Myths of Inclusive Leadership [PODCAST]

Phil Cross: There’s a pervasive myth in a lot of leadership teams and organisations that I have to be confident to be credible, that I have to have all the answers to, you know, to, to, to be credible in the eyes of my team. And really nothing can be further from the truth. Having the vulnerability to say, I don’t know is a sign of strength.
Um, and it will, you know, it will build trust, it will build psychological safety with your team. And it allows you to open up a dialogue. More importantly as well, it allows you to have conversations where you do find out more about the individuals that you are leading.

Kerry Boys: Welcome to the Inclusion at Work podcast.
I’m Kerry Boy, co-founder of Leaders for Good. And with me I have Phil Cross. Today we want to talk to you about one of our favourite topics because it’s a really highly misunderstood one. That’s the world of inclusive leadership. And the reason we say it’s misunderstood is that we so often in sessions hear people talk about things that make them lack engagement with inclusive leadership.
So, we see it as a driver of high performance, but very often leaders tell us they think that inclusive leadership means soft and fuzzy. So, what we want to do in this episode is talk to you about the myths that we most often hear about inclusive leadership. And they’re really important because if people have misconceptions, not only might they not engage with inclusive leadership, but the work they’re trying to do to be more inclusive leaders might also not quite hit the mark.
So, the way we’re going to do that today is by having this discussion about those myths that we see and think about how we can remove some of those barriers so that people can be more inclusive and effective leaders.

Phil Cross: Before we get into the myths of inclusive leadership, we wanted to spend a moment talking about the why.
Why is it important for you as a leader to focus on being a more inclusive leader? Why is it important for you as perhaps a people and culture professional to try and make this part of the culture in your organisation and. While the myths, I think, will do a really good job of highlighting some of the important reasons why we might want to focus on this.
We wanted to get at the heart of the why more directly right up at the, right up at the start. So, what we’re not going to do here is share endless stats with you. There are a lot of studies, there’s a lot of research that points to inclusive leaders being more effective leaders. We wanted to spend some time instead highlighting some of the very real ways in which inclusive or non-inclusive environments impact every person in your organisation every day.
And we just need to think about this from, a kind of evolutionary biology, from a neuroscience perspective. And we can think about it in two different ways. First of all, a threat response. We are wired as human beings to scan our environments to for threats. Um, and those threats, of course, these days don’t come in the form of save tooth tigers that are going to jump out from behind a rock and eat us.
They come in the form of social threats, threats to our sense of connectedness to other people, threats to our status or reputation. Threats to our sense of fairness within an organisation. And of course, this all links directly to the topic of inclusion. Am I, you know, have I got good relationships with the people I work with?
Are the systems and processes that I have to deal with every day? Fair. If you want to dig into these kind of motivating factors for humans, in a bit more detail, I’d recommend looking at the scarf model. We’re not going to go into all of that today, but that’s a really good, really good resource to dig into.
And we’ll, we’ll link that in the, link that in the show notes. When our sense of connection to other people or our sense of fairness is threatened in an organisation, we get that physiological response. We get that dump of cortisol and adrenaline, we get the firing of the amygdala, and we go into fight, flight, freeze, or please.
And if we’re getting that chemical cocktail of, of hormones on a daily basis. and we’re going to either low level or quite substantial levels of fight, flight, freeze, please. That has a really direct impact on a few things. Firstly, our wellbeing, plenty of studies have shown that social isolation, disconnection from others has a profound effect on our, sense of, anxiety, our stress levels, and ultimately can result in illness.
It has an impact on our motivation. When we feel excluded from a team, when we feel like things aren’t fair and we don’t feel a connection to the people that we’re working with, we don’t tend to want to go the extra mile. Our motivation goes down. We don’t put in that discretionary effort, and our performance suffers.
We don’t share ideas, we don’t challenge conventions, and we can spend a lot of mental energy worrying about, again, why we’re not, feeling that sense of connection with people. On the flip side, when we are creating an environment where people feel safe to share their ideas, they feel connected to people, they think things are fair and equitable, we get a very different, chemical cocktail.
We get that, oxytocin, that serotonin, that dopamine, which has a very different effect on our sense of wellbeing. It has a very different effect on our motivation. We tend to go the extra mile for teams and organisations that we feel a part of. And our performance improves. We tend to share more ideas.
We tend to challenge, we tend to engage in learning. So, at the heart of the why I believe is as leaders, we have a profound opportunity. I. Through our actions, through the systems and processes that we foster through the culture that we influence to turn the dial, to help more people feel less of that threat response and more of that safety inclusion response on a, on a day-to-day basis.
And if we can do that, if we can turn that dial, the effects on people’s wellbeing, their motivation and their performance are profoundly improved. So that’s kind of why of inclusive leadership.

