It’s often said that when you’re stuck on a challenge, you should try approaching it from a new perspective. But that’s sometimes easier said than done. After all, where do new perspectives come from?
While it can be difficult for individuals to gain fresh insights into a problem or situation, organizations that embrace diversity are better positioned. By designing teams that include people from different backgrounds, genders, cultures, ages, career stages, physical abilities, and lived experiences, you build a variety of perspectives to draw from. That diversity can be a competitive advantage against uniform teams who tend to think alike.
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You can’t simply declare diversity and inclusion a business priority and expect meaningful change to follow. Building an inclusive culture that benefits from diverse perspectives requires active commitment—especially from leadership. That’s where the concept of inclusive leadership factors in.
Inclusive leadership is vital for modern organizations. It fosters a culture of belonging and drives stronger decision-making and innovation. Understanding what it means to lead inclusively, developing the right skills, and taking intentional steps to a more inclusive workplace are key to making diversity efforts truly effective.
What Is Inclusive Leadership?
Inclusive leadership is a leadership style centered on fostering a work environment where every employee feels valued, respected, and included, regardless of their differences.
“Inclusive leadership is the ability to lead a diverse, dynamic team in a way that empowers, encourages, and engages the entire team in creating solutions,” says Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson, faculty chair of the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program, who teaches the online course Dynamic Teaming. “To be truly inclusive, everyone hired must find themselves welcomed and invested in important decisions and discussions.”
Importance of Inclusive Leadership
When an organization is led by individuals who prioritize inclusivity, it opens the door to a wider range of perspectives. These diverse viewpoints can be instrumental in solving complex challenges or seizing new opportunities—ultimately leading to more sales, stronger revenue, and sustainable profit growth.
One estimate suggests that companies with more diverse management teams generate, on average, nearly 19 percent more innovation revenue than peers. Another study estimates that inclusive companies are 70 percent more likely to capture new markets than less inclusive counterparts.
HBS Professor Robin Ely shares a compelling example in the online course Dynamic Teaming. She highlights a Wall Street firm whose research department was ranked 15th among its peers. After years of status quo, the firm hired a new research director, who hired many women analysts and created an environment that empowered them to approach their work authentically.
At the time, women on Wall Street were often excluded from the informal networks that men within their organizations typically dominated. As a result, women had to seek information outside their firm, leading them to engage with informal retail investors—an audience largely overlooked by their male colleagues. Within three years of adopting this strategy, the firm rose to first place among its peers.
“[The women] were able to bring new knowledge into the firm because they didn’t have access to what men had access to,” Ely says in Dynamic Teaming. “They don’t have the same opportunities. They figured out another way to do the job. And it turns out that that’s more effective.”
Inclusive Leadership Skills
Like many other aspects of effective leadership, inclusivity is a skill that can be learned, practiced, and developed over time. Several other skills can also support your growth as a more inclusive leader, including:
Not Being Reactive
As you work toward becoming a more inclusive leader, you may occasionally make mistakes—perhaps saying or doing something someone finds insensitive. When those mistakes happen, it’s normal to feel defensive, especially if you believe you’re being attacked or judged. But it’s important to resist the urge to react impulsively, as doing so can cause further harm and hinder meaningful dialogue.
“[In these situations], we tend to withdraw,” Ely says in Dynamic Teaming. “We put up our defenses. And that shuts off communication, and it shuts off learning.”
Instead of being reactive, Ely recommends stepping away from the situation if you feel yourself becoming defensive so you can approach the challenge with a clearer perspective once the initial sense of threat has passed.
Being Inquisitive
It can be easy to rely on assumptions when working with new people, especially those from different backgrounds or lived experiences. But instead of making assumptions, in the online course Dynamic Teaming, HBS Senior Lecturer and former U.S. Military Officer Hise Gibson encourages leaders to embrace curiosity and ask thoughtful questions.
Asking questions serves multiple purposes. First, it helps you learn about the people you’re working with and leading, allowing you to better understand their differences—and how those differences strengthen the team. Second, it signals a willingness to learn and improve. By asking questions, you create opportunities to demonstrate and develop empathy, which is crucial for creating a more inclusive workplace.
In Dynamic Teaming, Gibson recommends leaders get comfortable asking questions like:
- Who are you?
- Why are you here?
- What are you here to do?
- How can I help?
Allowing Yourself to be Vulnerable
Learning any new skill requires a degree of vulnerability. After all, committing to growth means acknowledging that you may not necessarily be an expert or a pro at something. It also opens the door to potential failure, which can be difficult for some people to accept. Ultimately, it’s this vulnerability that makes meaningful development possible, no matter what you’re striving to improve.
