Diversity and Inclusion strategies: How to be an inclusive leader

The challenges we’ve faced in our communities over the last few years have been many. I’ve noticed an important focus on people with privilege becoming better allies for Indigenous peoples, people of colour, LGBTIQ+ people, women and people with disabilities. However,  workforce diversity also needs to be about taking action on inclusion to create meaningful, lasting change – allyship is not enough. We need inclusive leaders.

What is inclusive leadership?

Inclusive leadership is about taking action – an inclusive leader is someone who has learnt to expand their worldview, is able to identify barriers that exist for others and work towards reducing those barriers in an effective and sustainable way. Inclusive leadership has similarities with allyship, however, rather than responding to situations as they arise, it predicts where someone may be excluded and mobilises people to do something about it.

An example of inclusive leadership

I love playing cricket. I decided to get back into cricket training as a single parent with two young children – I didn’t expect to play but I was keen to join in. My new coach was in his eighties, with a distinguished career as an elite coach in a variety of different sports. He wanted me to play every week.

Understanding the challenges I had as a parent, he mobilised the team to include me. Sometimes this looked like my teammates caring for my kids when I was playing or the coach organising activities and training drills for them so I could play knowing they were entertained. He even put on extra training sessions on a night that he knew I didn’t have the kids with me. My coach did more than stand by and support me as an ally – he actively identified the barriers I had to playing by speaking with me and educating himself. Then he went about smashing them one by one, always checking in with me and being flexible with his approach. That’s inclusive leadership.

How to be an inclusive leader

Educate yourself

Exclusion often happens with our being aware of it. We may not understand that the words we use, the stories we tell or the processes we have in place might be making someone feel unwelcome or cause them harm. It’s important to be aware that inclusive leadership isn’t an inherent skill – it needs to be learned. Indeed, as Maya Angelou once said, “When we know better, we do better”.

Educating yourself about the skills required to be inclusive is key. These skills include:

• empathy
• curiosity
• courage
• flexibility
• agility and responsiveness, and
• identity awareness.

Identity awareness is especially significant. It is only when you’re aware of your own identity, the privileges it has afforded you and the barriers it has created can you really notice the experience of others.

If you’re ready to learn more about inclusive leadership, join Bree Gorman’s Inclusive Leadership workshop. It’ll empower your business’s managers to become inclusive leaders by teaching them the impact of identity and provide them with the ability to recognise barriers. Most importantly, we’ll teach them the tools to be true allies and advocates in your workplace.

Educate those around you by speaking up

Recently, I had an experience where a leader in a community setting sat back while one of their community members told an offensive story about a trans person they encountered in the local shops. This leader talks often about his inclusive credentials. Well, sorry mate, but that’s not inclusive leadership.

It’s not enough to just quietly improve your own knowledge and actions, an inclusive leader stands up when others either won’t or don’t know how to. Be that person who addresses the bias in the room; be that person that calls out the inappropriate comments; be that person who pursues more inclusive policies, who takes a stand unconcerned about being told they are “playing politics”.

Create an action plan

So, what are you going to do with your knowledge of inclusive leadership? Once you’ve educated yourself and learnt to be responsive to what’s happening around you, you need to find something that you can change.

One of my previous Inclusive Leadership workshop participants decided to improve the recruitment process at her accounting firm. She had identified the lack of diversity amongst current employees and suspected that this was partly due to the ways roles were advertised. Although she wasn’t in the HR or recruitment team, she worked with them to create an action plan to increase workforce diversity. And I’m so pleased to report that she’s making progress!

What project will you take on? Is it to support your trans niece who is having trouble with members of your family and their school teachers? Is it to create gender equity in your local sporting club? Or, can you influence behaviour occurring in your workplace? Whatever it is, big or small, plan it now!

Listen

Each of the strategies I’ve listed here require strong listening skills. Inclusive leaders need to listen first and act second – a lot of harm can be done by people with privilege swooping in to ‘save’ disadvantaged or marginalised people.

Once, I was told a story about a group of developers who decided they would ‘save’ an African community by providing them with food. Without consulting with the community first, they planted a huge crop of tomatoes and set up distribution paths so that the community could create an income. The crop had initially grown well, but when the day came to harvest the fruit, the plants were all bare. A herd of elephants had decimated it. The developers askes the locals why no one had mentioned the elephants to them. Their answer? The developers had never asked.

Don’t parachute in and develop ‘solutions’ to problems you don’t experience yourself – understand the problems fully and co-design or create the solution with those affected. The one caveat here is to be aware of the balance between listening and not overburdening those without privilege. Be sensitive, be understanding and be an inclusive leader.