Kerry Boys: So inclusive leadership, I think hopefully you can agree, is really important and we know that it’s a driver of high performance and as leaders for good.
We try and think a bit differently in the work that we do when we are thinking about how we make the best impact on diversity, equity, inclusion, or leadership or culture change. It’s about how can we unlock the psychology, I guess, to help people really understand and want to make that change. So, thinking differently about inclusive leadership.
For us, as I mentioned, we really see it as a driver and a lever for high performance. We don’t see it as soft and fluffy, and hopefully you’ll see that when we talk about these myths and how we, how we better apply them. The other thing Phil mentioned, it’s part of day to day we can’t have this as a separate way of working.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a leader or a leadership team that aren’t time poor, so how can we give them things that they can embed and don’t feel like a whole lot of extra work to do? And that flows onto the next one, which is this is building in current skills. It’s not a completely new skillset. So, things like coaching, things like feedback, doing those really well is absolutely part of inclusive leadership.
And then the final one is it has to be for your specific style. We have to help our leaders do this in a way that feels authentic to them, rather than cookie cutter, or that they’re parroting things to say, none of us want to do that and it doesn’t work. So how do we help leaders take concepts, theories, ideas, and translate it into something that’s going to work for them with their existing styles?
So, having said that, a bit of framing and some free amble, but what we want to do now is talk about four key myths that we really regularly hear and the trip leaders up. So those myths are that as an inclusive leader, I should be an expert in all things DEI. My role as a leader is to create harmony amongst my team.
I shouldn’t have any bias. And then I need to make my decisions slowly and by committee. So, we hear those really commonly, they get in the way. So, what we want to do now is unpack those in more detail and explain why. Actually, we think none of those are correct.

Phil Cross: All right so let’s kick things off with a focus on the myth that we need to, as leaders, be an expert on all things DEI.
So, when we talk to leaders often, one of the barriers that they feel, to engaging in the project of being a more inclusive leader is the pressure that they need to know everything about every underrepresented group, that they need to have all the answers and. This, of course isn’t realistic. we sat down and did the maths at a really high level.
Once we looked at, you know, lots of different groups, we looked at the subgroups within them, we looked at, all of the different nuances, you know, for example, all the different types of disability, all of the different, cultures that people are from. And, and it, it starts to get into the hundreds of things you could potentially know about as an, as a, as a leader.
And of course, that’s not feasible for anybody. And these are tough topics. Hey, they’re shades of grey. The, these aren’t black and white binary topics. So sometimes when we hold the view that, okay, I, I need to know everything that causes people to shut down from the entire project. Well, if, if I can’t do it right, I’m not going to-do it at all.
So, the main thing we want leaders to kind of reframe here is that it’s okay to not know everything. It’s normal to not know everything. And. The really key takeaway here is to share that with the team and be honest about not having all the answers. And this is really beneficial for a number of reasons.
First of all, we’re role modelling that humility, that honesty, that openness and that vulnerability. What happens when, as a leader, I say. I don’t know, is trust is built with people as opposed to pretending to have all the answers and blustering your way through a topic which can, you know, conversely dis destroy our credibility.
I. There’s a pervasive myth in a lot of leadership teams and organisations that I have to be confident to be credible, that I have to have all the answers to, you know, to, to, to be credible in the eyes of my team. And really nothing can be further from the truth. Having the vulnerability to say, I don’t know is a sign of strength.
and it will, you know, it will build trust. It’ll build psychological safety with your team. And it allows you to open up a dialogue. More importantly as well, it allows you to have conversations where you do find out more about the individuals that you are leading. Kerry, any builds on that? I.

