This article is written by Rosa Alianelli, Information Management Associate – UNICC, Brindisi, BR, Italy.

  • The problem: Having an inclusive leadership based management model is important.
  • Why it matters: Inclusive leadership not only provides managers with an effective decision-making and operational reference model, but ensures that its staff feels involved, protected, appreciated and gives the working context a positive and highly attractive imprint.
  • The solution: The timely and structured adoption of a work management model based on open and inclusive leadership is a guarantee for organisations of growth, continuous improvement, participation, sharing the path to achieve the same goals, guided by a common vision built together by investing equal enthusiasm, effort and commitment.

Inclusive leaders are critical to success, as they unlock individual potential, enhance the collective power of teams, and support your organisation's ability to innovate and grow.

What is inclusive leadership?

Leadership is firstly about people: it is about leaders enabling people to do what they need to do in the most productive and beneficial way. Recent research and studies have proved that inclusive leadership is the primary source that motivates employee engagement in boundary-spanning activities, which fosters innovation and growth in business.

Inclusive leaders are critical to success, as they unlock individual potential, enhance the collective power of teams, and support your organisation's ability to innovate and grow. In the context of social sustainability, inclusiveness is considered a key objective to be pursued and constantly improved. Organisations that today want to define themselves as sustainable and be recognised as such, alongside purely financial outcomes, must create another type of value which is intangible but equally essential (in terms of reputation and in terms of opportunities): a common vision and a leadership style that are open and participated in by all the managers and the "managed" ones.

Key principles in Open Leadership are:

  • Creating a common noble purpose to which everybody can refer in their daily working life, which could be inspiring and, at the meantime, be a guidance to make decisions and choices;
  • Put the talent at the centre, take the right time to know your collaborators, their strengths, their skills, address values and, starting from there, put them in the conditions to express them at their best giving the most to the organisation;
  • Adopting a human-centric approach, where people are resources even more valuable than any strategic assets.

Operational principles of open leadership are:

  • Enthusiasm for the common vision (lived, renewed, capillary, conveyed);
  • A focus on human relationships; Resilience; Problem-solving approach; Presence.

Although each manager may have a personal leadership style, there are some key leadership mindsets that are generally valid and help to shape managers' behaviours: self-awareness, curiosity, courage, vulnerability, and empathy. These mindsets are critical for leaders' ability to create an environment where all employees feel respected, valued, and able to contribute their best work.

Roadmap to develop a culture of inclusive leadership

Now that we have some background, let's go back to your question: what can you do to develop inclusive leadership capabilities?

  1. First, it is important to understand if your management is really committed to an inclusive leadership style. Educating managers on the benefits of diversity and inclusiveness in the workplace is a great starting point (their support is essential to realise it). Examples of benefits are:

    a. retention of employees,

    b. humanising the workplace–when great people are properly empowered, they do great things,

    c. and nurturing the collaboration with as many different voices as possible only brings added value, since inclusion means a larger pool of different people to recruit from, which means a bigger opportunity to find the top talents;

  2. Similarly, motivate and involve staff offering them meaningful opportunities for engagement;

  3. Create your organisation’s own leadership brand (knowing the organisational context is crucial, as open leadership initiatives vary from organisation to organisation, depending on the needs and areas for improvement);

  4. Create employee-led task forces and assign roles and tasks to launch your brand;

  5. The basis of realising an inclusive leadership style is creating an inclusive culture in the organisation: work on that as the first step! How? a. Educate your leaders;

    b. Form an inclusion committee;

    c. Value all diversities and celebrate cultural differences, address all aspects of diversity (example: my team had a Chinese food lunch with Chinese music and a short presentation explaining the historical roots and the social meaning of this event when the Chinese new year started; we have replaced the Christmas Season lunch with a Winter Holidays International lunch where each employee brings a traditional dish from his/her country and, together with food, many culture and traditions are "brought on the plate");

    d. Acknowledge holidays of all cultures;

    e. Zero tolerance for racism and discriminations and labels of any kind (many different initiatives have been done, for instance celebrating the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21st March, watching and discussing themed movie and documentaries, bringing witnesses);

    f. Consider applying targeted changes in policies and practices (where necessary) involving the HR officers; nominating an ombudsman for consultations considered more sensitive;

    g. Communicate the importance of managing bias, identify and eliminate them (making sure employees understand stereotypes, which are the foundation for unconscious bias; be transparent about your hiring and promotion process maybe establishing a review committee; have a performance management review system and have clear criteria for evaluating qualifications and performance);

    h. Listen to your people to address any kind of feeling of discrimination or intolerance and also to amplify marginalised voices;

    i. Use inclusive language;

    j. Communicate goals and measure progress.

  6. Establish your objectives (making them SMART) and the timeline and communicate vertically each of them (ensure that nobody is left behind this discussion, using each available means, including the less formal tools like organisation’s intranet, or an organisation’s social media. If you don’t have one, get it and create proper pages or groups where people post about #InclusiveLeadership);

  7. Prepare a roadmap or action plan: how you want to achieve your objectives?

Ideas to get started

Examples of activities that can be proposed within an organisation, a division or a team to develop inclusive leadership skills:

  • Prepare a strategic training programme on open leadership (from management for staff), if necessary, consult an external expert. Remember: strong leaders come from strong leadership examples and strong development programmes;
  • Launch surveys on specific topics (e.g. pay equity, unconscious bias…) to seek ideas of improvement for business management or the staff welfare or management style (for staff) and accept and consider constructive critical feedback (for managers);
  • Organise employer-sponsored diversity and inclusion awareness events for staff (show how diversity can be a competitive advantage for the organisation and for the staff themselves);
  • Setting an example; inclusive leaders who display characteristics of openness, accessibility and availability have a positive effect on the staff commitment and boundary-spanning exploration (for managers);
  • Be transparent: everyone in the organisation should practise transparency and this is (also) done through an open, constant and effective communication;
  • Plan informal meetings (example brown bag lunches) ensuring that people from different backgrounds and teams attend, to open discussions, ask questions, share experiences, purposefully ask for other’s opinions, show interest (for managers);
  • Involve and be involved in the decision-making process (for managers and staff);
  • Promote internal mentoring programmes (from management to staff) and targeted development opportunities;
  • Organise periodic role-playing games (example: shadowing managers/staff, staff covering manager’s roles/tasks for one day, swapping staff and especially managers from a team to another, from a unit to another…)
  • Invest in educating leaders (emotional intelligence trainings, team building exercises, active listening workshops...);
  • Create (and maintain) two-way communication channels;
  • Creating a sense of belonging with the organisation (example: our organisation's staff has received reusable aluminium bottles with our organisation's logo and the names printed on, to have a common representative gadget and to support the greening the office initiatives);
  • Practise empathetic leadership (we call each other by first name, including our managers);
  • Inclusive leaders keep their people curious. In order to keep people curious, they understand their people’s interests, strengths, ambitions, and aptitudes. This is both a way to show real interest in them and to promote the creativity of their employees;
  • Offer employees development opportunities;
  • Develop a collaborative environment (if you check previous articles shared by Apolitical you will find multiple ideas for team building and collaboration exercises);
  • Making sure employees feel valued (promote integrated welfare, total reward technique, talent management programmes).

Recommendations and resources

If you want more recommendations you could refer to the standards that norm the social responsibility of companies and organisations: SA8000 (Social Accountability Management standards), SR10 (Social Responsibility Management standards) and ISO 26000 (guide to Corporate Social Responsibility).

Adapted from this Q&A on developing inclusive leadership.

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