![5 Resources to Help Leaders Develop a Diverse and Inclusive Culture]()
People
No matter who we are or where we come from, our assumptions and beliefs are shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, our race, our gender, religion, culture. Those beliefs help us navigate and make sense of everyday life. But they can also mean that we believe that there is no difference between our perceptions and reality. For leaders, that means we must continuously question our assumptions and value the voices of people who are not like us to help us assess reality correctly. That requires creating a culture that is not only more diverse, but more importantly, more inclusive, so that our employees are encouraged to express their ideas and share their insights.
Here are five resources we recommend to help you develop a more diverse and inclusive culture.
1. Inclusion: Diversity, the New Workplace & the Will to Change by Jennifer Brown
What it’s about: A roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the objective reality of what diversity and inclusion mean, why it matters, and how to make it part of your organization’s DNA.
Why pick it up: To learn about how to build systems that embrace diversity in all its forms, from identity and background to diversity of thought, style, approach, and experience, that tie directly to the bottom line.
2. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald
What it’s about: I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality.
Why pick it up: To reveal how our unconscious minds influence our beliefs and behaviors, and remind us to think twice about our instinctive reactions.
3. Is It Possible to Unravel Unconscious Bias? TEDTalk by Yassmin Abdel-Magied
What it’s about and why watch it: Abdel-Magied is an engineer, motorsport enthusiast, writer, broadcaster, boxer, and black Muslim woman. Her TEDTalk makes the case for how, if we want to live in a world where the circumstances of your birth do not dictate your future and where equal opportunity is ubiquitous, each and every one of us has a role to play in making sure unconscious bias does not determine our lives.
4. Can We Solve for Unconscious Bias in Tech? TEDTalk by Andreas Ekström
What it’s about and why watch it: We think of search engines as unbiased sources of information. But they’re not—and they can be manipulated. Andreas Ekström asks: who should hold the burden of addressing bias in search engines?
5. How Does Bias Affect the Way We Listen? TEDTalk by Tony Salvador
What it’s about and why watch it: We have to start every conversation fresh. We have to be vulnerable. We have to listen to ideas that we may not like and entertain them and struggle with them and keep them in our heads for a period of time until we develop a mutual understanding.
Bottom line. To lead effectively today, you need to constantly recalibrate your ability to assess reality correctly. Exercise your diversity and inclusion muscles by building your library of resources that challenge your perception of reality as a human being and as a leader.
Question: What resources do you use to challenge your perception of reality?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
If you ask a third grader what she knows about President Lincoln, she might draw you a picture of a tall, lanky, bearded man wearing a black suit and a stove top hat. If you ask a ninth grader the same question, he’ll likely recall that Lincoln was America’s president during the Civil War. When pressed, he may add that the Civil War was fought between the north and the south over the issue of slavery.
But, if you turn back the pages of American history, you’ll find that President Lincoln saw the Civil War in a much larger context. Not only was America wrestling with the question of slavery. Lincoln felt the burden of the Civil War was nothing short of a test of whether a country was capable of governing itself. The world was watching and waiting for the sovereignty experiment to crumble. The republic set forth by the founding fathers was on the brink of failure – an asterisk in history of an 80-plus year rebellion that would inevitably revert to rule by monarchy.
Lincoln knew that preserving the union could only happen by tapping into the power of diversity. Here are three lessons in diversity that today’s leaders can take from Lincoln’s playbook:
1. Assemble a Team of Rivals. In her book, Team of Rivals, author Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how Lincoln brilliantly assembled a cabinet from his Republican opponents to preserve the Union and win the Civil War. None of these men had high regard for Lincoln. But, Lincoln did not want a group of “yes” men to agree with his every decision. He wanted a cabinet of passionate advisers who could shed light on the complex issues facing the country, were free to question his authority, and who were unafraid to argue with him. Surround yourself with smart people and encourage them to challenge your ideas. Relying on people who think just like you can lead to group think and rubber stamp leadership. Neither you nor your organization will benefit.