Kerry Boys: Yeah. I guess just that by us saying we don’t know, it makes it okay for our teams to also say they don’t know.
And that’s the beauty in this, I guess, which is we need to people to feel that they can share when they don’t have answers. And that’s where we start to see things like. Mistakes being raised early, which we know can solve a lot of problems further down the road. So, I think it’s that really simple reframe, as you said, it’s like we’re not the experts here.
That’s okay. We’re not expected to be, we share what we know, what we don’t, and we ask others opinions. Especially in such a grey area, there’s not often one right answer here. So, it’s about, I you say opening up that, that dialogue.

Phil Cross: And it’s ever evolving as well, the, the landscape of. Things which are becoming the subject of conversation in the workplace is changing The, the things that people bring to the workplace, the things that we talk about in the workplace are very different from five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and they’ll be different in a handful of years’ time as well.
And that’s not to mention some of the events that happen in the world that we as leaders might need to respond to in terms of supporting our team members. Again, you’re not expected to have all of the answers, but we are expected to create the culture where we can say we don’t know, and we open up a dialogue about it.

Kerry Boys: And then I guess the one other build when we work with organisations on this one is a lot of organisations will have a value or a perspective or an approach to the work that they do with DEI. And often your role as leaders is to support that. So it might be that you don’t have the answer, but you do know that we really value inclusion in everything that we do, and therefore we need to think about things in a certain way.
Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I guess the aim here is about taking the pressure off and actually opening up a conversation versus when we’re expected to be an expert, we often shut down if.

Phil Cross: An approach and a philosophy are far more, far easier to integrate than a, a vast corpus of knowledge that we’re, we’re never going to get to the bottom of.
So, yeah.

Kerry Boys: Okay. So, our next myth is this myth that the role of an inclusive leader, or guest leaders in general is to create harmony amongst their team. So, this perception that your team should be happy, friendly, and everyone getting on and agreeing on everything. So, while that sounds great, in theory, when we see that in organisations, that is a huge red flag because that often means one of two things.
It either real means that we’ve got a really homogenous team, so everyone thinks in exactly the same way. Therefore, we don’t have any disagreement. Or it means there’s a lack of psychological safety and people aren’t comfortable to raise things when they see them and people aren’t comfortable to voice a different opinion.
So, what we are looking for instead, what a great inclusive leader drives and what a great team does, if we want to unlock high performance, is for people to be able to disagree, but in a really healthy way. And the reason that’s so important is because we want to unlock this diversity of thought. So, one of the key benefits of diversity is that we can think differently.
That means we have a different range and therefore better ideas, make better decisions, all of those good stuff. So, the way that we do that is by having productive disagreement. So rather than creating harmony amongst our team, what we’re looking for is encouraging that productive disagreement. So of course, the question is how and what does that look like?
So, what we see in unproductive disagreement or sort of swapped and falls into arguments is there’s no common goal. They’re not focused. Those conversations aren’t focused on anything that’s aligned. Obviously, they reverse then in a productive disagreement is we’ve got a common goal, we’ve got something we’re aiming for.
And then when conversations go off track, we bring them back to, okay, what are we trying to achieve here in unproductive disagreements, people are focused on being right and it’s what I’ve got to say, so that you’re not listening. In a productive disagreement. Really the focus shifts to be one of understanding.
So, trying to understand the other person’s perspective, which results in us listening, being more curious, asking questions, and then respecting the other person’s views even if we don’t agree with them. In unproductive disagreements, we often see people being angry or defensive or blame in a productive disagreement.
Really, we’re self-regulating. We’re calm, we’re non-defensive, and we’re curious, and that’s because this is about the common goal. This isn’t about us as individuals. This is about what we’re trying to achieve as a group, and we value that collective thinking in getting to that goal in unproductive disagreement, it’s about refusing to seek compromise, and it’s focused on that winning.
Whereas productive disagreement, we really believe that this disagreement can get us somewhere and that it’s beneficial, and therefore what we’re doing is focusing on that resolution. So as a leader, then, I guess there’s a couple of things we should be doing. One is sharing that content with our teams, getting us to discuss what productive versus unproductive disagreement looks like, and sharing that we want, that we’re actually aiming for this as a team, and the benefits of that.
And then within those conversations. How do we keep guiding them along those lines? So, if a conversation’s going off track, bringing it back to that common goal. If it’s still going off track, maybe we need to leave it for another time when people have calmed down. So, our role as leaders is, yeah, encouraging that productive disagreement.

