Designing and building the equitable organizations of the future will require inclusive leaders at every level and in every nook and cranny of the organization. What do those inclusive leaders look like?
There is plenty of opinion in the public square about this as well as many inspiring stories, but with the continuous studies and experience I'm consistently studying I can help identify inclusive leader traits and competencies.
Traits – the inner enablers of inclusive leadership
Traits are generally hardwired. They include an individual’s personality, sense of purpose, and values. They also indicate preferences. For inclusive leaders, they are the inner enablers that make inclusive leadership possible and, when taken as a whole, they tell us the leader’s disposition toward differences. The core enabling trait clusters of an inclusive leader are:
1. Authenticity - requires humility, setting aside ego and establishing trust in the face of opposing beliefs, values or perspectives.
2. Emotional Resilience - requires the ability to remain composed in the face of adversity and difficulty around differences.
3. Self-assurance - requires a stance of confidence and optimism.
4. Inquisitiveness - requires openness to differences, curiosity, and empathy.
5. Flexibility - requires the ability to tolerate ambiguity and to be adaptable to diverse needs.
Competencies – The 5 disciplines of inclusive leaders
While the traits outlined above are foundational for inclusive leadership, they are not enough on their own. An inclusive leader must also possess the following skills to lead inclusively. Below are the competencies that are essential for inclusive leadership:
1. Builds Interpersonal Trust - is honest and follows through; establishes rapport by finding common ground while simultaneously able to value perspectives that differ from own.
2. Integrates Diverse Perspectives - considers all points of view and needs of others; skillfully navigates conflict situations.
3. Optimizes Talent - motivates others and supports their growth; joins forces for collective success across differences.
4. Applies an Adaptive Mindset - takes a broad worldview; adapts approach to suit situation; innovates by leveraging differences.
5. Achieves Transformation - willing to confront difficult topics; brings people of all backgrounds along to achieve results.
Both traits and competencies can be developed, though given that they are part of identity and therefore can be inherent to who we are, traits can be more difficult to grow in. Leaders can have expanding spheres of impact that flow from self, team, and organization. Builds Interpersonal Trust largely involves the spheres of self and team. Integrates Diverse Perspectives moves more fully into the realm of impact on the team. Optimizes Talent has major impact on both team and organization but is still primarily focused on talent. In the last two disciplines of Applies Adaptive Mindset and Achieves Transformation, the impact becomes heavily focused on organization, not only on people strategies and experiences but also on other business imperatives such as innovation, globalization, brand and reputation, and growing markets.
Biography Matters
I have one more vital element to introduce that becomes the wrapper around The Five Disciplines model: The experiences of each leader’s biography.
As organizations become increasingly diverse, there will be a greater spread of work-style preferences within any given team. To excel at inclusive leadership, individuals therefore need to be able to identify other people’s culturally driven preferences, as well as their own, to compare their likes and dislikes with team members from different cultures, and to gauge
how helpful and productive their preferred style is likely to be.
Experiences that expose leaders to a broad range of geographies, people, and contexts can increase their understanding of culturally driven preferences by challenging their assumptions and ways of doing things. Diverse experiences can also open their eyes to the fact that client and employee needs are not all the same and cannot be effectively addressed the same way across the board, which in turn helps them realize that solutions can be varied and counterintuitive, and that, sometimes, they are best reached along unconventional paths.
Personal and professional experiences that may enhance an individual’s capacity for inclusive leadership include:
Growing up in a different country or region from the one they live and work in today.
Having parents who have done an overseas stint in business, not-for-profit, government, military, or missionary organizations.
Experiencing being in the minority or majority or in a fully racially or ethnically mixed environment.
Studying abroad or participating in a service program while in school.
Undertaking an extended stay in a different culture, inside or outside their native country.
Taking on expatriate work assignments or on cross- functional, cross-divisional or cross-market work assignments that push them outside their comfort zone.
If leaders have had these formatively it gives them an edge in this journey but it’s not automatic that they are leveraging these experiences as much as they could. Inclusive leaders learn to more savvily and profoundly leverage their biographies to lead others inclusively. And for those who did not have these early life exposure to more diverse experiences, it’s not too late to gain that type of exposure through short- or long- term immersion experiences and even lifestyle changes.
In Conclusion
Moving organizations beyond diversity metrics to embrace inclusion requires 21st-century inclusive leadership. By taking on the challenges inherent in leading heterogeneous inclusive teams, these leaders bring their organizations to the next level in a highly competitive and increasingly diverse global marketplace. But as this discussion has shown, inclusive leadership requires commitment and a strategy. It takes a comprehensive plan, grounded in the assessment and development of key leadership traits and competencies, to foster inclusive leadership at the top of the organization. This then can in turn inspire an inclusive mindset shift and capability development throughout the organization to attain a more diverse workforce and realize its full potential.
Reference:
by Andres Tapaia and Alina Polonskaia
by Juliet Bourke and Andrea Titus
by McKinsey and Company
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