The Need For Inclusive Leadership

Inclusive leadership is needed now more than ever. We are facing overly complex times as the pandemic and the social, political and, economic environment are creating division and making it more difficult for organizations to create a true inclusive culture. I see part of the progress made by some of these organizations over the last decade to create more diverse and inclusive cultures vanished. This may be because while some behaviors started to change it did not get as far as changing the fundamental beliefs, and all the changes we are going through, allowed for some of these behaviors to revert.

Diversity and inclusion are usually managed together, and some people may think they are the same, but they are not. Diversity considers religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality, age, and other differences. Inclusion is what you do and how you value these differences. Many organizations are focused on diversity pursuing recruiting and representation and while it is very much needed, it can become meaningless without a true effort to include and make the most out of those differences.

Becoming an inclusive leader requires changing our own behaviors. I am far from being what we should aspire to be as inclusive leaders but will like to offer some of my personal learnings:

1) Understand your biases. Biases are normal and we all have them. We develop them as we grow coming from our own experiences, beliefs, education, religion, and family influence, among others. In 2017 I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Cincinnati by Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, cofounder of Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ethics.html) in collaboration with the Harvard University. For me it was an eye opener. I started to realize we need to understand our conscious and unconscious biases and how to be aware of them and face them.

2) Learn and educate your-self and your organization. Over the past few years, I have realized how little I know about diversity, inclusion, and privilege. My paradigms as a white male blocked me from seeing it is not the same for all and how hard it is to change. I have also learned that while many organizations have good diversity and inclusion efforts, sometimes they fail in educating their people not only to change their behavior while at work but to really understand why it is the right thing for their business and organizations. Despite many studies by a lot of different organizations and consulting firms that show that diverse, inclusive organizations outperform those that are not, we as leaders still fail to understand it and continue to think it is just about meeting recruiting and representation targets.

For me, a key part of the learning process has been to be able to have open discussions in safe environments to help me understand and confront my biases. I am fortunate to have four millennial children and coaching from some young managers and entrepreneurs who have helped me look at this with a different perspective and help me understand further. It is encouraging to see how these new generations have blurred those differences and are teaching us a new way to face them.

In all these we cannot forget diversity of thinking as a key aspect. In most cases building a race, age, gender diverse team brings inherently some of it, but I think we still must be careful not to surround ourselves by people who think as we do. Sometimes the people who think different than us are the most difficult to include.

3) Be deliberate. Leaders have the responsibility to create diverse and inclusive organizations. Jennifer Brown in her book “How to be an Inclusive Leader” defines what she calls the “Inclusive Leader Continuum” as a four-stage path to move from being: Unaware à Aware à Active à Advocate.

Moving through this continuum requires each of us to be deliberate to move through these stages by learning, acting to make their organizations more inclusive to become a credible leader capable of changing culture and behaviors.

In summary becoming more inclusive leaders in our organizations, communities and families is now more important and needed more than ever and we all need to embrace it by learning and acting.

Luis Hurtado

Grupo Azimuth

January 2021

References

Brown, Jennifer | How to be an Inclusive Leader | Berrett-Koehler |2019

Banaji, Mahzarin and Greenwald, Anthony | Blind Spot. Hidden Biases of Good People | Delacorte Press | 2013

Project Implicit | https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/