The hardest work for every inclusive leader

Welcome to Inclusion Is Leadership, a biweekly infusion of insights, research, and guidance to create inclusive workplaces. Created by Ruchika Tulshyan, inclusive leadership advisor, founder of Candour, author of Inclusion On Purpose, and creator of the LinkedIn Learning course: Moving DEI from Intention to Impact.

In my last newsletter, Why Good People Aren't Always Inclusive Leaders, I reflected on my highlights from Big Think, where my book, Inclusion on Purpose was featured in the monthly book club!

We covered a couple of ways you can use your privilege to create a more inclusive environment, specifically giving credit to underestimated voices and challenging the idea of “culture fit” as a metric for hiring. This week, I want to talk about what is often more meaningful, but much more challenging to achieve on truly creating inclusive workplaces: The internal work and education that inclusive leaders must do. In a world forcing us to always take action, it can be hard to slow down and learn. And then, when you’ve become aware, it can be hard when others around you haven’t done the internal work.

It’s hard but still, undeniably necessary.

These are some ideas to get you started: 

Learn (more) about intersectionality

Intersectionality is a concept every leader needs to be familiar with. Coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, “Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking."

Understanding intersectionality brought everything I was experiencing as a woman of color in corporate America to focus for me. It was originally termed in response to a number of lawsuits Professor Crenshaw had been following where Black women workers experienced discrimination that their white women or Black men counterparts didn’t at General Motors in the 1980s. In the eyes of the law, Black women couldn’t sue for gender discrimination as there were white women who weren’t facing that discrimination, nor could they sue for racial discrimination. The discrimination they faced occurred due to their intersecting identities as Black women, but there wasn’t yet a way to describe this. So Professor Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality.”

Discrimination isn’t a sum of its parts. It’s compounded and exacerbated, particularly for women of color, which is why I focus my inclusion efforts at this very intersection. 

Women of color will be the majority of working women in the United States by 2060. To create a change, leaders must understand intersectionality, and any effective DEI strategy must include the voices of those who have multiple intersecting identities. 

Develop empathy as a leadership skill 

Empathy is extremely hard to quantify, but it’s an important attribute for leadership. According to a survey, 60 percent of workers would be willing to take a pay cut to work for a more empathetic company. And this was before the pandemic! 

In what we’re now referring to as The Great Resignation, a Pew Research Center survey found that low pay, a lack of opportunities for advancement, and feeling disrespected at work are the top reasons why Americans quit their jobs last year. Pay is still important to people, but it’s not enough. Employees need to feel like their work has purpose, there is opportunity for growth, and they are treated with respect, all issues that can be improved, if not solved, by developing more empathy as leaders.  

Women are not inherently more empathetic, but because we are often socialized (and rewarded) to display empathy, we often develop these skills, which can be a great leadership trait. As we saw during the early days of Covid, Women-led Countries Performed Better in Pandemic Response. This is attributed both to a more diverse leadership team and a more compassionate, empathetic style of leading. 

One way that I recommend to develop empathy (supported by research from the Greater Good Science Center) is by reading fiction, especially stories written by people who are unlike yourself. How do you put yourself in someone else’s shoes? How do you really try and understand what they’re facing? What’s going on in their world? 

Read fiction! I say fiction specifically because sometimes reading nonfiction can be really painful and trigger our defensiveness, but research shows that when we sit back and read fictional stories, we can build inclusion and empathy as leadership skills. 

Speaking of which, Big Think always closes by asking interviewees what books have had a lasting impact on their lives. I like to stay very present with my book recommendations, so I’m including three amazing books that I read recently. They are by authors from two different African countries, Nigeria and Cameroon, and helped me learn about cultures different from my own, by authors from those communities.

1. Wahala by Nikki May - A fun read but also informative about the experience of Black women and multi-racial women in the UK.
2. Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue - A great book about the immigrant experience to the U.S. of a family from Cameroon and the racial dynamics that they encounter. 
3. Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo - Based on a fictional African country, it captures  challenges people face, especially as people of color in Western countries. 

What’s on your recommended fiction reading list?

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