culture by adopting the behaviours of the majority – so, for women, behaving like male leaders.  Second, make sure you are still providing similar levels of support for all of your team, not just those from the under-represented group.  We need to coach our majority group on how to succeed in our new inclusive culture. That is your job too.
7. Role model those inclusive behaviours, at all times.  You can do the most brilliant job talking about the organisation’s great improvements in diversity or the work you do in advocating and sponsoring those from underrepresented groups, but if, at the same time, you are still aggressively shutting people down in meetings, sending unpleasant emails after core working hours or not trusting people to do their jobs when you are on holiday by constantly emailing them, people will spot the inauthenticity gap between what you say and what you do.
8. Treat diversity and inclusion as a strategic change programme.  It needs to be resourced and funded with a direct goal with improving culture, with appropriate skilled resources, not just passionate individuals trying to make change from the side of their desks. And like many other strategic programmes, it needs continuous investment so that culture does not degrade.  One definition of culture is “the worst behaviour we are willing to tolerate”.
9. You have to take a stand against poor non-inclusive behaviours, including the toxic superstars.  Those people may be the biggest revenue earners, bring in the most clients, generate the highest P&L.  But at what cost?  I am seeing more and more senior leadership teams move those people out, because again, people notice the authenticity gap between what you say as leaders and what you do.

My conclusion was that it is up to each of us personally to make a difference. This is not something to delegate to others, to the HR department, to the chief people officer, but something that each and every one of us must do. Otherwise, we cannot expect others to join us in creating an inclusive culture and reap the benefits that it brings to each of us and the organisations in which we work. We must choose to do this work.