The Benefits of Being an Inclusive Leader!

When looking at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, it’s important to think about it holistically, not just as a part of your talent attraction strategy. Although it’s critical to put Diversity and Inclusion at the forefront of your recruitment process, ensuring that this follows through once someone has joined the organization is equally important.

Being an inclusive leader takes time, patience, and a lot of self-education and reflection, however, once you create an environment and way of working that prioritizes inclusivity within your team, you’ll start to see the long-term benefits.

We wanted to highlight three key benefits of being an inclusive leader.

Better trust with direct reports

Creating an environment that is inclusive, as well as managing inclusively will give you a byproduct of trust with your direct reports, as well as your peers and colleagues. Better trust not only boosts productivity and general job satisfaction, but it allows you to operate at a deeper level with those around you.

Cultivating better trust comes with embracing vulnerability as a leader, implementing (and welcoming)  feedback given to you by direct reports, and also continuously educating yourself on how you can be the best leader for your team. For example. Being more vulnerable can be presented as being more of a risk taker in the workplace and encouraging this behavior.

There are countless studies evidencing that an inclusive working environment equals higher, better performance.

As we’ve mentioned before, simply recruiting diversely doesn’t necessarily make the impact on higher performance, it’s the integration of those individuals and bringing out their best qualities that achieves it!

Better retention

Retaining talent requires a lot more factors nowadays than it did ten or even five years ago. Benefits such as flexible working, free coffee, and extra days off are now seen as standard requirements, and instead, today’s workforce needs more from their leaders to keep them engaged.

Harvard Business Review reported on the correlation between inclusive leadership and retention, with their opening gambit to the report being “Picture, for example, a Muslim who prays in his car because he doesn’t want to advertise his religion, a mother who doesn’t put up pictures of her children so that coworkers won’t question her commitment to the job, or a gay executive who is unsure whether he can bring his partner to company functions.” These three different examples show how important inclusivity at work is for better retention and job satisfaction.

The piece goes on to explain that although a lot of business leaders understand the importance of diversity, to retain diverse talent you have to ensure that the environment they are working in is inclusive of their needs.

If you consider your team and/or workforce to be diverse, have you asked them what would make them feel more included at work? Looking at the example presented by Harvard Business Review, a Muslim who prays in his car because he doesn’t want to advertise his religion – how could you, if you were presented with the same scenario, ensure that your leadership style and team environment is inclusive rather than exclusive?

Bringing your whole self to work is important. Times have changed and people want to feel like they don’t have to put on a front when at work. Although true inclusion requires effort from every single person, leaders can have an exponential impact on how inclusive others can be when leading by example. As a leader, you get to set the tone, and set boundaries around what respect and acceptance looks like!

Candidate attraction

Although inclusivity is centered mostly around the individuals already in your team/organization, candidate attraction (and more diverse candidates) is a byproduct of being a more inclusive leader. 67% of job seekers state that a diverse workforce is a critical factor when deciding whether or not to join a new organization.

We are currently in a big talent crunch where candidates have a lot more agency over the opportunities they can choose, so naturally they are going to choose the most progressive and inclusive businesses. It’s crucial that as a business you have a compelling proposition, culture and overall ethos to get the best talent out there.

If you focus on creating an inclusive environment this will shine through when interviewing and enable you to also ask insightful questions that put Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the forefront.