Every Inclusive Practitioner should stop and read this before they go any further.
Inclusive practice and in particular Inclusive Leadership has lost its way and gone backwards. A. Various articles will bring up models in the same vein of offering inclusive characteristics of an Inclusive Leader. There is a thread of making inclusive leadership purely about social relations within the workplace, and oriented towards making the majority feel comfortable to talk about inclusion, because it is badged as meeting the needs of all. Inclusive Leadership has in effect has become the opposite of what it is has intended and has unfortunately become the badge of ‘All Lives Matter’.
The Inclusion model assumes that diversity is considered but doesn’t specify this. The business case around diversity is well documented in recent years and is qualified through research outlining the potentially beneficial bottom-line impact for businesses and organisations. Inclusive leadership and managing diversity approaches, such as they are, don’t appear to converge even in these writings. The business case for diversity is used to justify why an organisation should pursue diversity, but the only underpinning consideration is unconscious bias often using the Harvard Implicit Bias Assessment as the measure of working positively with diversity. The Inclusive Leader is then positioned as simply a reflector of self, and their unconscious bias, and perhaps some consideration of team dynamics. However, they are not invited to consider how the Inclusive Leaders is to structure the business and its workings to ensure diversity.
Neither of these approaches consider Equity. Accepting that equity has come to mean equal treatment for all – and there is more to this term, but this will be addressed in future articles – then Inclusive Leadership approaches should include how leaders ensure equity, but they don’t. These arguments and models have failed, and we appear to have gone backwards.
The Inclusive Leadership approaches assume equity but doesn’t specify this. It appears that inclusive leadership practices have lost their way. That is, what was perhaps a communication device to encourage business engagement to buy into inclusive practices, has gotten confused with what Inclusive Leadership is supposed to be, why we needed it in the first place. The absolute driver for Inclusive Leadership is inequity. The fact is, those with protected characteristics do not experience equal treatment and this is based in systemic and institutional inequality and oppression.
Too many Inclusive Leadership Practitioners and proponents have been acculturated in this misunderstanding. In fact, Inclusive Leadership is now creeping towards simply being a well-being device. At one level it makes sense that this element is gathering momentum supported by human resources personnel who see daily the practical symptoms of exclusion. Inclusive Leadership then becomes associated with the symptoms of inequality, i.e., not belonging, not being your authentic self. What is now completely omitted is the reasons of inequity which drive the not belonging and how this is embedded in the organisation, other institutions, is systemic, and based in a wider context that propagates this. And of course it omits, equality of outcome in terms of – the proportional representation through all levels of the organisation and through all types of roles, equality of pay, the rate of progression through the organisation, removing of disproportional scrutiny and disciplinaries and power dynamics and power games which reduce personal visibility, efficacy, identity and self-esteem, contribution, quality of work life and general well-being; the removal of policies and practices that inhibit and reduce access to resources and opportunities and which introduce respect, recognition, honour, validation and acceptance. The removal of this from leadership models at best distils in a fragmented way the responsibility to other professional disciplines such as HR, business transformation, training leadership, and communications. And most of these disciplines do not have the professional will and guidance to address systemic power and inequality. Consequently, Individual practitioners within ambivalent organisations are left with few resources to challenge poor practice except personal commitment and influence. Organisations with professionals cannot limit their professional responsibility to simply individual capacity and commitment to disrupt poor practice. The personal cost is too high and is often side stepped by many in this role and often left to those who experience/identify with the harshest inequality within these organisations, i.e., black people, women, disabled and LGBT+ staff who bear the weight and the brunt of the organisational ambivalence, who do this without being valued, recognised or financially rewarded for this additional emotional and social burden on behalf of the organisation. Systemic oppression and inequality cannot rely on individual action, when it does and as it does, it is failure by design. It requires an infrastructure, and it requires equitable Inclusive Leadership to drive this.
Instead, what writers and practitioners do in this misunderstanding is double down on the interpersonal language and concepts. Proposing that a more granular understanding of individual psychology and even neuroscience will produce the ultimate answers for ensuring inclusion and equity with it. At its most basic it suggests that, if we only understood our personal motivations and bias and those of others then we would be inclusive. If only we were nice to everyone. On its own it is an approach that makes inequality an individual phenomenon and, in the process, pathologises individuals (get rid of the few ‘rotten apples’) and firmly moves the institution and the systemic nature of inequality out of the picture. So, whilst some public sector organisations like the Met Police have battled with the term ‘institutionally racist’ the leadership tools for addressing institutional racism inside organisations are now woefully inadequate and more impoverished than when we had the McPherson Report over 20 years ago.
We must reintroduce Equitable back into the thinking on Inclusive Leadership. I propose the term then Equitable Inclusive Leadership. The term reintroduces equity as the driver for change and inclusion being simply a vehicle that pursues equity. Equitable Inclusive Leadership would also introduce a shift from going down the rabbit hole of purely personal and interpersonal approaches and incorporate the features of inequity which are contextual, systemic, institutional, and organisational.
Equitable Inclusive Leadership would also incorporate the understanding of power and specifically systemic, institutional, and organisational power. Power is a term that appears to have dropped out of favour. I’m not sure it has even achieved dog whistle status, at least not in terms of pursuing change. Though it may have achieved dog whistle status in terms of resistance to Inclusive Leadership. Most models don’t talk about power, the maintenance of societal and organisational power balance, and the disenfranchisement of many of those with protected characteristics within it – i.e., not having equal rights, privileges, stake in the system, or representation. Power and the maintenance of the status quo is the basis of systemic inequality. It is the essence of systemic inequality.
An Equitable Inclusive Leader considers on the one hand the power imbalance threaded through the systemic context and its continual impact on the organisation, the organisations infrastructure, business processes, proficiencies, requirements, and practice; and on the other the interpersonal and personal. In short manage the balance between the systemic and the interpersonal.
I would posit that Systemic thinking as an approach offers a theoretical framework for the combination of the social system, the system of the organisation and the interpersonal elements. Writers of systemic thinking haven’t yet applied systems thinking to addressing organisational inequality and my proposed term Equitable Inclusive Leadership has the potential for the direct application of systemic thinking to systemic inequality. In summary – Equitable – addresses the systemic nature of inequality and Inclusion – reflects the interpersonal and interpersonal actions. The child emerging from this union then would be the Equitable Inclusive Leader who understands the link between the organisational system and power and the behaviour and interpersonal relations it drives and vice versa. Individual and group behaviour are inseparable from the system that drives it.
Carole Litchmore