Raising The Bar On Inclusive Leadership

Inclusive leadership must first begin with inclusive leaders. But how do organizations achieve this aspiration? In 2022, our U.S. business leaders took a definitive step to elevate inclusive leadership in the hiring interview and selection process by introducing the Inclusion Bar Raiser program—a new talent selection driver targeting Directors and above. I talk in this article about how the program identifies inclusive leaders while also helping our hiring teams assess talent in an equitable and consistent manner.

Raising the Bar on Inclusive Leadership

What comes to mind when you think of inclusive leadership? Words like equitable treatment, advocacy and equal opportunity are popular. They’re all good. But before a company can create a culture of belonging, business leaders must first have an inclusive mindset. This is primarily because of their impact as it relates to attracting and retaining talent, fostering inclusion within teams and integrating diverse perspectives in business decisions.

Research has shown that corporate diversity and inclusion programming must advance beyond training to drive meaningful progress. This was the framework that two teams within Takeda’s U.S. Business Unit (USBU)—Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) and Talent Acquisition—began with when they developed and piloted the Inclusion Bar Raiser program. This innovative program was designed to help us more precisely identify and select leadership candidates who espouse our core values around inclusive leadership.

How it works?

Modeled on Amazon’s “Bar Raiser,” Takeda’s Inclusion Bar Raiser program brings the values of inclusion into the interview process for hiring searches at the Director level and above. A cohort of these leaders, who have been trained and certified through a series of workshops, form the Inclusion Bar Raisers. An Inclusion Bar Raiser is assigned to every candidate search and is responsible for fulfilling three specific roles:

• ?Engaging with the interview team members, sharing tips on how to interview with an inclusive mindset.??
• Interviewing all final-round candidates on their personal inclusive leadership track-record, evaluating candidates on their understanding of the value of DE&I and how they have sought opportunities (personally or professionally) to engage with others with different backgrounds and experiences.??
• Participating in the interview team’s discussion of the candidates and disrupting the potential for implicit bias.

The path to an inclusive work culture

The program has been successful largely in part due to the participants. As Inclusion Bar Raisers, their focus on interview panels contributes to identifying future leaders who will continue to cultivate an inclusive environment.?As we build on the initial success of the program and continue to gain insights, we plan to expand this initiative across more job levels and increase the number of Inclusion Bar Raiser program launches in other regions and business units.

We’ve seen that by investing in the Inclusion Bar Raiser program, which is being implemented as a standard USBU practice, we are able to spotlight the importance of building an inclusive workforce at Takeda.