“You have to make yourself vulnerable when you’re learning,” Ely says in Dynamic Teaming. “When you make yourself vulnerable across what’s culturally a divisive difference—which in the U.S. culture might be race or gender—that vulnerability, when it’s received in a positive way and respected and worked through, I think that really creates a stronger relationship.”
Critiquing Your Assumptions
Reluctance to embrace diversity and inclusion often stems from underlying prejudices or deeply held beliefs about groups perceived as different. Becoming a more inclusive leader requires the willingness to confront these prejudices and assumptions head-on.
“I think some of the key actions that people can take are really at an individual level to take a critical look at themselves and their own assumptions and be willing to test those assumptions,” Ely says in Dynamic Teaming.
How to Create Inclusion in the Workplace
The process of creating inclusion in the workplace is exactly that: a process. As such, it takes time and consistent effort to achieve.
“There’s often a wish that there would be some quick fix that you could implement, and then everything would be fair, and everyone would feel valued and respected, and you’d really be able to get the benefits of diversity,” Ely says in Dynamic Teaming. “And in my experience of working with companies, there is none.”
HBS Professor Frances Frei and entrepreneur Anne Morriss, co-founders of the Leadership Consortium, developed the concept of the Inclusion Dial to illustrate how organizations journey toward inclusivity.
According to the Inclusion Dial, the process of becoming a more inclusive workplace can be broken into four steps:
- Every member of the team feels safe despite their differences.
- Every member of the team feels welcome despite their differences.
- Every member of the team is celebrated for their uniqueness.
- Differences among team members are championed within the organization.
While organizations work through these steps in their own ways, creating inclusion is often broken into two phases. During the foundational stage, leaders focus on education, ensuring that team members understand the importance of inclusion and the steps needed to create it. In the reassess and deepen stage, the emphasis shifts toward evaluation. Leaders examine where the inclusion initiative is working and where it may fall short so that changes and adjustments can be made.
How to Measure Inclusion
When measuring inclusion in the workplace, your organization may want to track several metrics to gain meaningful insights into how inclusive your culture is. Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider include:
- Team composition: Who makes up your teams? Are employees from diverse backgrounds, or do they share similar experiences and identities?
- Organizational demographics: What does the overall makeup of your organization look like, and how has this changed over time?
- Turnover rates: What trends are you seeing in employee turnover? Are certain groups more likely to leave the organization than others?
- Internal promotion rates: What percentage of employees are promoted or advancing in their careers? Are specific segments of the workforce underrepresented in these opportunities?
While KPIs can provide valuable insights, Ely cautions against relying on them too heavily when evaluating the success of your inclusion efforts. Metrics are important but don’t always capture employees’ full lived experiences.
“Metrics are indicators of how you’re doing in your culture,” Ely says in Dynamic Teaming. “But I think when we manage to the metric itself, then that becomes a problem, because we’re not making the real change that is leading to the change in the metrics. We’re just doing the simple fixes to make the numbers look good. And that’s the thing that I think you have to guard against.”
It’s also important to consider other, less data-driven ways you might measure inclusivity in your workplace.
“One way you can evaluate where you are on inclusion requires the leader to look around—and who is speaking in the room,” Gibson explains in Dynamic Teaming. “The folks who talk the least many times feel that their comments aren’t valued.”
If employees seem reluctant to share their insights or opinions, Gibson recommends experimenting with different tactics and techniques to discover what makes them feel valued and pull them out of their shells. These approaches may vary across organizations and even between teams, so flexibility and responsiveness are key.
You Don’t Need to Do It Alone
Like any skill, inclusivity develops over time—and growth will come more consistently when you have other people to practice with. For this reason, Ely recommends working with a small group or a coach who can help you continuously challenge your biases and serve as a sounding board as you navigate inclusive leadership’s complexities.
Alternatively, you might enroll in a course to deepen your knowledge of inclusive leadership, such as Dynamic Teaming. It’s designed to help you acquire the skills to build and lead adaptable teams, including learning how to create psychological safety and foster inclusion.
Ready to become a more inclusive leader and learn how to lead adaptable teams? Explore Dynamic Teaming—one of our online leadership and management courses—and download our online learning success guide to learn more about how an online program can benefit your career. You can also learn key lessons from Dynamic Teaming as part of our yearlong Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB), which comprises seven courses for leading in the modern business world.
