Leadership Valentine - A Culture of Inclusion

An inclusive culture means more than just a diverse workforce; inclusion refers not to who is in the workforce but to how people treat each other.

I was in the 4th grade and Valentine's Day was approaching. Mrs. Arthur made a rule for us that we hadn't had before. If we had a Valentine for anyone's "mail box," we had to have a Valentine for everyone's mail box. She wanted to ensure that no one felt left out. In your organization, the behaviors that include or exclude aren't usually as easy to identify as Valentines in a mail box but they exert a powerful effect on how people feel and how work gets done.

Your culture must be truly inclusive to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce. Inclusion is no longer optional, something you delegate to human resources, or something you do only to be "politically correct." There are many reasons that inclusion is critical to your success. I want to focus on two - the market and innovation.

What is the face of your market? Is it uniform and homogenous or is it diverse and heterogeneous? Pretty likely it's diverse - a mix of people from different ethnic groups, nationalities, genders, religions, and sexual orientations. People with different thinking styles, world views, abilities, and disabilities. Will a diverse team understand that market, anticipate its needs, and intuit its preferences better than a homogenous team? Pretty likely. But so far, we're only talking about diversity. To create a high performing diverse team, your culture must be truly inclusive.

A CEO, lamenting the lack of diversity on his Board, put it this way. "Our client population is very diverse -- ethnicity, socio-economic background, abilities and disabilities, family status, age -- you name it. How do we expect a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged white guys to understand and anticipate their concerns?" Good question! Dealing with this issue doesn't mean that the demographics of your organization have to mirror those of your target market perfectly. But it does mean that your culture has to support diversity and inclusion.

You know that innovation is key to your success. Innovation and change are more easily fostered when there are differences. Let's take a simple example. Given a puzzle to solve, mixed gender teams will often outperform teams of all women or all men. Why? One reason is that men and women tend to have different patterns of thinking and communicating. The mixed gender teams thus have a broader set of mental resources available to them. In systems language, this is part of the "law of requisite variety." According to this law, the system with more variety will prevail over the one with less variety.

When differences come together in a respectful, open way, the team "brain" has access to enormous resources. Differences, creatively engaged, foster innovation. Building a culture of inclusion is how you make that happen.

Inclusion is not about giving members of disadvantaged groups a chance or any other socially conscious motivation. Although being socially conscious is a good thing, the business driver for inclusion is your success in the market.

Lack of diversity, the "middle-aged white guys" stage lamented by the CEO above, is a problem in terms of your connection to, and responsiveness to, your market. Look at your executive team, your board of directors, your sales force, your entire company. Do those groups look at least somewhat like your market? If not, your organization lacks the diversity that is essential to your success.

This Valentine's Day, give your organization the Valentine of inclusion. As the Beatles said, "Love is all there is."

If your culture is not inclusive, that's a problem too. It means that your culture doesn't offer full respect and participation to a range of diverse people and styles. Your culture doesn't yet enable all employees to participate fully. A diverse workforce needs this culture of inclusion to thrive. To see where you stand on this score, you'll need to look through the eyes of someone who is part of a non-dominant group in your organization. If you are a member of the dominant group, it can be hard to see the signs of exclusion and disrespect. Those behaviors generally will not be directed toward you and they are often inadvertent and subtle.

Without a culture of inclusion, your attempts to create a workforce that mirrors your market are doomed to fail. People either will leave or the organization will become fragmented and unproductive. Add a culture of inclusion and the disruption becomes creative and innovative, facilitating positive change.