Why do so few business leaders know how to lead D&I business transformation?
By: Arrival Education
Tags: Business Change, Diversity And Inclusion, The Inclusion, Inclusive Leadership, Arrival Education

By Dan Snell, Co-founder, Arrival Education

As we come to the end of the year, we naturally reach a reflection point. We start to make sense of the year that’s just gone and think about what the following year might bring.

Clearly, Covid has dominated every aspect of life in 2020 that it’s hard to look beyond its impact on us, on our loved ones, our teams, our organisations, communities and even society as a whole. Brexit has been ever-present also.

The other significant thing in 2020 was the increased importance of Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) and the Inclusive Leader.

We’ve witnessed a seismic shift in how businesses engage with D&I.

Leaders leant in and listened to diverse colleagues — in some cases for the first time. To their surprise, they found the messages coming back could be quite challenging. Some organisations clumsily even tried to turn it into a marketing opportunity.

As a result, we thought it might set out the benefits and the challenges of being an Inclusive Leader, specifically — Inclusive Leaders as a Change Leader.

Let’s remind ourselves of the data-driven benefits* of having and managing diverse teams and organisations successfully. Organisations who do this successfully are:

70% more likely to capture new markets

75% more likely to see ideas converted into products

Diverse and Inclusive teams are 87% likely to make better decisions

Likely to report 19% higher innovation revenue if they’re a company with above-average diversity

36% more likely to outperform on profitability

Being Inclusive and Diverse clearly pays dividends. So what is stopping organisations and leaders from being more inclusive and obtaining the obvious benefits?

In a word — change, or rather, fear of change.

Inclusive Leadership = Change Leader

What I think we all need to grasp is that in 2020 the world changed, more specifically change has changed.

We’ve now entered an epoch of continuous accelerated disruption, and it’s only going to get more so, perhaps even exponentially. Covid merely accelerated this trend.

The leaders best able to navigate this ‘new normal’ will be those who are open-minded, inquisitive and interested, agile, flexible and adaptable. Those who can unlock different talents and cultures to achieve different answers. Who can support and manage different types of agile, innovative teams, doing different things, with new and different ideas from those that appeared to work up until this point. They also have to put their people’s growth and success ahead of their own. Think stewardship, rather than ‘winner/hero leadership’. In other words, they need to be Inclusive Leaders.

However, as we’ve talked to leaders, we’re often struck by the lack of understanding in their role as Inclusive Leaders in unlocking the **Diversity Dividend for their organisations. There seems to be some hesitancy, and confusion still.

Without authentic ownership, there’s no change

Perhaps, it’s legacy ideas and issues about leadership? Or lack of development which might limit a leader’s capacity to be authentic? To openly admit to what they don’t know and be open about their development?

For some leaders, it appears as though it’s more important to hide their limitations or ignorance than own and change it. Often, in their commitment to avoid looking unknowledgeable, they can come up with plausible-sounding language. Sometimes, not even. But this flannel and ‘stuckness’ is also the hallmark of out-of-date, rigid, command and control leaders too.

It’s not just about being Inclusive Leaders per se, or about D&I, but a general leadership issue. In their attempts to appear knowledgeable and manage their brand, they don the mask and tone of authority and opine but then don’t actually do anything with their ‘intelligent’ sounding insights — except, you know… talk about it.

This has their diverse colleagues screaming out in frustration, bordering on anguish!

This incongruent posturing confuses and slows innovation, change and business improvement.

Leaders see understand the language, but don’t always grasp that it starts with their own change. And that’s the issue, isn’t it?

To quote Peter Senge “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

Leaders need to lean in, embrace and own Inclusion and the change it brings, not wait for it to be forced on them, when it may be too late anyway.

An example of this is when leaders demand that their people or culture change. They lament the fact they’ve got the wrong people, culture, tools, processes, structure or products to meet rapidly changing market conditions.

“If only we were more agile,” they say. “But we’re too slow, too inflexible”.

They want rid of their deadweight ‘change blockers’. They want fresh attitudes, open minds, ambition, energy, new ideas and innovation and be free of the old, lethargic, apathetic, stale and pale managers and people.

