Five Compelling Benefits of Inclusive Team Cultures

Inclusive teams and cultures sound intuitively right. Yet, many teams languish under leadership practices and legacy cultures that waste the ideas, inspiration, and resourcefulness of their people. To such teams and their leaders, inclusion might need to be a more compelling idea than they realise.

Inclusive team cultures are no longer a choice, companies that ignore this imperative are already finding themselves hemmed in by past choices.

Building an inclusive team culture requires intentionally inclusive practices. ?

Here are 5 research backed benefits that can help you get inspired to lead your team inclusively and cultivate a culture that recognises and values differences at work.

1. Inclusive cultures create safety

Emotional safety is key to an inclusive workplace. Feeling safe means that people can bring themselves to work without wasting time hiding their best selves. A safe workplace creates resourcefulness and agency in doing a better job. Google conducted a comprehensive two-year?study on team performance, and found that their highest-performing teams had one thing in common - psychological safety. This is a belief that you can trust your team, they have your back, and calculated risks are rewarding.

2. Inclusive cultures grow trust

One of the pre-requisites to high performance is trust within teams. Trust grows in environments that allow for safe relationship-building and have room for empathy, collaboration, and forgiveness. Research points to safe and inclusive environments helping raise Oxytocin levels in our brains, encouraging focus, trust and social connections. Moreover, Paul J. Zak, in his Studies on trust found "that building a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies.

3. Inclusive cultures encourage empathy

Empathy often falls by the way when teams are rewarded for conformity, criticism and forsaking collaboration in favour of competition and self-preservation. Lack of inclusion often goes hand in hand with team environments that fail to recognise the diversity, professional value, and struggles of other people. There are two key issues that get in the way, most people can't quite define what it means to be empathetic on a day-to-day basis and unfamiliar diversity can make it harder to appreciate what those differences mean. Good news is that empathy is not always a feeling you need to wait to feel, it is also a cognitive skill to learn, practice, and get better at.

4. Inclusive cultures are more innovative

Much has been said about how diversity spurs innovation. This is not as simple as putting a bunch of different people in a room and expecting breakthrough. “Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not”, writes Columbia Business School Professor, Katherine Phillips. Benefits of diversity though are predicated on how well people's differences are understood and managed in context of the work and problem at hand. Leaders who mismanage diversity can create conflict, chaos and hurt feelings. Conversely, well-managed diversity can pay rich dividends when directed towards a common goal.

5. Inclusive cultures serve customers better

Deloitte shared perspectives on the 'Future of the Workforce' and described four drivers and challenges that are disrupting organisations. Two of these challenges are Diversity of markets: The emerging markets are driving increasing demand as a growing global middle class presents the single biggest growth opportunity and Diversity of customers: Customers are empowered and interconnected through technology and expect personalisation of products and services. In another survey, most senior managers found themselves unprepared and untrained to engage with emerging, fast growing and highly diverse markets. Inclusive teams are more tuned to listen to differences, ask better questions, show more patience, and engage more effectively with customers.

Sonali D’silva?is a Certified Professional in Inclusive Leadership from Catalyst Inc. She is the Founder of Equality Consulting, a training and advisory service for raising diversity awareness, leading with inclusion, and creating psychological safety at work. Visit her website at?www.equalityconsulting.com.au?to know more about her work.

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