Inclusive leadership is a personal and professional journey. The skills you’ll need along the way aren’t found on any checklist, but finding the path forward starts with considering who you are, unpacking what you think you know, and reframing your concept of success.

Try these three tips to help you lead inclusively:

1. Know Yourself – The capacity for inclusion within your organization begins inside you. Having an inclusive workplace culture means that everyone feels valued, but that is extremely unlikely to come about collectively without your singular leadership setting the stage for well-coordinated inclusive practices to actually take hold. It’s a big responsibility, yet the payoffs in terms of organizational outcomes, staff performance, and employee well-being are immense.
   
   Realizing the pivotal role you have to play as a company leader in making or breaking an inclusive culture, it only makes sense that you find your own footing before rallying your team. So what personal attributes distinguish a strong inclusive leader? The short answer is self awareness, which is really an ongoing, evolving process of introspection. You’ll need to purposefully lower your natural defenses and become mindful of your own tendencies. Honest, compassionate self-appraisal will grant you personal insights while also allowing you to pick up on attitudes and behaviors coming from fellow leaders, staff, Board members, and others in your organizational sphere. With appropriate self knowledge, you’ll be in a better position to engage authentically and provide genuine and credible guidance, helping colleagues to feel seen while also modeling and establishing accountability for the changes that are necessary to cultivate meaningful, sustainable inclusion.
   
   
2. Uncover Your Bias – Knowing yourself better will set you on a smoother course for uncovering the judgements and assumptions that often get taken for granted or go unnoticed even as they wreak havoc on interpersonal and organizational dynamics. Implicit or unconscious biases are a normal and typical facet of human psychology, but their effects within the workplace are neither benign nor inevitable. In fact, the impact of bias within organizations tends to mirror the dynamics pervasive in the broader culture, so a toxic workplace can all too easily emerge and persist indefinitely if power imbalances resulting from hierarchical managerial structures and social inequities related to gender, race, and sexual orientation are allowed to run rampant.
   
   Organizations are increasingly being called on to do better in the face of systemic social injustice and leaders who don’t rise to the urgency of this occasion by making a real and lasting commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity are justifiably getting called out. Effectively managing unconscious bias is crucial for shifting an organization that is merely demographically diverse into one that is truly equitable and fully inclusive. Critically examining bias also happens to be great practice for noticing and dealing constructively with resistance behaviors such as perfectionism and fragility that are deeply enmeshed with white supremacy and misogyny, yet often get masked as (unspoken) “high performance standards” within corporate cultures. As difficult as it can feel to question unconscious biases that are commonly understood as clever business acumen, identifying them in yourself and locating the associated pain points within your organization will be the precursors to positive, lasting transformation.
   
   
3. Embrace Your Strengths – While there’s a perception in the business world that fixing what’s wrong is the best way to demonstrate worth and get ahead, inclusive leadership hinges on a different approach to recognizing and capitalizing on success. Recent innovations in the science of management have come through organizational scholarship, positive psychology, and strengths-based research pointing a lens toward what companies and their leaders do well rather than summing them up as a series of problems to address, blame to assign, and black holes to avoid. The Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology, for example, begins with the premise that all organizations have real-world, time-tested, situationally proven strengths to replicate and build on. The principle of tapping into individual and collective strengths purposely defies the flawed, problem-oriented patterns shaping toxic, divisive workplace cultures and instead leverages the power of positivity that fosters inclusion.

Learn how to make the most of these tips–and awaken all the potential waiting to be realized on your inclusive leadership journey–with guidance from Beyond Inclusion Group. Contact us to learn more about how our Inclusive Leader Coaching Intensive can support your growth and deepen your impact as an inclusive leader committed to shifting culture and driving equity for all.