Are We Still Missing Inclusion?
Last year, it seemed Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) was on everyone’s mind. It was a new day in the sun for a seemingly simple concept that had thrown some for a loop.
It was the first time some were hearing Diversity spoken about along with it’s new sidekick: Inclusion. Bringing up the economics of diversity had helped to shift the narrative around D&I, but inclusion was going to take more maintenance and thought.
The general tone felt something like, “promoting diversity should just mean being inclusive.” However, there was a larger point being missed: inclusion is something that often requires extra effort. Diversity is not a means to an end — and inclusion isn’t something that just inherently comes along with diversity.
When you have a company full of diverse people, but they aren’t actually included in meetings where impactful decisions are being made, then you’re operating under the illusion of diversity. Invited and represented is not the same thing as acknowledged and awarded.
It’s like buying all the ingredients for a casserole and then thinking you can just throw everything together in the oven and it’ll come out fine.
Business leaders were told if they wanted to be successful, they would need to build an environment that fostered creativity and original thinking. That often meant they would have to get a little creative themselves and hire new faces.
The reality is that leaders often tend to hire those who look like them, think like them, and are therefore more willing to agree with them. It’s an unfortunate tenet of our human psychology that does comes at a cost.
What some leaders were learning for the first time was that it’s critical to their bottom-line to hire people who come from different cultures, walks of life, and who have different life experiences. There was a growing bank of research to prove that, too.
The science behind this concept was that the more we stayed in our comfort zones, the less we’d be able to develop and improve our lives. What is true about taking our own personal risks to be better humans, also became true of how we run our businesses.
Sallie Krawcheck, Founder of Ellevest, captured this idea so perfectly in an interview we did with her for one of our clients last year.
When looking to invest, she would often ask, “is the leadership team any good?”
The only thing that seemed to strengthen a company’s forecast for success seemed to be diversity. It wasn’t just about having those people on the team, though. It was also about having them in the room — maybe even fighting with one another.
It might seem like basic psychology that we like when people agree with us, but there’s a huge downside to staying comfortable at work. We weren’t meant to agree with one another. Challenges are part of everyday life — both in our relationships and throughout our careers. We have to afford both an equal amount of care and attention.
Talk about a work-life balance. So, how do you ensure you’re being inclusive?
Start With Your Culture
When everyone is thinking the same, it stalls growth. Including new voices in the mix means you’re making adjustments to check yourself and stay relevant.
But how can you solve novel problems if you have a work environment that doesn’t encourage people to speak up? Studies show that when employees exist in a company culture that isn’t hospitable to sharing opinions, they don’t want to share them — even if it means making a mistake.
In the past, critics had suggested company culture really didn’t make all that much difference as to whether someone decided to chime in. They thought it had more to do with personality type, but there’s evidence that environmental norms can override this influence and push people to keep their mouths shut when they would normally speak out.
In another study involving nurses and doctors, nurses were tested to see if they would object when a mistake was made by a doctor in an extreme life-or-death surgery simulation.
Believe it or not, only about 50 percent actually called attention to the mistake when it was made. Those who were higher up on the hierarchical ladder did so more frequently.
Sometimes we want to be inclusive, but our culture is not set up to succeed from the get-go. Inclusivity requires openness and the free-flow of ideas.
So, if you find yourself in an organization that’s extremely siloed or overly bureaucratic, it can be hard to get almost anything done.
If it’s hard to get through to the people actually running the company, then there are going to be even more barriers to a fluid exchange of information. Leaders who thrive off of fear or a need for control make inclusion feel more difficult.
There’s little room for debate when decisions are made from the top-down and employees are not asked for feedback in the process. Organizations would be wise to take a look at whether a larger issue exists with management that can be solved before trying to facilitate inclusion. When the culture conversation gets bottle-necked at the top, it’s hard to make real, lasting change possible.
Imagine sitting in a working session to provide input for much-needed organizational change. All of your colleagues agree on the right way to go, but the leadership team walks away and does the complete opposite without taking any of the employee’s input into consideration. Likely, those employees will be left feeling undervalued and unheard.
If this is how things generally go, it’s time to learn to respectfully disagree and have those hard conversations. Friction is what gets the wheels turning, after all. As long as you are moving towards understanding, you are making progress.
We live in a world where there’s a lot of fear around being wrong or coming off as insensitive or culture-deaf, but sometimes the only way we learn is to make mistakes. Remember the old adage, “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” It really is okay not to know everything all the time.
As Peggy Yu, CEO of Stack Education, sums it up so eloquently in an op-ed for Forbes, “We need to foster an environment that allows these kinds of conversation to happen.”
Oh, that delicate balance.
Encourage Engagement and Feedback
When it comes to work, inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean involving everyone in meetings, all the time. It doesn’t mean you’re always on the email chain either. This might actually have the opposite effect. You don’t want to waste peoples’ time just to seem inclusive.
The ability to act inclusively is a strategic advantage both personally, and professionally. Not only will it make your team stronger, but it will make you better at your job.
Engaging people in work when they don’t exactly share your point of view will challenge you to think differently. It may even kick you out of a box you’ve placed yourself in for years.
Years.
The trick is to have a heightened level of awareness for when it may be useful. Creative meetings where ideas are flying around without a filter are a great example.
It’s easy to want to be comfortable in these situations, but you also need to invite the critics into the room
.Those moments where you’re on the brink of innovation are arguably the most important to have a diverse team present at — and the team needs to be given the floor to speak. These are the times when you need to hear fresh and contrasting opinions the most.
Being safe doesn’t usually make the headlines. Doing the same thing over and over isn’t usually the route to success.
Inclusion can take many different forms in the workplace and that can be confusing for companies that have made a habit out of working certain ways. In general, the goal should always be to keep an open mind and always be learning. The only way we can do that is for our workplaces to be two-way exchanges where everyone is given an opportunity to weigh in on decisions being made.
It can be as simple as asking employees what their preferred pronouns are, or allowing a colleague the opportunity to speak uninterrupted during a meeting. It could even be as specific as asking what an employee thinks about a company’s diversity policy, or how you could be more inclusive as a manager.
Asking for the opinions of others to weigh in should seem like common sense. However, you’d be surprised how many leaders don’t request feedback on their jobs.
Inclusion requires everyone — upper management, mid-management and junior employees — to have more frequent and open dialogue, as fellow individuals.
Inclusion means giving the floor to others to speak without the threat of fear, retaliation or denial.
It means welcoming everyone into the fold and coming together despite our differences, to be humble, vulnerable, and learn from one another.