Phil Cross: I guess a build there and, and something that often causes those unproductive responses to a conversation are a, a real and emotional reaction to something that has been shared. Often, we don’t get heated about things we don’t care about. And, and this, this can especially be present if we’re talking about topics of diversity and identity, for example, that, people can get understandably defensive, about their, about their position on such things.
That’s not to say it can’t apply to just general, general things in, in, in working life as well. So, part of this and part of the environment you’re creating with your team, again, is a one of psychological safety. B I think it the, the first thing that Kerry shared there in terms of potentially things to do, making sure we’re all aligned on the actual goal we’re trying to achieve.
You know, we might disagree on how we’re going to get there, but we’re aligned on, on the outcome that we’re trying to achieve. But he is also a degree of emotional intelligence and, of being able to regulate one’s state as well in, in the moment in response to things that we might have a reaction to, which is easier said than done, but it can be something that’s can be taught, can be practiced, and can be really, really effective in, in teams that are struggling with this.
So, the third myth we wanted to share with you and, and a really pervasive one, is that inclusive leaders don’t have bias. So, we have run workshops, learning and development sessions with thousands of leaders at this point. And common questions that we ask are. How much bias impacts their day-to-day decision making.
So, we often run a, often run a little poll in sessions on this and we get a really mixed bag of responses. And I’d say the vast minority of leaders are citing that. Yeah, bias impacts everything I, everything I do in terms of my thinking and my decision making, most leaders are like, yeah, maybe sometimes, or not at all.
And this kind of pairs with another question that we often ask, which is we get leaders to reflect on the words. That they associate with bias. So, what do you hear? What words spring to mind when you hear the word bias? And we get a lot of negatively framed words there. So, prejudice, prejudice, racism, sexism, discrimination, for example, I.
And the disconnect here is that most of us see ourselves as fundamentally good people. And if we see bias as something bad, we often unconsciously disconnect from the idea that it could be something that’s driving our decisions. But of course, the reality is that we are all fundamentally full of bias.
We absorb it from our environments, our experiences. And it’s just the way we, we see the world, right? We only have to look at the different attitudes of people who’ve been raised in different countries and different environments to see that that’s fundamentally true. Hey, I. We need it. It, it’s a necessary part of navigating the world.
We as human beings can only pay attention to a very small part of the total amount of information that’s surrounding us at any given moment. So, we have to have these mental models of how the world operates or we’d be. Thinking about every interaction and every situation from the ground up every time, and we’d never get anything done.
So, the reframe here for leaders is that bias isn’t a, a bad thing, it’s a normal, necessary part of being a human being. It’s a, it’s a fact of life. So, once we accept that the myth switches from leaders don’t have bias to how do we work with bias? So, our role as leaders becomes awareness of bias in ourselves, in others, in our teams, and in the systems that we use, in work.
And we’re looking for those ways to mitigate on helpful aspects of that bias in our organisations and teams. And the, one of the common ways we, we kind of kick off the conversation here. It is not to talk directly, think to things like racial bias or, or, or gender bias. Of course, those things can, have an impact, but we find a lot of teams really struggle with those as concepts in terms of a discussion.
But thinking in terms of some of the common types of cognitive bias we see in organisations, so such as affinity bias, for example. So, our tendency to seek out, be attracted to and spend time with people who are like us. How does that imp impact how we, compose our teams? How does that impact how we hire?
How does that impact, who our customers that we’re going after are, for example? So that’s just one example and there are, there are many that we don’t have time to get into today. I. But the, the key takeaway from this section is the move away from not having bias to bias being a feature of, of life, and how do we mitigate potentially unhelpful aspects of it.
Kerry, any builds there?

