What Skills Do Leaders Need to Foster an Inclusive Culture?

During the initial meeting of our Joy Global Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Council, in the early afternoon, we hit a rough patch.  We were discussing what inclusion might look like on the ground level – between an employee and his or her manager.  Specifically, we were talking about how best to prepare our leaders to engage with an employee in a discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.  We agreed, ultimately, that leaders need to be open and supportive when employees come to them to initiate these discussions.  We also talked about the need for leaders to be aware of what’s going on in their departments, and address issues of harassment where they might arise.

What became clear, as we tried to clearly identify what was needed in order to fully prepare leaders for these conversations, was that a lot of the skills that are needed to foster an inclusive culture are the same leadership skills that we’ve been teaching for years.

Please don’t get me wrong – there is absolutely a need to training on the topic of Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) in its own right.  There are conversations that leaders need to engage in, and they need to be equipped to represent the company appropriately.  They need to understand best practices and key behaviors – to know what good looks like.

But there are a number of other skills that need to be in place if we truly want to build and support a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture.  And most of those are foundational skills that characterize strong leadership.

One of the first things that the Advisory Council worked on together is a clear articulation of the business case for D&I at Joy Global.  We’ve defined the case through five business drivers, as follows:

Cultivate innovation by promoting diversity of thought, valuing different perspectives and empowering employees to contribute their authentic viewpoints, thoughts and ideas in support of our business strategies.

 

Engage employees and improve our operational effectiveness with a more inclusive organization that leverages the diversity that currently exists within our company.

 

Broaden our ability to attract, develop, and retain critical talent by improving the representation of women and minorities at all levels and functions, beginning with our core competencies.

 

Enhance our cultural competence to meet the product and service needs of a global, dynamic and diverse customer base.

 

Build our competitive brand as a company that values, and actively fosters, a diverse and inclusive culture.

As I look at each of those, I can see not only that certain skills will be advantageous to our leaders as they seek to support D&I efforts.  It’s clear to me that our efforts will be at risk if our leaders aren’t demonstrating certain basic skills.

For example, the first driver, focused on cultivating innovation, requires that leaders are strong meeting facilitators, can effectively draw out dissenting viewpoints.  They need to be comfortable not only with resolving conflict, but with creating and embracing the healthy conflict that is sure to come when people raise differing viewpoints.  We need to believe, at a fundamental level, that the friction created by diverse thought will lead us to better answers.  If leaders are unwilling or unable to embrace these inevitable conflicts, then we won’t enhance our ability to innovate – at least not through diversity and inclusion.  Because the first time that someone speaks up with a viewpoint that differs from the perspective of the highest ranking person in the room, their dissent needs to be welcomed, and included in the discussion.

This seems fairly obvious, but it’s certainly not easy.  If an organization has a history of acquiescence and agreement, or a culture that discourages risk-taking, then the mindset and skills that need to support D&I could be lacking.

Similarly, the business driver of attracting, developing and retaining critical talent from diverse sources requires that leaders are good at assessing and developing all employees.  If we haven’t embedded that in the culture (yet), then there’s important work to do as we head down the path of talking more specifically about diversity.

Fortunately, these things don’t have to be done in a strict sequence.   But the gaps in foundational leadership skills need to be inventoried and addressed as part of the D&I training efforts.  If not, then we run the risk of setting our leaders up to fail.

Over the last several months, I’ve done a lot of thinking and talking about D&I in my organization.  And for the most part, there’s a lot of support.  That’s essential, because the hard work’s about to start.  Implementing a diversity and inclusion strategy is often a culture change unto itself.  But as we get ready to plant the seeds of diversity and inclusion, we need to be realistic about soil that we’re working in.  We need to make certain that it’s fertile ground, and that anything that could be toxic is identified and managed early.

That means that those of us in Learning & Development have our work cut out for us.  We need to prepare our leaders so that they’re equipped with fundamental skills.  We need to prepare our organizations so that the prevailing leadership philosophies support open exchange of ideas, realistic risk-taking, and active development of talent across functional and geographic boundaries.  It’s a significant challenge.  But once we do those things, then we’re in a place where we can reasonably expect our D&I efforts to flower and bear fruit.