Understanding Inclusive Leadership and the Need for Training

In the 21st-century industry, where businesses have gone global, companies rely on diversity. They create multidisciplinary teams that encompass employees of different cultural heritages and different backgrounds. However, simply including a mix of individuals in one team doesn’t guarantee the desired results. It requires inclusive leadership.

What is Inclusive Leadership

It is a practice that defines how to respect diversity and inherent differences in an organization. A company can have employees of different ethnicity, gender, and age. There could be several things that may make individuals unique. They include education, persona, socioeconomic status, career experience, and others. Through inclusive leadership, a company can encourage these employees to collaborate together and work to achieve common organizational goals.

In the last few years, studies have been conducted to understand if diverse teams benefit organizations or if companies function better with individuals who look alike and think in similar ways. It has been found that diverse teams, in general, outperform homogeneous teams. Apart from that, they help companies in improving productivity and driving innovation.

Inclusion describes three things:

1. Showing respect for difference

2. Engaging with differences

3. Valuing the different views and opinions of all

An individual who encourages others to implement these three things can be defined as an inclusive leader. He or she demonstrates how to engage with differences and optimize performance. Also, the leader spans division and functional boundaries to access diversity.

Need for Inclusive Leadership Training

Inclusive leaders need to be responsive, flexible, and adaptive to adopt the change and teach others how to implement these behaviors. Also, they foster psychological safety so that people feel willing to express themselves. They provide employees with an environment where they feel safe to speak out about what they believe

Until a few years ago, only a handful of organizations practiced inclusion in the workplace. However, it has grown as a practice that transforms average companies into organizations with high-performing teams.

An inclusive leadership training program works as a practical roadmap that helps team leaders in developing inclusive behaviors. The program includes various kinds of learning and development tools that assist leaders to model inclusion as a part of organizational culture to achieve goals.

A leadership training program on inclusion can have different parts:

● Workshops: Here, leaders learn about inclusive behaviors and practice them.

● Assessment: Participants are measured on inclusion understanding and ability.

● Action Learning: In this part, leaders in the program implement practical behavioral challenges.

● E-learning: This is an online platform to help embed an inclusive mindset.

● Coaching: It offers personalized support to use new concepts.

In the End

Companies can use inclusion as a process to create a healthy work environment where employees learn to respect views of people with differences and focus on achieving common organizational goals. So inclusive leadership describes how to show respect for differences and encourage others for differences. Also, it teaches how to embed an inclusive culture in their teams and tell how to practice it.