2. Allow Your Ideas to Evolve. Lincoln was unsure what to do if slavery ended. For most of his career, he saw slaves as a group of people who had been uprooted from their own society and unjustly brought to America. He saw no way for freed slaves to live peaceably among white Americans. Instead, Lincoln advocated for colonization – sending a majority of the African-American population to settle in Africa or Central America. In the last two years of his life though, he began to see the possibility of diversity. Freed slaves were joining the Union Army and serving in the Navy by the thousands. Black leaders argued that African-American were as much natives of the country as whites. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, all mention of colonization was eliminated. When you take a leadership position, you become privy to information that you did not have before. Don’t let your bias keep you from holding onto outdated opinions when presented with new facts from diverse sources.
3. Listen Intently, Then Be Decisive. Lincoln’s cabinet often debated slavery late into the night. Finally, he made up his mind. He brought the cabinet together and told them he no longer needed their thoughts on the main issue, but he would listen to their suggestions about how best to implement his decision and its timing. Some members still did not support Lincoln’s decision, but they felt they’d been heard. If you wait to make a decision until you have perfect information, it’s no longer a decision, it’s a foregone conclusion.
The most successful leaders know how to leverage the power of diversity. They seek out diverse perspectives, evolve their opinions as they get new information, and know when to stop collecting input and be decisive.
Question: Which of these lessons in diversity can improve your leadership journey?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Employee Engagement
Once upon a long, long time ago, it was good to be king. Being an unchallenged leader was so good, in fact, that the top-down, command-and-control organizational model that sprung from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers when the Mesopotamians first used mass labor to irrigate crops remained relatively unchanged for the next 6,000 years.
In early 20th century America, researchers began studying the impact of managerial behavior on employee productivity in organizations. The video titled (I kid you not) The Year They Discovered People documents studies conducted in the 1920s on workers at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in partnership with Harvard Business School. The research first focused on environmental factors, like better lighting, that would result in a more responsive, efficient workforce. Much to the surprise of the researchers, however, was the finding that social factors played a larger role in workforce efficiency than environmental factors. The Hawthorne studies found that manufacturing workers who received additional attention from their managers felt that they were cared about as human beings. Social factors were, in fact, equally important to financial motives – at a time when the average pay was 50 cents per hour.
Fast forward 100 years. Information is the new raw material. Survival in the 21st century information economy means turning information into knowledge, and knowledge into insight at lightning speed. We know that organizational structures still slogging in Mesopotamian mud are doomed for extinction. Somewhere between a purely bureaucratic organizational structure and the notion that every human wants to contribute to something greater than themselves, however, is the question of how to balance organizational structure with flexibility, fluidity, and role ambiguity. You’re probably familiar with the holacracy model famously adopted by Zappos in 2014. Here are two more examples of how far the pendulum can swing from bureaucracy that you may not have heard of:
TEAL Organizations.
What’s the theory? As human consciousness evolves, so do our organizational systems. The Teal theory shifts from external measures of success to intrinsic needs along a color-based motivational scale. It’s less important if we get what we want (Red), we conform to social norms (Amber), we are effective and successful (Orange) or that we belong and have a say (Green). Now, humans are motivated by Teal — Does it feel good? Am I being my true self? What is right for me to do? Am I being in service to the world? In Teal, obstacles are life’s way of teaching us about ourselves and the world. We embrace the possibility that we were part of creating the problem.
How are they structured? Small teams take responsibility for their own governance and for how they interact with other parts of the organization. Assigned positions and job descriptions are replaced with a multiplicity of roles, often self-selected and fluid.
What’s radically different? No job descriptions, no targets, few budgets. In their place are soulful practices that enable extraordinarily productive and purposeful organizations. People’s actions are guided not by orders from someone up the chain of command but by ‘listening’ to the organization’s purpose.