Kerry Boys: I think just that where we see the biggest change in bias is when we have the conversations around it with our teams. Mm. So as leaders, I think that’s the, there’s lots of things we can do. Can maybe talk about on another episode about what you can do to mitigate your own bias. I.
But I think what’s more interesting is how you have the conversations with the team, because once we start to have conversations around it, you start to be able to not only see it, but then raise it and do things about it. So often we hear from organisations when we go in, we introduce these sort of common types of bias, get them to have the teams to have conversations off the back of that.
There’s a lot more conversations. They start to raise it and start to notice it in processes or systems, and they start to raise it in conversations and that’s what we want. This has to be a discussion. Without the discussion, we don’t make any change on bias, because it’s often hard to see your own.
So, we need people to feel comfortable to be able to raise when they’re, when they’re seeing it in others as well.

Phil Cross: and, and I think, just an example from, from our, our, from our own work of how it pops up in kind of just day-to-day effectiveness and, and kind of productivity. I, for example, have more of a bias towards the, the models and the frameworks and the theory behind things.
Kerry has more of a bias towards, the action towards, okay, what does this mean for what we’re going to-do? It’s a very common occurrence for when we’re co-designing a, a workshop for one of us to go, hey, I know this is my particular slant on this, but like, this is the way I’m looking at that situation.
And that just opens up a dialogue about it and, and actually where we get to at the end of the day for, because we foregrounded that is somewhere far more productive. So that’s a, that’s an example of it not showing up in, in a way that relates to underrepresented groups or anything like that. But it certainly, certainly relates to effectiveness in, in the work we do.

