What Is Inclusive Leadership?
Inclusive leaders are individuals who are self-aware and actively seek out and consider different perspectives to inform their decision-making and collaborate more effectively with others.
Inclusive leadership also means that leaders commit to ensuring all team members:
- Are treated equitably,
- Feel a sense of belonging and value, and
- Have the resources and support they need to achieve their full potential.
How to Be an Inclusive Leader
Inclusive Leadership Starts With Compassion
First and foremost, compassionate leadership is of utmost importance for inclusive leaders.
Compassion is the foundation of our ability to understand what another is going through, connect with them on an emotional level, and take meaningful action to improve their condition. More than just showing empathy in the workplace, compassionate leaders move from a private place of empathetic feeling into external, tangible actions. Compassion should catapult you to do something meaningful — whatever that is for you or for other people — and it should show.
Inclusive leaders can encourage their colleagues to be more compassionate by practicing empathy and then consciously, intentionally engaging in acts of inclusive leadership.
When organizations commit to merging compassion and inclusion — and use that power to transform their cultures for the better — individuals adopt these 7 acts of inclusive leadership. These acts lead the way to full, meaningful, and authentic participation of every individual in the organization. Each act has the ability to change lives, open doors, and build bridges.
7 Acts of Inclusive Leadership
Whether you’re just starting out or the leader of an entire organization, engaging in these 7 intentional acts of inclusion and building the following leadership competencies will allow you to reinvent relationships and strengthen your organization.
1. Deepen your self-awareness.
As your first empowering act of inclusion, build a solid foundation of personal understanding, including about the power and privilege you may have access to. Sometimes this may mean asking for feedback; admitting to your own mistakes and failures; reflecting on your own upbringing, background, and personal identity; talking about your emotions and experiences; or advocating for your own needs.
You need to have a high level of self-awareness; understand your own biases, strengths, and weaknesses; and be comfortable in your own skin in order to be able to engage in acts of inclusive leadership. If you’re comfortable with yourself, that confidence will reverberate through all the other acts of inclusive leadership. Learn how to boost your self-awareness.
2. Foster social awareness.
From self-awareness comes social awareness, a part of emotional intelligence, which is connected to leadership effectiveness. Social awareness is the currency of dialogue and our relationships with other people.
When people lack social awareness, they have trouble communicating, or tend to say the wrong things at the wrong times.
As you pay attention to what’s going on around you, use the information you gather to build a culture of inclusive leadership. For example, if a new person is hired, take some time to get to know them, show them around, and offer to help them get acclimated. Simple acts of inclusivity can help build a culture of respect at your organization.
3. Listen to understand.
Listening is a powerful tool and, when used correctly, it can help the listener discover 3 things: the facts, plus underlying feelings and values.
As a leader, you have an opportunity to practice effective listening skills in everyday conversations, whether your employees are sharing personal stories or are enlisting your help in working through a challenging assignment.
By listening to understand, you go beyond active listening to get a more accurate picture of the challenges your team is facing. You’re better equipped to resolve conflicts, and you increase efficiency as well as inclusiveness and communication competencies.
Increase efficiency, improve employee commitment, reduce misunderstandings, and waste less time by upskilling your team so they truly listen to understand one another.
4. Create connections.
What’s the purpose of creating connections? A connection is a link that’s formed between people with the intention to strengthen, encourage, and improve their bond. Those connections help give you a broader social network, too. If you can build social connections, you will more likely have what you need when you need it, and connection is directly linked to employee wellbeing. On the other hand, when social connections are low, individuals run the risk of experiencing isolation, fear, mistrust, limited access to information, and negative effects on job performance.
In an organization, diversified social networks and a network-wide perspective are important because they invite information from different sources and perspectives. Those perspectives expand your capacity to deal with differences, especially in times of challenge or crisis. Just as you want your financial portfolio to be diversified, you also want your social networks to be diversified, because it makes you a more flexible, resilient, and agile leader.
5. Make a meaningful impact.
In your daily interactions with colleagues, enable yourself to be exposed to new information. Be curious about experiences at your organization that are different from your own. Ask questions to learn more about other perspectives. In feedback conversations with others, be open to challenging assumptions and exploring the gap between intent and impact.
When you better understand the people you work with, you’re better equipped to take meaningful, substantial actions that make opportunities more accessible to all of your employees.
6. Lead with courageous vulnerability.
Inclusive leaders lead with courageous vulnerability. In other words, they position themselves in the areas where they feel weak, and they do so courageously. They are also humble enough to be able to identify and share candidly about their own limitations. They seek input and ask questions, and they challenge others’ ways of thinking in a respectful manner.
To understand what this could look like in practice, consider the example shared by our senior fellow, Abigail Dunne-Moses, who recounted an experience from early in her career: “I saw a colleague work tirelessly without getting promoted,” she says. “She deserved recognition, but got none. I felt for her, but for a long time I did nothing because I felt I didn’t have a voice. But the truth was that I did,” she says. “So I faced my vulnerability, I faced it courageously, and I spoke up on her behalf.”
Dunne-Moses said she had to do this 3 times, through continual conversations with management, but eventually, her vulnerability paid off, and her colleague received a well-deserved promotion. Practicing allyship as a leader can help strengthen your organization by helping engage and retain everyone, including employees whose valuable ideas and contributions might otherwise be overlooked.
7. Invest resources in inclusion.
Forward-thinking organizations understand that building a culture of inclusive leadership and collaborative teams takes a thoughtful investment of resources, but will offer a valuable return in the way of employee satisfaction and engagement, innovation capabilities, and increased ability to respond to complex challenges.
When Intentions & Impact Aren’t Aligned
Many leaders have good intentions to build diverse teams and practice inclusive leadership — but there’s often a gap between intentions and outcomes. When inclusive leadership efforts go awry, organizations experience unintended consequences, such as individuals who don’t reach their potential and strategies that fall flat. And as others in the organization observe these consequences, trust levels begin to erode, the organizational culture suffers, and psychological safety at work is diminished for everyone.
Creating a more inclusive organizational culture requires intentional planning to identify specific steps that will help close the gap between intentions and actions. For ideas on ways to do this, explore our guide for leaders on inclusion at work.
When individuals’ workplace experiences are driven by acts of inclusive leadership and a drive to build belonging at work, the result is an organizational culture shift that reinforces true inclusion — a powerful transformation.
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