Crisis Leadership Fundamentals: Inclusion

We have yet to meet a leader who claims that they do NOT want to create an inclusive culture for their employees. Yet most organizations struggle with doing just that.

Anne Morriss and I introduce The Inclusion Dial as a way to diagnose where you are in your journey towards inclusion and to clarify the path forward. 

A culture of inclusion has four levels: safe, welcome, celebrated, and cherished. The definitions for each of these progressive stages are: 

1. Safe. Employees feel physically and emotionally safe in the workplace, regardless of who they are.
2. Welcome. Employees feel welcome in the workplace, regardless of who they are; they can bring their “whole selves” to work without penalty.
3. Celebrated. Employees feel celebrated in the workplace because of who they are; they are rewarded for contributing their unique ideas and perspectives.
4. Cherished. A culture of inclusion permeates the organization; leaders embrace differences among employees as a source of competitive advantage, and there is minimal variability in the experience of belonging across individuals, teams, and functions.

Where on the dial would you locate your team? Keep in mind that not everyone in a group may experience the same stages at the same time. There may be trends in who feels safe versus welcome versus celebrated, patterns that can become road maps to the inclusion work that needs to be done. In addition, as one person or profile moves up the dial, an unintended effect may be that other people and profiles move down. For example, as some cultures have become more inclusive of women, some men in those same cultures have become more afraid of the costs of inadvertently doing or saying the wrong things. If this is the case on your team, we urge empathy and direct dialogue. Sustainable solutions to inclusion must make everyone better off.

What does the progression of the inclusion dial look like in practice? Let’s use a routine team meeting as an illustrative example. Imagine that you’re a young black or brown woman on a primarily white team. The meeting is scheduled, and you feel safe showing up. The guy who had been repeatedly asking you out via the company’s Slack channel, despite you asking him to stop, has been removed from your team. 

You walk in and a white colleague makes you feel welcome by inviting you to sit next to her. The team lead—an older man—opens by saying, “I’d like to get the team’s advice, and I want to hear from everyone.” You’re feeling pretty good at this point, comfortable and ready to participate. 

The meeting continues, and there seems to be convergence in what the group thinks the plan should be. (Note that this is the point at which most organizations declare victory and move forward with an idea.) You have a different idea, but you don’t want to rock the boat or hold the team back. Then the team lead says, “OK, if we were to think about this problem differently, what would that look like?” A few new voices jump into the discussion. The team lead says, “Excellent! I never would have thought of that!” to ensure these voices are celebrated for making the group’s thinking more rigorous. 

He then says, “What else are we missing?” His response shifts the dynamics in the room, and you decide to share your idea. Your colleagues respectfully debate your idea; they identify some risks that you hadn’t thought about before, but people seem energized by the ambition of it. The lead says, “Listen, it might not work, but I love the audacity of [insert your name]’s idea. It’s the kind of thinking we need to win.” You leave the meeting feeling cherished by the company for your ability to think differently—and without any doubts that you belonged in the room. This feeling has become familiar to you. You felt the same way in a different meeting, led by a different manager, last week. 

Excerpted from Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leaders Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, Harvard Business Review Press (2020).