Inclusive leadership: Embrace the friction

More and more organisations are realising the tremendous value of leaders developing the skill of inclusiveness. The skill not only helps foster more diverse and equitable workplaces, but also sits at the heart of innovation and creativity – helping teams to better bring together ideas and perspectives to solve complex challenges. Deliberately practising inclusive leadership (and, yes, it is a skill that can be practised) can rapidly accelerate the growth and development of leaders across organisations, from the C suite on down.

But for many organisations there is something called a knowing – doing gap. Leaders “know” (or assume they do) the value of inclusive leadership, and would consider themselves inclusive leaders. But when we work with their teams, they tell a very different story. Leaders have good intentions, but these aren’t always being matched by action.?

If the benefits are clear, and peoples’ intentions are good, why the gap? We see several factors that frequently hold people back from their inclusive leadership potential. Today we are going to introduce you to one: friction.

For our purposes, we can think of friction as, “the resistance that occurs when different thoughts, ideas and perspectives encounter each other.”

If we have a team with a truly diverse range of worldviews and perspectives, and all team members feel empowered to express their, sometimes contrary, thoughts and ideas, then there will be instances where ideas rub up against each other. Friction.

Contrast this with a more homogenous team where people think and act in very similar ways. Making decisions and generating ideas in a team like this can feel relatively fast, smooth and easy! Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Truly leading inclusively can feel more difficult. That’s because it is. Everybody loves fast, smooth and easy. This is why the knowing-doing gap emerges. Leaders abandon the sometimes more time consuming, harder-to-navigate friction inherent in diversity for the familiar waters of homogeneity.?

Fast, smooth and easy may be useful if we simply want to repeat a well-worn process in the quickest efficient way possible. But where the world around us is changing, where we are trying to solve complex problems and, where we are trying to generate novel ideas, we want friction. We?need?it.

Friction is where we have to unpack and explore our ideas more deeply, so we can better explain them to others.

Friction is where ideas, perspectives and assumptions are tested.

Friction is where we can create a culture in which everybody feels safe to constructively disagree.

Friction is where we grow through exposure to new ways of thinking.

In our experience, the friction inherent to inclusive teams is a feature, not a bug. Our goal isn’t to remove friction, but to harness and embrace it.

But friction isn’t always easy to love, especially in organisations where speed is king, (expedience bias) and where, despite the repetition of mantras like “there is no failure, only feedback” people don’t feel safe to try new things or challenge ideas.

How to embrace the friction

As an inclusive leader, part of your role is creating conditions in which friction can occur. Through our work with thousands of leaders, we’ve uncovered many ways of embracing the friction. Here are a few to get you started.

• Set the expectation. Friction is valuable, necessary and expected.
• Be clear about behaviours. Emphasise respectful disagreement and agree on clear team behaviours.
• Build your personal and collective tolerance of friction. Hold fun debates and play with friction. Rehearse it and share stories about it (good and bad) so it’s normalised and expected.
• Develop key skills. Think about how your team might benefit from developing its coaching skills, ability to skillfully give and receive feedback, capacity to have difficult conversations, etc.
• Get into the right mindset. Mindfulness and state management both have a role to play in building leaders’ capability to embrace friction. At Leaders for Good, we talk to our clients about adopting a mindset of ‘humility, curiosity and compassion’ (more to come on that in a future post).
• Seek diversity. Build a cognitively and demographically diverse team. Invite outside thoughts and ideas to build a richer environment that continues to challenge.
• Allow time. Short time frames often prevent inclusive ways of working, and rely on authoritarian (rather than inclusive) leadership styles.
• Introduce the right systems and processes. Build the time and space for frustration to occur as part of your ways of working.
• Seek feedback. Create multiple mechanisms for comment and feedback.

Introducing these practises won’t mean smooth sailing (you don’t want it to!) And you likely won’t get it 100% right the first time. But that’s why we call them practises. Don’t try to introduce everything at once. When trying something new, take time with your team to discuss what worked, what could have been better and what you’ll do differently next time.