Inclusive Leadership Encourages Business Growth By Including New Perspectives
Multiple surveys and studies have shown that a business that adopts Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles puts itself on a path to growth when stacked up against companies that do not. While it is unfortunate that both terms have become highly politicized, the numbers around the success of companies adopting DEI and ESG are undeniable.
A McKinsey study conducted in 2020 found that a company with significant gender diversity would financially outperform competitors by 25%, while a business that championed ethnic diversity could expect to outperform by 36% on average.
Such companies are likely to encourage managers to adopt an inclusive leadership style too, which can help businesses grow.
What is an Inclusive Leadership Style
According to the Harvard Business Review, inclusive leaders share the following traits:
- Visible commitment to diversity and inclusion
- Humility
- Awareness of bias and promotion of meritocracy
- Curiosity about others and empathy
- Cultural intelligence
- Effective collaboration
With employees reporting that what a leader says and does makes up 70% of what an individual staff member needs to feel included, it is imperative that managers develop the above traits if they want to truly be inclusive.
An inclusive leader will do a number of things to practice, including forming personal advisory groups to give them unbiased feedback, sharing their inclusion learnings with their wider team in town halls or similar forums, and moving out of their comfort zones by having regular interaction with more diverse stakeholders.
The Effectiveness of Inclusive Leadership in the Workplace
The business case for inclusive leadership is in the ability to leverage diverse thinking in increasingly global landscapes and markets.
When a problem is viewed through the usual lens of a few people from one background, it’s a narrow view which rarely yields the best solution. Inclusive leadership puts more people at the table, allowing a business problem to be considered from multiple perspectives and ultimately resulting in better business outcomes.
Data about the work habits and patterns of employees can be used by inclusive leaders as a template that anyone can follow in order to improve their productivity - Prodoscore, our employee productivity monitoring solution, has a significant role to play here.
Prodoscore is a telescope that empowers an organization to find its stars. Numbers tell a fair and impartial story, and Prodoscore allows you to discover what your high-performing employees are doing with their days so you can create a template for the rest of your team. Often, these employees aren’t who you think they are, which can be due to a set of unconscious biases around class, education or background. Inclusive leaders actively seek out any tool that allows them to maximize people power without bias.
The Difference Between Inclusive Leadership and Servant Leadership
Inclusive leadership differs from servant leadership in that it is more of a top-down approach. While servant leaders employ a high degree of empathy and humility, as inclusive leaders do, their primary focus is to serve their people in order to strengthen the team.
Managers who want to lead with empathy will generally use both of these leadership styles. Additionally, a servant leader may not be considering the principles of diversity and inclusion when making decisions, but rather the individual and collective needs of the team. Both, however, are empathic leadership styles.
Can a Formerly Non-Inclusive Manager Learn Inclusive Leadership?
Part of being an inclusive leader is recognizing our own biases and behaviors. Every human being is capable of change. The DEI/ESG business climate is new to everyone, having only been recognized as a major driver of monetary business growth within the past decade. If a company is adopting these principles, they are likely to have training available to the entire workforce.
The only thing a manager may have to develop on their own to adopt any kind of empathic leadership style is emotional intelligence. Often, we spend most of our careers developing and upskilling our intellectual knowledge base. Not much time is spent in formal education or professional development courses focusing on emotional intelligence. However, it is increasingly on the rise and is now considered to be at least equally as important as intellectual intelligence.
The Niagara Institute found that emotional intelligence is absolutely necessary for leaders, with the following striking statistics:
-Only 22% of 155,000 surveyed leaders had high emotional intelligence
-Staff with emotionally intelligent leaders were four times less likely to leave their jobs
A formerly non-inclusive manager can absolutely become an inclusive manager, but generally only if they make a conscious effort to develop their emotional intelligence and learn everything they can about DEI and ESG. In addition, the Harvard Business Review found that only one in three leaders accurately view their own inclusive leadership capabilities, so everyone can use some training around these skills.
If you want to make sure you are being truly inclusive, it helps to know what everyone on your team is doing so you can reward the good in your organization. Our employee productivity management solution, Prodoscore, will help you find hidden diverse talent and reward it. Contact us for a demonstration today!
