Inclusive leadership - A conversation with Dan Robertson
Listen to FAIRER Consulting’s MD, Dan Robertson talk about Inclusive leadership, what it is and how we can all get better at it.
"One of the big areas that we often talk about in the space of ED&I is this notion of inclusive leadership. And even though lots of people talk about it, I think it's really important to say, well, what does it actually mean? What are the principles or the traits of inclusive leaders? How do inclusive leaders think and how do they act?
There are lots of traits that we can talk about and we at FAIRER have mapped out the core traits and capabilities of inclusive leaders. Here are a few to call out specifically
The first one is this notion of awareness.
As a leader, are you aware of your own styles? Are you aware of the things that motivate you? Are you aware of your own biases? Are you aware, in terms of your frames of reference, how you see the world? And more importantly, are you aware of how your leadership style impacts those people around you? The second thing about awareness is it's a two way street. Are you aware of how other people around you, how do they experience life? Are you aware of the practical challenges that they face?
The first principle is, if we are not aware of ourselves, if we're not aware of the experiences and the challenges that our diverse colleagues face, it's going to make it very difficult for us to have proper engagement and to treat people in a way which is inclusive.
The second call out is this idea of curiosity. And there's been a lot of research around the psychology of curiosity. But what we know for sure is that leaders who are curious, who are interested in other people, demonstrate certain behaviours. And those behaviours are actually relatively straightforward.
They are ‘Hey, how's your day?’, ‘How was your weekend?’ or ‘What's going on for you?’
And curiosity is interesting because curiosity is a means to something. So if you're curious, you get stuff back. So that facilitation of conversation starts to build your knowledge of the experiences of colleagues around you.
We have this thing where we say that curiosity leads to insight. You get insight from the conversation - that builds your knowledge, that builds your cultural competences and that can facilitate in terms of behaviour.
So curiosity is a is a big thing. The third area I think around inclusive leadership is called perspective taking. And most leaders are absolutely shocking and terrible at this. They can't do this. And perspective taking is a real human and leadership skill. Perspective taking simply means this. Can you see validity in a viewpoint that you fundamentally disagree with? And that's interesting because most of us find that really problematic. We can't see any validity in something that we fundamentally disagree with. And if you think about the world we're in today, things like Brexit, things like politics, there's lots of identity politics that flow around.
So I may fundamentally disagree with you and I may fundamentally disagree with your viewpoint on a topic. But if I can see where you're coming from and I see validity in what you're saying, that's a skill around perspective taking and you can navigate around that. But most leaders are more closed off to that actually.
And the final thing that I would say around inclusive leadership here is inclusive leadership is a concept of doing stuff. And what I mean by that is, it's not good enough just to have insight, curiosity, perspective taking as a leader, you need to make sure that you become an advocate and an ally for colleagues around you. Your job as a leader is to ask questions around who's getting the stretch projects, who's getting on those global mobility programmes, etcetera. Am I making sure that I'm the advocate of somebody who doesn't have that power to speak up in the room?
So we need to move away from inclusive leadership that has just been about awareness and towards traits of an inclusive leader that steps in and does something, and uses their privilege and power on behalf of colleagues that don't have that privilege and power within their own organisations.
We also know that inclusive leadership is not some mystical thing, it's actually a set of skills that all leaders can develop. So if we think it's a skill set, how do leaders develop those skills? And what we know from psychology is we all have biases. We know that for sure. Human beings have a neurological gravitational pull to people like them. So one of the first skill sets of being an inclusive leader is to think about how do you connect with people that are different from you.
And you can do that in very simple ways actually.
One is, most corporate organisations will have groups, ERGs, BRGs. And my advice to leaders often is, is just go along. When it's International Women's Day, when it's Black History Month, when it's Pride Month, go along, sit in, listen to listen to the conversation, soak up the kind of vibe around you. And the skill of an inclusive leader is about thinking ‘Well, what is it that I'm hearing that I'm not normally exposed to? What is this conversation telling me?’ And I think that's the skill.
What we need to do as leaders is to let go of this psychological concept that leaders know everything already. And what we need to do is to learn into the vulnerability that there is a lot of stuff that we don't know about. So just having basic conversations with people and asking them questions around their life experiences. - How do they experience gender bias? How do they experience racism? How do they experience homophobia? That basic level of question can help to build out awareness.
And then that starts to give us the insight, which then gives us the tools to lean into some of the things that we need to do around allyship, sponsorship and the rest of it."
