At the height of the #metoo debate in the nation's entertainment sector, actress Francis McDormand used her 2018 Academy Award acceptance speech to promote the "inclusion rider." It was a call to action for entertainers to insist in their contracts that studios hire diverse cast and crew. McDormand seized the moment to inspire a commitment to diversity, and she set an important example for leaders everywhere.¹ Business and community leaders alike can and should use their positions of power to set the standard for inclusion. This is especially true for the nonprofits that are providing an increasing share of the US safety net of services for the most marginalized members of society.²

But the cultural transformation necessary to address our nation's growing racial and ethnic anxiety, and the corresponding lack of equity, will happen only if new behaviors and organizational practices are "baked-in" to everyday operations in service delivery, management, and stakeholder engagement.

The Work of Inclusive Leadership Teams

Leaders committed to serving diverse communities effectively should prepare themselves to address three essential challenges:

• Creating a culture of inclusion with attention to key practices
• Setting clear expectations for inclusive leadership behaviors among all managers
• Aligning the mission of their organization to the broader equity issues being faced by the communities they serve

For each of these, leaders can implement operational strategies to foster new behaviors that over time will yield key results—sometimes even before staff fully align on the value of diversity or understand the business case for inclusion. Leaders who have studied peak performance psychology will recognize this as the proverbial "acting as if" mindset.³ To be inclusive in the workplace, skip the polarizing rhetoric or endless debate and move forward with setting performance standards regarding inclusive behaviors. Then measure your progress over time by looking at key indicators of success such as retention and advancement of diverse staff, successful policies to serve communities, and improved program outcomes across diverse community members.

Creating a Culture of Inclusion

Executive teams committed to a culture of inclusion will support ongoing professional development so that middle managers, team leads, and staff are consistently developing skills linked to inclusion. While many organizations focus on unconscious bias awareness training, research indicates that awareness has a limited lasting impact—between several hours to several days.⁴ Inclusive leaders instead look at work routines or processes to make inclusion an integral part of the way they work. This is perhaps most often seen in a review of how people source, recruit, onboard, or promote new hires. For example, many organizations are removing identifiers from resumes or making sure that diverse candidates are identified for all vacant positions, as well as conducting audits of their communications to ensure their values around diversity and inclusion are consistently expressed.

Employees also take cues about inclusive behaviors by the way they are treated during their workday. For example, setting the tone in meetings to engage participants with different communication styles—cultural, linguistic, or introverts/extroverts—allows everyone to be heard. One strategy for team meetings or community forums is to appoint an "inclusion advocate"—the person with permission to note if a person's comment has been ignored or to make sure anyone dialed in for the call is given time to speak. At the end of the meeting, inclusive leaders ask, "Did everyone who wanted to speak get heard?" This isn't to be confused for a quest for consensus. It's about distributing the power to be heard among all participants.

It's also human nature to gravitate towards others like ourselves. To account for this, executive teams can tune in to team dynamics and identify the "in-groups" that form around any number of issues—tenure, gender, or even alumni networks—and rotate team assignments or distribute responsibility for key tasks to ensure everyone has opportunities for growth.

Setting Clear Expectations

Any effort to build or sustain an inclusive culture must be linked to clear accountability for inclusion. Over the past five years, InclusionINC has trained more than two thousand senior executives about inclusive leadership, using a definition of an inclusive leader as one who seeks out and integrates the voices of key stakeholders to drive key organizational results. Our research shows three key—and measurable— statements about leaders that are most often associated with inclusive workplaces:⁵

• My manager asks my opinion about the work I do
• My manager acknowledges my contributions
• My manager demonstrates concern about my success

To determine if leaders are demonstrating these behaviors, conduct 360 evaluations, provide ongoing professional development, and integrate learning opportunities at all levels of the organization. It's equally important to reward these behaviors. Some organizations link a leader's performance raises or bonuses to high employee engagement scores—one of the most correlated indicators of inclusion and psychological safety among employees. ^{6 7 8}

Aligning the Mission to Advance Equity

In serving the needs of community members, inclusive executive teams will measure the extent to which services and programs achieve their intended objectives among all members of the community. In the United States, we have taken refuge in the idea that equal treatment yields equal outcomes. That notion would be true only if everyone lived in or started under the same conditions—which they don't.

Original image by Craig Froehle, PhD

Maria Hernandez, PhD is the practice leader for Global Consulting Solutions at InclusionINC and leads the company's engagements in the healthcare sector. Dr. Hernandez (@drmghernandez) is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. InclusionINC (www.inclusion-inc.com) is a woman-owned business founded in 2010 and headquartered in Minneapolis.

If you’d like more guidance, consider participating in Bridgespan’s Investing in Future Leaders program, which combines online lessons with guided team meetings that will help your team develop these habits. Our next cohorts start in September 2019. Email us at [email protected] to learn more and apply.