Making Brave Decisions
I am currently on the last mile of my book. If you’re new here or happened to have missed any of my previous content, I am writing about inclusive leadership - with a special emphasis on decision-making. Without giving away too much, I don’t believe we can do much around inclusion unless we are very clear about our decisions and how we get others to buy into our reasoning and thinking behind it.
Inclusive decision-making impacts your workforce and your customer
One of the things that always strikes me as absurd in our modern way of working is how many services and products are not designed with women in mind. The book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019), written by Caroline Criado Perez, is an eye-opening read on the impact of such design.
For example, did you know that women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash than men? This is not about driving - women are safer and more risk-averse - but how seats, seatbelts, and distances from steering wheels are designed.
Did you know the average smartphone is too big for women’s hands? Given that smartphones are a staple of modern life, why do many flagship devices (yes, there are some smaller ones) not consider 50% of the population?
Recently when working with a marketing company, we explored what inclusive leadership meant for them. As is common, they focused on recruiting the right people to do the job. But I also wanted them to explore it through the broader lens of customer service and product development.
How were they making decisions about their target audience? Did they have enough insight and understanding of the avatars on the ground, or was it a broad sweep? Were they collecting enough quality data to meet customers' needs?
And in those moments, with this client and others I have worked with, you realise that making brave and bold decisions to be more inclusive is often an oversight. People unwilling to make brave decisions work with the notion, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Smartphones still sell by the hundreds of millions, so why would manufacturers pause to consider one less than 5.5 inches in size?
And yet there is a golden opportunity beyond immediate bottom-line results or market share for organisations to play the long game. They can have an alignment between getting paid and serving customer needs simultaneously, where they can give agency to people within their organisations to ask better questions about how they are serving and what they can do to improve that service.
“The challenge will always be getting people to see wider and make bold and brave decisions when they don’t feel they have the power to. The challenge to leaders: why don’t people feel they have this agency?”
Being brave enough to have this kind of agency through all levels of leadership is what I am all about when coaching and facilitating inclusive leadership.
Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash
