What is Inclusive Leadership

My work in personal development started out evenly split between schools and corporates. In schools, our team spent many years working with students to help raise attainment and make them aware of the options available to them post-school. At corporates, we worked with individuals around career ambitions and communication skills.

While each partnership was unique, each offering a unique set of lessons and observations to take away to the next, one commonality always stood out to us. The success of individuals we worked with, students and career professionals, was shaped by their environment for the most part. Did their place of work/study give them the space to thrive? This is what first piqued my interest in leadership.

I started to work more with middle and senior leaders in schools - to understand their environment and expectations. We'd share and explore my team's techniques in winning students over, how we gave students agency and explored how they could do the same. I went on to share our learnings across the country at conferences, inset days and other teacher development events. I also made a point to note the different approaches taken in the varying schools we worked with - a nice mix of academies, free schools, private and forest schools.

In the corporate work, I got involved in understanding how leaders made their decisions, especially around talent - specifically approaches to hiring, firing and promotions. This emerged as a result of conversations with people who believed their career progression would be hindered by a line manager or sponsors in senior leadership who didn’t understand them.

These interventions exposed me to so many different types of leadership. I started to understand not just corporate ways of working, but how the leadership worked for many in non-profits and charities too. I signed up to a few leadership development programmes; I spoke at a few too, and something kept niggling me. Why did so many of these programmes spend little time exploring how inclusive leadership needs to be? Why is it an afterthought rather than an integral part of the curriculum?

I define inclusive leadership as the ability for leaders, at all levels, to:

• Attract, empower and support talent towards a vision or goal, and do so without marginalising any of them.

• Develop and integrate systems and processes across functional business areas that consider the needs of the stakeholders affected by these areas, e.g. product, customer service, sales, etc.

I include that second bit in the definition because organisations often only focus on talent. However, for leadership to be inclusive, it should also consider stakeholders of those functional areas. In addition, the decision-making, problem-solving, and service areas of a business should also actively work to reduce marginalisation.

Over the last two years, my client, Paul*, had become increasingly aware of the many external pressures facing his business. His concern was how little experience he and his management team had around dealing with some of these situations.

Staff wanting to work from home rather than return to the office post-lockdown. Unfavourable responses from ex-staff on websites like Glassdoor. How to respond to staff in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and on issues of racial inequality. Staff querying gender representation in senior leadership. Paul was suddenly faced with all this while still trying to grow the business.

This is why inclusive leadership matters. There is no single way to tackle all of those challenges, especially not without engaging those who are most impacted.

As a coach, my approach is to explore the business as a whole - first through the lens of vision, values and purpose. Once that is done, we then look at the systems in place both from a talent perspective and through the processes such as customer service, product, comms, etc. This is what I started to do with Paul. To help build leadership capacity that is responsive rather than reactive.

I continue to work with Paul on an inclusive leadership approach for his company - on building this leadership capacity across all its functions and how we measure the impact and effectiveness of such leadership.

This doesn’t mean that inclusive leadership is perfect. Nothing really is. The point is for leaders to think widely and thoroughly about their impact. To consider questions like:

What is working? What isn’t working? What needs improving? Have I seriously thought about all my stakeholders? Where are my blind spots? Who is keeping me accountable? How do I become better a leader? How do I encourage better leadership as a whole across the organisation?

My confusion around leadership development courses that positioned inclusion as an afterthought lit a fire under me. It led me to build out an approach to leadership centred on inclusion. My goal was a coaching model that encourages clients to dig deeper into how leadership shows up beyond just the bottom line or diversity, equality and inclusion practices. I wanted, we needed, something more holistic, something that impacts people, processes and profit. Successes with clients like Paul help to reaffirm all this. Long may it continue.