Kerry Boys: Okay. And the final myth then is about the fact that inclusive leadership means all decisions have to be made really slowly and by committee. So, we hear this one all the time, and the reality is we are in a fast paced world and that just jars. So, we can’t, as leaders, make all our decisions really slowly by committee.
So, what we’d say instead that it’s actually about making the right decisions at the right speed with the right people, and then really importantly, communicating well. So not everyone has to be involved in every decision. That’s a waste of time, and we definitely don’t want inefficiencies. I. And even more than that, we don’t want this sort of pantomime of consultation.
So, so often we hear from people that they’ve been consulted, but it was a pointless consultation, so we can’t, and then that makes the whole situation worse. So, we can’t ask people for opinions and feedback unless we’re actually going to-do something with it. Then if we know that businesses are quick and moving quickly, it’s very rare we go into an organisation, and they tell us they’re a slow moving organisation in terms of decision making.
Then how do we think about the right level of speed and the right level of inclusion of different voices for that decision? So, the matrix that we use is a importance versus reversibility matrix. So, if you imagine those on two axes, and I guess what we’ve got at one end of the spectrum in terms of decisions.
Are things that are really high importance, but maybe also hard to reverse. So, say that’s completely repositioning your organisation. So, if we do a really bad job repositioning the organisation, there’s potential to lose customers, to lose income, revenue, et cetera. And it’s really hard to reverse because we’ve gone out.
To the public, and we have positioned ourselves in that, that new way. So, it’s reversible, but it’s going to be hard and cost a lot of money to do so in that scenario, then we don’t want to make that decision too quickly. And we want to make sure that we’ve heard lots of different perspectives, potentially customer perspectives, as well as internal perspectives in making that decision.
But then let’s think about the other end of the spectrum, so maybe a team social event. So that’s very easy to change and it’s also something that of course, it’s important to the people in that team. If something goes wrong with it, we can, we can change it. So, I think in that scenario, yes you would want to get some perspectives, but we can do that in a much quicker way.
So that can be something like a poll. We can make that decision very, very quickly. And in the scenario, if that decision was made quickly and it wasn’t quite the right decision, that actually reversing it can be really powerful. So, organisation we worked with recently, one of the leaders in that team every year ran a golf day.
This year got loads of feedback that Golf Day didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel very gender inclusive actually. They put their hand up and said, hey, I’m sorry this was wrong. I’ve had this feedback. This is what we’re going to do instead. So that’s a really powerful decision. And reversing that decision was, sorry, was a really powerful one.
And says, I’ve heard you, I’ve listened to you, and I’ve actually made a very real change. And then I guess the biggest part of decision making that we just want to make sure we touch on is, especially for those decisions where we are not including large numbers of people. Is the communication. The biggest thing with decision making isn’t actually not being included in those decisions.
It’s not understanding decisions. We see this time and time again and engagement data. People want to know why decisions have been made and how they’ve been made. That’s the thing people really want to understand. They don’t want to necessarily need to be involved in them all, but they want the meaning behind it.
Mm. And that can often be hard as leaders, partly because a lot of our decision making is unconscious. One of the key things to do is to start noticing those decisions we’re making and then communicating around them

Phil Cross: and, and. The reason, again, this is so important and so impactful. I’ll just kind of cast our, cast our attention back to the model that we shared at the top of this, the, the scarf model decisions.
Have that capacity to impact that sense of those, you know, those, those scarf factors. So, my sense of status, hang on, why wasn’t I consulted about this, decision? Am I not? Am I not important enough to be consulted here? Our sense of control, the, the fact that we have some agency in, in deciding the future of, you know, what our team does or doesn’t do.
Our sense of fairness. Um, that pantomime of consultation that, that you mentioned, Kerry, it does not feel fair if we’re asked our opinions on something knowing full well that that’s not going to go anywhere and not actually going to be taken into consideration. So again. One of the reasons that being clear about our com, how we communicate, how and why a decision’s being made in a particular way is because it really does impact people, um, very directly.
And, and we see that, as Kerry said, in the engagement data, um, in lots of different organisations. So, I. Hopefully that’s given you some food for thought. We’ve shared just four of the myths of inclusive leadership there, and there are many more to get into. if you are keen to hear more about that, we are hosting an upcoming webinar on this topic on the myths of inclusive leadership.
We will put a link in the show notes for this, which will outline the date. Times, et cetera. If that’s something that’s of interest to you, you can sign up. maybe there’s other people in your organisation that you think would benefit from hearing, um, some of what we, what we’ve discussed today. So, feel free to forward that on to them as well.
So, that kind of about wraps up the episode for today. As always, if you have any thoughts, if you have any questions or if you would like to talk to us about leadership or DEI in more detail, you can shoot us a note at [email protected]. But all that remains is to say, um, have a wonderful rest of your week and goodbye.

Kerry Boys: Thank you.

Phil Cross: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Inclusion at Work podcast. If you’d like to help others benefit from the conversation you just heard, the most impactful thing you can do is share it with a friend. You can also give us a rating or a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.
And of course, if you’d like to talk to us about accelerating your organisation’s DEI efforts. Or if you’d like to provide feedback on anything you heard today, you can reach us at [email protected].