Inclusive Leadership

Transforming Diverse Lives, Workplaces, and Societies

Bernardo M. Ferdman, Jeanine Prime, Ronald E. Riggio, Bernardo M. Ferdman, Jeanine Prime, Ronald E. Riggio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429831386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

In a time of increasing divisiveness in politics and society there is a desperate need for leaders to bring people together and leverage the power of diversity and inclusion. Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Diverse Lives, Workplaces, and Societies provides leaders with guidance and hands-on strategies for fostering inclusion and explains how and why it matters.

Inclusive Leadership explores cutting-edge theory, research, practice, and experience on the pivotal role of leadership in promoting inclusion in diverse teams, organizations, and societies. Chapters are authored by leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of leadership, diversity, and inclusion. The book is solidly grounded in research on inclusive leadership development, diversity management, team effectiveness, organization development, and intergroup relations. Alongside the exhaustive scholarship are practical suggestions for making teams, groups, organizations, and the larger society more inclusive and, ultimately, more productive.

Leaders and managers at all levels, HR professionals, and members of diverse teams will find Inclusive Leadership invaluable in becoming more effective at cultivating inclusive climates and realizing its many benefits—including innovation, enhanced team and organizational performance, and social justice.

For more, visit: https://inclusiveleader.com

Part I

From Exclusion to Inclusion

The Challenges of Inclusive Leadership

1 Inclusive Leadership

The Fulcrum of Inclusion

Bernardo M. Ferdman

The ability to be inclusive and to foster and sustain an inclusive culture in groups, workplaces, and communities is a critical component of 21st-century leadership. Successful and effective leadership in today’s organizations and societies and in those of the future requires strong understanding of and skills for creating and catalyzing opportunities to benefit from all types of diversity and to enhance these capacities in oneself and others. Thus, inclusive leadership goes well beyond cultural competence or managing diversity to incorporate creating and fostering the conditions that allow everyone—across and with their differences and without having to subsume or hide valued identities—to be at and to do their best, to see the value in doing so, and to belong and participate in ways that are safe, engaging, appreciated, and fair. In short, inclusive leadership means bringing inclusion to life, whether in an interpersonal relationship, a work group, an organizational system, or a community. Beyond facilitating participation, voice, and belonging without requiring assimilation, inclusive leadership also involves fostering equity and fairness across multiple identities.

In recent years, as the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion around the world and especially in organizations has expanded, the number of articles, books, blogs, speeches, and other material addressing aspects of inclusive leadership has also grown. These perspectives on inclusive leadership tend to vary in at least three major ways. The first relates to how much explicit and focal attention is given to diversity, intergroup dynamics, and equity. The second has to do with the levels of system that are addressed: intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, organizational, and/or societal. A third aspect of variation—often cross-cutting the other two—involves the degree to which traditional hierarchical structures are assumed, such that leadership is seen as the responsibility of and primarily emanating from those holding particular positions (e.g., executive, manager, supervisor, etc.)—in other words, as being based on a particular role—versus viewing leadership as a social process constructed collectively and relationally and constituted by a set of functions and processes that produce direction, alignment, and commitment (Drath et al., 2008) and that also serve to catalyze adaptive work (Heifetz & Laurie, 1997) by individuals and groups.

In my own work on inclusion and inclusive leadership over the years, both on my own and with colleagues (e.g., Ferdman, 2014b, 2017; Ferdman & Brody, 1996; Gallegos et al., 2020; Holvino et al., 2004; Wasserman et al., 2008), I have sought to integrate these perspectives, proposing a multi-level systemic view of the practice of inclusion (Ferdman, 2014b) and its goals, and highlighting the importance of addressing multiple social identities and cultures as core to inclusion (e.g., Ferdman, 1995). In this chapter, I apply this approach to lay out elements of a broad and integrative framework for inclusive leadership that considers individual and collective effectiveness as well the importance of participation, engagement, safety, voice, and equity in the context of the complexity and intersectionality of multiple social identities, intergroup relations, and their multifaceted organizational and societal manifestations.