But they say it like it isn’t THEIR responsibility to make it happen.

Let’s try an analogy — “I don’t want to get bowel cancer, but I don’t want to change my diet or habits. Why should I?”

Get the point?

Leaders model the right behaviours and beliefs. But just as the sight of a horse and cart, then the bowler hat, then the Filofax, or a press button mobile phone become symbols of the out-of-touch, so does the experience of the old models of leadership. And no-one optimises ‘old skool’ leadership better than Phillip Green, whose situation must serve as a warning for leaders who refuse to move with the times.

Which ambitious, capable or smart person would tolerate those obsolete command and control methods any longer? In my conversations with people who worked with Sir Philip, he seemed to have deeply understood refinancing/restructuring and business modelling to achieve significant short-term wins, but he didn’t seem to understand, or value inclusivity, culture or digital change. He was the very opposite of the Inclusive leader — by all accounts, he was old fashioned, out-of-touch, technophobic, controlling, bullying, ego-driven, brittle, command and control type of leader, who just wasn’t able to move fast enough as the market turned against him.

He’s a bit of an obvious, villainous, pantomime example of a non-inclusive leader, but how many business leaders still hold on to aspects of his attitude, character and behaviours? Ideas and behaviours that are clearly cancerous to the success of their organisation.

Defining the Inclusive Leader and Inclusive Manager

Let’s set out what the Inclusive leader needs to embody. They need to be:

Authentic and genuine

Emotionally elastic, flexible and resilient

Positive and optimistic

Interested and inquisitive — in ideas, others, different perspectives and realities

Adaptable and creative — can handle ambiguity and constant change and can use inclusion and diversity to create new and better outcomes

Not scared to lean in and be with the change, however challenging.

However, it’s not enough to merely embody Inclusive Leadership. Leaders also have to manage diverse teams successfully too. Leaders and managers will need to lead different sorts of people, in different ways, to achieve different outcomes they will need to:

Create trust, by constantly being inclusive and by owning and delivering their accountabilities

Integrate different views and ideas into successful execution and change

Build diverse talent and develop diverse teams and individuals

Integrate agile working through inclusive and growth attitudes

Create ‘followship’ by a compelling inclusive vision that drives innovation, change and clear business success

Implementing Inclusion programmes

Let’s go back to Senge, and his change model for implementing business Inclusion programmes successfully. He states “change is hampered by resistance created by the cultural habits of the prevailing system. No amount of expert advice is useful. It’s essential to develop reflection and inquiry skills so that the real problems can be discussed”. He sets out four criteria for successfully initiating change.

There must be a compelling case for change. There must be time to change. There must be help during the change process. As the perceived barriers to change are removed, it is important that some new problem — one perhaps not before considered important or even recognized — doesn’t become a critical barrier.

As we all know, most business change programmes don’t work because the leaders don’t fully understand the change, buy into, own or execute the change themselves successfully. Similarly, most business D&I programmes/strategies aren’t successful because they’re stifled by the fact that their leaders aren’t inclusive themselves.

They don’t properly understand, nor authentically model inclusive leadership. They still (wrongly) believe that D&I is a peripheral issue, which should sit with HR, not understanding its urgency or its benefits.

D&I on the cheap

How many leaders will end up merely talking about D&I and Inclusive leadership?

Upon realising that they need to change, resource and own the implementation of Diversity and Inclusion, some leaders may be tempted to kick it down the road for someone else to resolve. In order to manage that unpalatable action, they will use pleasant but undermining language, pointing to ‘more pressing’ issues. Not realising that in their fear of change and biases, they may end up looking a bit like Philip Green. Out of touch.

We have already seen business leaders talking about “wanting to do D&I in-house” Read — on the cheap. Or worse, they’ve “created online support resource materials to help our diverse staff”. As if online materials were the reason diverse people can’t flourish in their organisation. Perhaps they’re hoping that 3 years from now, their already out-of-date, inflexible, slow-to-change business will magically be more forward-looking, diverse, inclusive, agile or adaptable?

Ultimately though, leaders will either need to become inclusive leaders, or they’ll need to go.

*McKinsey and Company 2019, BCG 2018, Korn Ferry Institute 2018.