If you haven’t figured it out by now, being persistently inquisitive is a facet and an asset of inclusive leadership.

Establishing inclusion depends on leaders looking inward to consider how long-standing personal attitudes or patterns may pigeonhole us into pursuing surface-level change instead of necessary, desired transformation. Leaders must also solicit input from employees about their strengths, challenges, and opportunities as teammates in fostering a productive, satisfying workplace where everyone can grow and thrive as their whole selves.

Leaders don’t source or dictate the synergistic elements of positive workplace cultures externally—rather, they seek them in themselves and in their colleagues. In a spirit of curiosity, they inquire from their discoveries and then build new, higher functioning realities.

Look Back and That’s Where You’ll Go
Looking to the negative past often manifests counterproductive tendencies such as perfectionism and resistance that can hold leaders back from pursuing meaningful, effective diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. On the flip side, when we embrace the potential and impetus within us all to experience personal, professional, and organizational growth, resistance transforms into possibility.

What you question becomes your focus. Focus only on your problems, you get fault-finding and a view of the past. Focus on your positives, and what is working, and you get possibilities and a forward look into your desired future. So turn problem-solving on its head. Positive change starts by sparking curiosity about what already works. Rather than instigating the downward spiral of negativity, fault-finding and blaming your outlook can become one that’s future-driven—where you will see real possibilities informed by your history. This is the basis of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), an evidence-based methodology that has proven highly successful across many kinds of domains—compassion-based community, healthcare systems and, inclusive organizations.

Progress in the new strengths-driven paradigm is not a singular track seen through rose-colored glasses, but a dynamic trajectory that unfolds and evolves collaboratively for inclusive staff teams. It’s an iterative, creative, ongoing process of building (and rebuilding) on successes rather than endlessly looking for problems to fix, blame to assign, and black holes to avoid. The new way of inclusivity is to engage the power of the collective positive.

Never Mind Problem Solving!
You may be surprised or skeptical when I tell you leaders shouldn’t focus so much on solving problems, but let’s reflect for a moment on the nature of progress. Sometimes when roadblocks to innovation have been on our path for too long, they start to seem deceivingly like permanent or unavoidable landmarks. We may not even notice them anymore (if we ever have) or when we become conscious of them as eyesores (we suspect or know they aren’t serving our organization), navigating around them can be intimidating, and removing them altogether may seem unmanageable or unthinkable. I find this situation playing out for many leaders who realize that they want a different workplace culture but cannot figure out how to navigate around the tricky dynamics perpetuating the status quo.

Unfortunately, when problems loom too large, we get trapped into the contradictory, self-defeating belief that new ways of going, however desirable, are either unnecessary or too difficult.

Seeing and doing things differently becomes less scary and more exciting as we realize that forging ahead in a new way doesn’t plunge us into the unknown. Instead, it depends on reassessing what is already all around us and replicating the good we find, exactly as AI invites us to do.

Engage the Power of Positive
The science of management has advanced great strides over the recent past. The emphasis has been on the power of leveraging strengths as a well-informed path to strategy execution. It is a very well-informed approach rooted in positive organizational scholarship, positive psychology, and strengths-based research. AI begins with the premise that all organizations have real-world, time-tested, situationally proven strengths. Through an engaging process of discovery for asking the right good questions, your people can build a compelling path for greater inclusion and ability to meet your challenges and achieve more than you thought possible. Knowing what you’ve done well is your catalyst. Knowing that you have and that you can source your answers, is your power. 

Build Your Strengths
By taking an honest account of what’s already working to envision the optimal future of your company, you will be drawing on your talents, deploying best practices, and leveraging your positive energy that could otherwise go untapped. Because this entails engaging and validating members of your organization collectively as human beings who fundamentally desire to be uniquely valued while meaningfully serving the group, inclusion and the pursuit of strengths go hand in hand.

Appreciative inquiry can invigorate organizational development by reinforcing the commitment to curiosity that’s a hallmark of the inclusive culture you’re striving to lead. Connect with us to further explore AI and learn how to ask more of the right good questions to shape your organization into the future you want and deserve.

Imagine and create your new future!