I do so in the context of a view of leadership that acknowledges the particular responsibilities of those with authority in a group, organization, or community, but that also recognizes the ways in which anyone in these systems can display acts of leadership—acts that in some way move that system toward adaptive work, greater inclusion, and mutually beneficial processes and outcomes. In particular, I ground this aspect of my approach to inclusive leadership in the work of Heifetz and colleagues (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz & Laurie, 1997; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002), who describe leadership as an activity, not a set of personality characteristics; for them the core activity of leadership is mobilizing groups and individuals to address adaptive challenges, and helping to create the conditions that make this adaptive work possible.

The central questions that inclusive leadership—and inclusive leaders—address, in this conceptualization, include the following:

1. How can people work and live together, interact, and engage in positive and mutually enhancing ways—productively, effectively, and authentically—in diverse groups, organizations, and communities while maintaining valued identities and cultures and fostering equity and fairness? How can collectives use their differences as a source of benefit for both individual members and the whole?
2. What behavior, mindsets, values, interactions, norms, policies, processes, and systems encourage, support, and incentivize people to work together and interact positively while maintaining their multiple identities, their cultures, and their sense of authenticity? How does the practice of inclusion manifest in a particular group, organization, or community? What do equity and fairness mean in that same collective (and in the larger systems of which it is a part)?
3. How can these goals and the factors that bring them about be clarified, articulated, and implemented so as to catalyze sustainable changes on the part of individuals and collectives?
4. What are the individual qualities, behaviors, and interactions that support finding answers to these questions and implementing them?

The key to inclusive leadership is the way in which it helps people, groups, organizations, and societies find answers to these questions that work, that are sustainable, and that maximize experiences of inclusion, across a range of identities and social positions (Ferdman, 2014b). I refer to inclusive leadership as the fulcrum of inclusion because it plays a key role in magnifying inclusion within levels of analysis and transmuting inclusion across levels of analysis—from micro to macro and vice versa. Although specific answers to the questions can and do vary across contexts, depending for example on the particular diversity dimensions and their dynamics relevant in a specific collective, inclusive leadership involves mobilizing people to jointly co-construct the best and most sustainable approaches.

The first question has to do with inclusion—defining and clarifying it, and giving it a prominent role in social collectives—whether a group, an organization, or a whole society. Inclusive leadership both makes this question and the need to address it prominent and also supports the adaptive work needed to address it. The second and third questions have to do with individual and collective change and even transformation, so as to help foster and instill new ways of thinking, behaving, interacting, and engaging across differences in these social collectives. This can often require reassessing and redefining previously held practices, ideas, or values that serve as barriers to inclusion and equity. And the final question has to do with noting and raising up the perspectives, voices, and influence of those most likely to support changes needed to drive and sustain inclusion and equity.

In the rest of this chapter, I provide a frame to help think about these processes that constitute inclusive leadership. First, I define inclusive leadership through the lens of diversity, inclusion, and equity in a multilevel systems perspective. Then I expand on this definition to discuss how inclusive leadership serves a pivotal role as a fulcrum or force multiplier to foster and magnify inclusion at micro and macro levels and to connect micro and macro aspects of inclusion. I conclude by discussing key elements of inclusive leadership and a set of behaviors that leaders can use to increase and facilitate inclusion and that are likely to foster this within- and cross-level reverberation of inclusion.

Leadership through the Lens of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity

Inclusion is fundamental for the success of diverse groups, organizations, and societies (Ferdman, 2014b). It supports equity, encourages people’s multi-faceted talents and contributions and permits reaping their benefits, and also supports individual development, growth, engagement, and self-determination (Ferdman, 2014b, 2017). In sum, it is the short answer to the first question posed earlier. So, how does each of these concepts—diversity, equity, inclusion—matter for leadership?

Diversity and Inclusive Leadership

Diversity is essentially the “representation of multiple identity groups and their cultures in a particular organization or workgroup” (Ferdman, 2014b, p. 3) or in a larger system, such as a community or society. (It is important to highlight that diversity is always an attribute of a collective, and never of a specific individual. There is no such thing as a “diverse person,” in spite of frequent use of that term to denote someone different than the dominant group.) Diversity is both simple and complex, which I have previously explained as follows:

At its most basic level, diversity is simply about difference; people vary in many ways, some based on individual differences and others grounded in the range of social identities and groups that we belong to. At the same time, diversity can be multilayered and complex, because these identities and characteristics combine within each of us, and because there are histories of relationships between groups that also come into play.

