What is inclusive leadership and why is it necessary?

In brief, add equal parts humility and empathy to a solution of DIVERSITY INTELLIGENCE.

An inclusive leader is self-reflective and attendant to the feelings of others. They’ve also “done the work” – they’ve attuned all manner of different intelligences (gender, cultural, generational) that helps them understand difference.

Luckily, none of these – the humility, the empathy, the intelligences – are something you have or you don’t. What’s the quote? “Greater leaders aren’t born, they’re made”. Well, there’s science backing that up now. Those skills are like muscles, and our Inclusive Leadership Program is the trainer that’ll get you into the Olympics.

And why is it necessary?

Because business problems are increasingly complex. The demands on companies have never been higher – they have to maintain growth while also acknowledging their social impacts. Relying on the past model of choosing only the “highest performing” individuals usually means ending up with a homogenous team. You’ll never be able to see the scope of a complex problem that way. Think of it like this: a forest is just a pile of wood to a bunch of woodcutters, but it’s a pharmacy to a botanist, a painting to an artist, a source of oxygen to an environmentalist.

What’s the structure of the Inclusive Leadership Program?

The program can be summarized in 3 words: Experience, knowledge, and action. We show you, through experience, how important inclusive leadership through group exercises. We then thread that experience with knowledge gleaned from years of empirical research. Finally, we help you plan how you’re going to use what you learned in practice. 

Module #1 – Dynamics and Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion
We start off your inclusive leadership journey through an immersive experience where, in groups, you break down and solve a problem while navigating the gap between majority and minority perspectives. You’ll figure out pretty quickly what strong, sensitized leadership does for diversity & inclusion.

Module #2 – Drive high performing teams with inclusion
This is where we bring in the science. We draw on the latest research to show you how leaders can reduce their biases through Diversity Intelligence. This puts everything you learned in Module 1 in perspective, and gives you an inkling of how to approach it in your company.

Module #3 – Implementing Strategies for Building Cultures of Inclusion
Everything you’ve learned, experimented with, and considered until this point in the program will be utilized in developing your own personalized roadmap towards a culture of inclusion at your workplace.

Each of these modules is approximately 3 hours long. We’ll also give you homework (not the boring kind, we promise) that prompts you to start practising what you learn at your company.

And the best part? The program can be performed in person or online.