8 Empathetic Ways Tune Your Mind to an Inclusive Culture

How do you create conditions for a culture of genuine inclusion when you are faced with:

• The plot twists and turns of a highly political work place.

• Barren department wastelands where beleaguered bosses are resigned to ‘it’s just the way it is around here’.

• Toxic cultures where good people silently keep their head down or behave badly out of fear.

In these places a misguided sense of belonging is created by excluding others.If the antidote is inclusion, where do you begin?

1. Begin with yourself. Be courageous and honest about where your natural and learned biases lie. Take stock of your default assumptions and thinking. Develop a consciousness and action to be inclusive in the way you communicate and connect with others in professional, personal and social settings. “Flip it to Test it” will help you nip unconscious bias in the bud. Watch Kristen Pressner’s eye opening  and mindset challenging brainpoke in her TedX Basel talk.

2. Cultivate a diverse and inclusive workplace ecosystem where the community members see beauty in difference and value inclusion as a mind-set, personal behaviour and a daily practise.“If you put people in an ugly environment, what are you gonna get out of it? Ugly. Beauty in, beauty out. Beauty doesn’t cost any more than ugly. It’s simple.”Ron Finley, Gangsta Gardner interview in The Great Discontent.

3. Nurture a strong purpose-focused community environment that is inspiring, transforming and energising. Fire up the hearts and minds of your members with a reason to believe and instil positive values as their guide.Trust, respect and safety. You can’t go wrong with planting these 3 seeds from which inclusion can take root. Nurture and protect them. Do that and you will be on your way to creating an environment where people feel free to make mistakes and learn from them, where team members are helpful and generous to each other and where collaboration and creativity are the norm.

4. Inspire your employee community by leading with a respect for the individual. Employees want to feel secure in the knowledge that their work has meaning and trust in relevance of their efforts.Constantly review critical employee experience contact points for inclusivity; for example recruitment marketing activities, communication style and tone of voice, hiring methods, work arrangements on offer to suit different ways of working.

5. Credit. Remember that people want to feel seen, heard and valued for their ideas and individual contribution. This is no place for a one-size-fits-all approach. Ensure that your recognition and reward initiatives give credit in ways that suit the individual style and personality of your employees.

6. Protect your organisation against the dangerous creep of groupthink and mob mentality by seeking out the views of the different-thinkers, the defectors and, in the bad times, the Whistleblowers. These individuals are key to ensuring that honesty and accountability remain rooted in your culture.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” Dr. Martin Luther King

7. Build Your Team Like a Jazz Ensemble. Bring together skilled and committed individuals around a clear purpose. Assign dedicated yet fluid roles.[bctt tweet="Build Your Team Like a Jazz Ensemble. Assign dedicated yet fluid roles and make sweet music together" username="AquariusHRLtd"]Like an artist, each individual employee has the freedom to create their own riff on their assigned role. The team member’s thinking and work style quirks are respected but he/she is accountable to the group.The decision to switch it up, giving your team the latitude to do so as well, is equally informed by feeling and knowing. This is the art of improvisation and a path to get the best from your Jazz Ensemble style team.

8. Healthy Conflict. Margaret Heffernan invites us to ‘Dare to Disagree’ in her Ted Talk. My favourite excerpt is the bold and brilliant paradox that constructive conflict is, in fact, a kind of love.

“ … what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them.

That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy. And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care. And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds.”

Listen to her full Ted Talk here

Leader, does the lack of inclusion in your organisation bother you?

Good!You will need a highly developed sense to intuit when it is time to change to suit the opportunity or challenge of the moment; and ditch old mindsets that no longer help you or your business to grow.Over to you.

• What are the ways you defend your team or organisation against groupthink and stranger-danger mentality?

• How are you creating a greenhouse environment where diversity and inclusion can bloom and thrive year round in your organisation?

This post has been developed from an excerpt from my guest post for Open for Ideas -How to conquer the enemy lurking within your workplace culture.