Four steps to inclusion

In the last Full Colour Friday, I wrote about what NOT to do to develop an inclusive workplace culture. This time I suggest four steps to move you forward.

But first…

Massive thanks to all who responded to the Full Colour Friday Survey. I’ll be building your ideas into my newsletter plan. One thing you fed back was that your most preferred newsletter frequency was monthly. So, from November, we will do just that.

Back to inclusion..,

Step 1: Know yourself (and help colleagues to know themselves too)

All true inclusion journeys start with people understanding themselves more deeply than they have to date.

Inclusion is about attitudes, mindsets and behaviours. To change these, you need to know where you are starting from.

Examples include:

• Uncovering their own specific biases and identifying actions to counterbalance them. (If you don't know how, get in touch...)
• Identifying how you impact those around you. For leaders, the higher up the ladder you go, the more people mask their views of you, so you need to do this intentionally.
• Make seeking feedback a habit.
• Defining your spheres of influence so you can make intentional decisions about how you bring inclusion to them. The “how” will differ depending on context so plotting your spheres of influence will help you break this down.

If people, particularly leaders, do not start with uncovering their true selves, (not the stories we tell ourselves about who we are), fundamental organisational change is nigh on impossible.

Step 2: Learn how to be inclusive

Inclusion is a specific competency, like finance or media management. No-one is born knowing how to be inclusive, just as no-one is born knowing how to create an excel spreadsheet.

The key is not to fall into the “I’m a good person” trap. Don’t confuse your identity with skill. Unless you have specifically studied inclusion techniques and applied them, chances are you are nowhere near as good as you could be.

Learning doesn’t have to be arduous or resource intensive. Something I do regularly is listen to summaries of non-fiction books on an app called Blinkist. Then if I connect with the content, I may buy the book and go deeper. Even if I don’t, I still have the key learning in my toolkit.

Step 3: Be driven by data

Base every decision and inclusion plan you make on data.

• What data do you have on your current culture?
• If you plot the data based on demographics, are there differences in people experiences?
• What do your employee engagement scores tell you?
• What gaps are there and therefore what assumptions will you have to make?

Even if you only have minimal data, start with what you have and work from there.

It is remarkable how many organisations miss this fundamental point. It would be like saying “we need to get to Mumbai” without knowing where you are now. The journey to Mumbai would be different if you were starting from London or from Beijing.

Step 4: Get real

Those who know little about equity, diversity and inclusion often have wildly ambitious, utopian goals like being “genuinely inclusive to all” or having diversity “representative of the communities we serve”.

They want to achieve these things in six months or by the end of their strategy period, with little or no resources, not being prepared to free up employee time to engage with change and with no expertise on how to plan or execute the journey. Result? They fail, and this has two affects:

• It damages the trust of those who thought their leaders would deliver against their stated EDI ambitions
• It confirms the views of naysayers who will openly declare “that EDI stuff doesn’t work/is a waste of time/is woke gone mad ” etc

If you have limited organisational bandwidth, or budgets are tight, that’s fine. Just set goals accordingly.

And remember…

1.    Inclusion is less about things to do and more about ways to be. Changing attitudes and behaviours is hard for some, so wrap a warm blanket around people to keep them feeling safe as they face who they are and those aspects of themselves that need to change.

2.    Keep it simple. The simpler the journey, the more progress you will make. Tiny actions taken consistently create more trust than one-off, grand gestures. What matters is that we move forward, and any movement is better than none.

3.    Have fun along the way. This quote by Sojourner Truth says it all. A 19th century escaped slave who became a passionate anti-slavery campaigner and advocate for women’s rights, Truth said:  

“Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier.” 

Can we help?

Full Colour specialises in helping leaders get the best from people and from themselves so they can deliver high quality results and create a workplace culture people love. We do this by helping leaders build equitable, diverse and inclusive organisations.

Do you want help with any aspect of your leadership and inclusion journey? Reach out to Izzy Taylor on info@fullclr.com to arrange an informal, no obligation chat with Srabani Sen.