Why inclusive leadership is so rare yet needed more today in our divided communities and organizations

Why is inclusive leadership so rare, but needed more today in our divided communities and organizations? Most leaders give “lip-service” to the concept of including diverse individuals and their opinions in important decisions and policies. In the recent March 2020 Harvard Business Journal article “The Key to Inclusive Leadership” by Juliet Bourke and Andrea Titus, extensive research identified six key attributes of inclusive leaders. Bourke and Titus wrote that the more people feel included, the more they are willing to speak up, go the extra mile, and collaborate — all of which ultimately lifts a community and raises organizational performance.

To be an inclusive leader the most important attribute is:

Visible commitment: They articulate authentic commitment to diversity, challenge the status quo, hold others accountable, and make diversity and inclusion a personal priority.

Secondly, leaders must be truly humble and teachable.

Humility: Leaders are modest about their own capabilities, admit mistakes, and create the space for others to contribute. They give credit and acknowledge their colleague’s contributions publicly.

Other important attributes identified by Bourke and Titus included:

Awareness of bias: They show awareness of personal blind spots, as well as flaws in the system, and work hard to ensure a meritocracy.

Curiosity about others: They demonstrate an open mindset and deep curiosity about others, listen without judgment, and seek with empathy to understand those around them.

Cultural intelligence: They are attentive to others’ cultures and adapt as required.

Effective collaboration: They empower others, pay attention to diversity of thinking and psychological safety, and focus on team cohesion.

What happened to empathy and mercy for one’s adversary or opponent in our current political process or organizations? It is rare to witness empathy and forgiveness for one's opponent since it is characterized as weakness. But great leaders overlook small disagreements, rarely hold grudges, and demonstrate empathy when their teammates make mistakes. 

Many leaders don’t want to do the hard work and undergo the painstaking process of compromise inherit in inclusive leadership. It is easier to try and create a community or organization that has the most admired characteristics and backgrounds. Most often we see this manifest in leaders choosing successors just like themselves. Similarities and outward appearance are valued over substance and diversity by most people. Many narcissistic and accomplished entrepreneurs and leaders fall into this trap and it limits our ability to practice inclusive leadership. The truly inclusive leaders maintain an emphatic heart for those who don’t demonstrate or “look the part” of a winner in how our organization or society defines winning.

Non-inclusive leadership taken to the extreme is disastrous. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler declared non-Aryan races such as Jews and gypsies as inferior. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure. And in 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations. By 1940, Hitler’s master-race mania took a terrible turn as hundreds of thousands of Germans with mental or physical disabilities were euthanized by gas or lethal injection. During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. This German super-race was supposed to outsmart and outperform all its opponents or competitors.

Josef Mengele, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins. He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia. Many of his “patients” died or suffered permanent disability, and his gruesome experiments earned him the nickname, “Angel of Death.” In all, it’s estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust, most of them because they didn’t fit Hitler’s definition of a superior race. Thanks to the unspeakable atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened.

What exactly constitutes “negative genetic or physical traits” is open to interpretation and judgements, right? Could the Nazis style eugenics be a dramatic metaphor for leaders who hire, develop, and promote those similar and agreeable to themselves?

To understand why true inclusive leadership is so difficult, I introduce the concept of grafting. True inclusive leaders graft in very different people and viewpoints and compromise. Grafting could be considered the opposite of Hitler’s eugenics. Grafting is a pain-staking and difficult process found primarily in agriculture but can be metaphorically adapted to leadership training. Grafting means taking two very different species and combining them to create a more sustainable plant. To be trained to successfully graft trees is something that takes years of hard work and experimentation. Leading your organization with the principle of grafting means using that same principle of compromise and experimentation in how inclusive practices are codified.