When we first hear about diversity, we tend to focus on demographic or identity dimensions, especially the most visible ones (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, culture, age, national background, sexual orientation, physical ability/disability). At the same time, diversity also involves less visible and more individual dimensions (e.g., personality, abilities, thinking style, values, experiences). In short, diversity involves the differences and similarities among people across many dimensions represented in a particular group or organization. These dimensions combine within individuals, influencing how we approach and experience work and life as well as how we perceive and treat each other.

(Ferdman, 2018, paras 3–4)

Diversity and its dynamics at different levels of system—whether in a group, an organization, or a community—present both challenges and opportunities for leaders. As has become clearer from a growing body of theory, research, and practice, diverse collectives can derive great benefit from their differences, but can also experience tensions related to those same differences. Phillips (2014), for example, compellingly summarized how racial, gender, and other types of diversity in groups can lead to availability of more information, more creativity, greater innovation, and deeper processing. But truly gaining these benefits requires more attention to process and to creating opportunities for the differences to emerge in the service of collective goals (see, e.g., Creary et al., 2019). This also means removing invidious biases, discrimination, and other barriers to diversity in the first place.

Given that diversity is a reality in most human collectives—whether workgroups, organizations, or the larger society—it is also a critical leadership issue. A key aspect of inclusive leadership, then, involves awareness of, attitudes about, and approaches to diversity:

At both societal and organizational levels, leaders must in some way address diversity and intergroup relations. Doing this requires addressing questions about the proper role of differences in culture and identity at both individual and group levels and about appropriate ways to structure relationships across these differences. It also requires clarifying which differences matter, in what ways, and to whom. Answers to these questions are often grounded in widely divergent values and ideologies regarding diversity.

(Ferdman, 2017, p. 238)

Inclusive leadership requires mindsets and skills for noticing, engaging with, and creating space for multiple dimensions of diversity, as well as the varying ways in which people deal with this diversity. It requires being able to explain how diversity matters, and to help people close the gap between the tendency to avoid, reject, or minimize differences in identities or cultures and the need to move toward approaches that highlight the value of diversity and other positive diversity mindsets (van Knippenberg et al., 2013) that allow for, encourage, and support deriving the mutual benefits of diversity (e.g., Bennett, 2014; Hannum et al., 2010; Miller & Katz, 2007). Thus, inclusive leadership involves noting the identities and associated differences that matter, and providing space and perspectives to help people recognize, appreciate, address, and work with these differences in a positive way (see, e.g., Creary, this volume; Ferdman, 2017; Plaut et al., 2009; Rock et al., 2016), as well as challenging invidious biases and discriminatory beliefs and practices.

A key element for making this happen is inclusion, another core foundation for inclusive leadership and essential for deriving the benefits of diversity (Ferdman & Deane, 2014), which I address in the next section.

Inclusion and Inclusive Leadership

Inclusion is a system of “creating and embedding organizational, leadership, and interpersonal practices that result in a sense of safety, full belonging, participation, and voice across the range of diversity dimensions, without requiring assimilation or loss of valued identities” (Ferdman, 2016, para. 4). Inclusion is a fundamental practice—at the individual, group, and organizational levels—for gaining the benefits of diversity and for making it possible for all people to flourish and to contribute at their best and is thus a foundational element of organizational success. At the societal level, it is similar, but perhaps even more complex, given the range of social institutions and settings involved.

The essence of inclusion has to do with how much people feel appreciated, valued, safe, respected, engaged, able to be authentic, and therefore able and willing to provide their full contributions to the collective, whether in work or other settings—both as individuals and as members of multiple identity groups (Ferdman, 2014b); people feel included when they can fully belong without having to subsume their uniqueness or their differences from others (Ferdman, 2010...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Editors
• Contributors
• Series Foreword
• Preface and Overview: Inclusive Leadership
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Challenges of Inclusive Leadership
• PART II: Leadership Practices for Fostering and Benefiting from Inclusive Interpersonal and Team Dynamics
• PART III: Leadership Practices for Building Inclusive Organizations
• PART IV: Leadership Practices for Fostering Inclusive Societies
• PART V: Approaches and Resources for Developing Inclusive Leadership
• PART VI: Reflections and Conclusion
• Index