What company is successfully using this structure? The Morning Star Company
Where can I read more? Reinventing Organizations, by Fredric Laloux
Adhocracy.
What’s the theory? Employees are encouraged to tap into their entrepreneurial nature, initiate new projects, and choose which of them to work on. Self-selected teams emerge spontaneously where the most exciting opportunities appear to be rather than according to a strategic plan or a product development roadmap.
How is it structured? Instead of projects coming to established teams, teams converge around projects. These are highly collaborative and mostly temporary structures. Their edge comes from the ability to form links both inside and outside an organization. These nimble groups come together around a specific task, recruiting personnel, assigning roles, and establishing objectives. When the work is done they disband their members and take their skills to the next project.
What’s radically different? If a project launch fails, employees move to other, more promising projects. As a result, the organization is market focused—its model resembles that of a venture capitalist: it invests only when it sees a clear pathway toward a commercially viable product.
What company is successfully using this structure? Mundipharma
Where can I read more? All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks, by Clay Spinuzzi
Traditional management goes wrong when one powerful individual prescribes what must be done—or how—because of their positional role, not because he or she has more insight into what will produce the desired outcome. Self-managed organization models strip away much of the top-down hierarchical power, and favor process over structure to get the job done.
Compared to 6,000 years of bureaucracy, models like holacracy, teal, and adhocracy are still in their infancy. The next generation of self-managed teams will require leaders with the vision to recognize the limitations of hierarchy, and defend the structure that serves the organization’s strategic goals.
Question: What’s the best mashup of hierarchy and self-managed teams?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
We’ve all come across them. Those leaders who people naturally gravitate toward. Though it seems counterintuitive, the magnetic effect these leaders have on people is not because of how people feel about the leader. It’s because of how the leader makes people feel about themselves.
These leaders have mastered the embodiment of two basic facts about people:
Fact 1: Every person matters.
Fact 2: Every person wants to feel valued.
By keeping these facts in mind, you can master the skills necessary to achieve leadership excellence. Here are three skills that will have the highest impact:
1. Help People Connect the Dots. In my post, “A Pharaoh Walks Into a Bar,” I illustrate why team members need to understand how their daily jobs fit into the big picture. It is your responsibility as a leader to help your team connect the dots. You may use formal tools like strategy maps, or pull up to your nearest whiteboard. Regardless of your delivery method, take the time to sit with your team members to help them visualize their role in the success of the organization.
2. Help People Grow. I know a CEO who likes to joke that, “The only thing worse than training your people and then they leave is not training your people and they stay!” All joking aside, one of the main reasons people give for leaving companies is that they stop growing. Growth brings energy, vitality, life, and challenge. Without growth, we’re just going through the motions. Create a culture of learning and growth to maximize the collective talent of your team.
3. Give People Sincere Appreciation. People who don’t feel appreciated are often the first to burn out or jump ship. It only takes a minute to recognize a team member for making a positive contribution. But, doing it right requires more than the occasional “Attagirl!” Give timely and specific praise to show your team members how you value their contribution. Here’s a quick demo to show you how.
One final secret to mastering leadership excellence – you can’t fake it. Leaders who genuinely care about their team members will invest the time to help each one feel valued. Be committed to helping them connect the dots, helping them grow, and giving them sincere appreciation. Every day is an opportunity to help people see the best in themselves and achieve their highest potential.
Question: What is one thing you can do today to help someone else feel valued?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the forty-second issue of CEE News!
If you get lucky in this lifetime, you get to meet someone with the vision to right a wrong in the world, and the tenacity to make it happen. If you get very lucky, you get to play a small role in seeing that vision become a reality.
If you get very, very lucky, your spouse joins you for dozens of promotional events, your children cheer you on, and your colleagues start volunteering their talents toward the mission. Business leaders, government representatives, philanthropists, families, friends and the community start pulling together in a collective effort as the vision evolves from a dream to a reality. I consider myself lucky on all of these counts.
(more…)