Therefore grafting or graftage as a horticultural technique joins the tissues of diverse plants to make a more sustainable growth pattern. Grafting provides the benefit of attaching different roots to tree species to enable those plants to grow in soils where they normally can't grow. If you were to plant a tree where it shouldn't be planted naturally, it will have a shorter life. In most cases, grafted fruit trees are generally a better choice than seedlings because they are heartier and sustainable. The metaphor to leadership and inclusion should be clear. Inclusive leaders “graft” solutions in an iterative process similar to compromise.

Authentic leaders do not create inclusive environments in a brilliant flash or spending spree on popular or trendy programs. They work with diverse individuals to find a meeting of the minds. Talented and brilliant people are not the best people to lead your organization or community unless they can prove they can graft inclusive solutions. Grafting these solutions is a painstaking process of compromise and "bridge-building" with those that some might say were your adversaries or individuals who's life experiences are 180 degrees different than your own. A meeting of the minds is not always a 50/50 compromise. A 80/20 compromise can be an inclusive and acceptable solution if the key stakeholders were truly listened to and consulted.

If you want to identify the people who have the potential to be an inclusive leader, find those that enjoy bringing diverse people together. Find those in your community that effectively articulate a commitment to grafting inclusive solutions. If your organization wants to not only be inclusive, but discover the best ideas and policies, I recommend challenging the status quo in who gets the most attention and resources in your organization. Challenge the choices of who to hire and which leaders to develop. Hold your current leaders accountable for grafting in the next generation of inclusive leaders.

Did Adolf Hitler ever change his view that Germany would triumph because their ethnic characteristics and attributes were superior? I don’t think so. While the Olympics are ostensibly designed to bring a multitude of races and cultures together in a spectacle of competition, Hitler had little use for such notions of unity and inclusion. In fact, he deliberately hurt his country's chances for success by keeping Jews out of athletic clubs and events, eliminating potential Olympic medalists like high-jumper Gretel Bergmann.

As evidence, Hitler’s vision of an identical super-race was not the recipe for athletic success. Jesse Owens, one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time, was the star of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Owens coasted to a gold medal in his first event, the 100-meter dash, with Hitler looking on. Jesse followed that the second gold medal in a highly publicized victory over German champion Luz Long in the long jump. After setting an Olympic record in the 200-meter dash in route to a third gold medal, Owens put the exclamation point on his Olympic performance by running the opening leg of a record-shattering U.S. 4x100 relay performance.

Sometimes those not athletically or intellectually gifted make great contributions to an organization. Inspired by Daniel James Brown's critically acclaimed nonfiction book, “The Boys in the Boat”, Nine Americans triumphed against all odds at the same 1936 Berlin Olympics. Sharon Eubank recently gave an inspiring talk called “By Union of Feeling We Obtain Power with God” where the idea of "swing" was clearly explained: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2020/10/31eubank?lang=eng “There is a thing that sometimes happens that is hard to achieve and hard to define. It’s called “swing.” It happens only when all are rowing in such perfect unison that not a single action is out of sync. Rowers must rein in their fierce independence and at the same time hold true to their individual capabilities. Races are not won by clones. Good crews are good blends?—someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve, someone to fight the fight, someone to make peace. No rower is more valuable than another, all are assets to the boat, but if they are to row well together, each must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the others?—the shorter-armed person reaching a little farther, the longer-armed person pulling in just a bit.

Differences can be turned to advantage instead of disadvantage. Only then will it feel as if the boat is moving on its own. Only then does pain entirely give way to exultation. Good “swing” feels like poetry," Eubank explained.

Great inclusionary leadership puts into practice the idea of “swing” along with the grafting in of diverse ideas and viewpoints. Inclusive leadership is so rare because very few leaders understand how to work with people who don’t think, walk, or act like they do. The status quo creates feelings of comfort and reassures senior leaders that the up and coming generation of leaders will be just like themselves. They will come from the same schools and look much like themselves. But for 2021, I challenge leaders to break these less inclusive patterns and start grafting in new and better programs for the betterment of all our organizations and communities. Let's find our leadership swing together.