Inclusive Leadership

Inclusive leadership was defined through research on speaking up

In a 2006 study of healthcare teams, Nembhard and Edmondson found that leader inclusiveness was linked to greater psychological safety, and that it helped offset the effect of professional status, where lower-status team members tend to stay quiet.

Since then, the term has broadened to cover how leaders draw on difference of every kind: nationality, gender, generation, function and thinking style. It sits close to psychological safety, which describes the climate an inclusive leader helps to create.

The behaviours of inclusive leadership are specific and learnable

Inclusive leadership is visible in what a leader does in meetings, decisions and one-to-ones, not in what they say they value.

• ✦Asking for input from quieter or more junior people first, before senior voices set the direction.
• ✦Admitting the limits of your own knowledge and asking others to fill the gaps.
• ✦Responding to disagreement with curiosity, so the next person feels safe to raise one.
• ✦Noticing who is consistently missing from decisions, informal conversations or stretch assignments.
• ✦Explaining how input shaped the final decision, even when the answer was no.

In Gulf workplaces, inclusion often means working with hierarchy

Many Gulf teams are multinational, multicultural and respectful of seniority. Those are strengths, but they can mean that junior colleagues, recent national graduates or women new to senior rooms wait to be asked before they offer a view.

Imagine a general manager chairing a weekly meeting with twelve nationalities around the table. Discussion is always led by the same three senior voices. She starts asking newer members for their view first, rotates who presents and follows up privately with people who stay silent. Within a few months, problems surface earlier because more people are willing to name them. Leading across cultures like this is covered in coaching for leaders of multicultural teams.

Inclusive leadership is often mistaken for a hiring policy

Diverse hiring brings different people into the room; inclusive leadership is what lets them contribute once they are there. A diverse team led exclusively can perform worse than a similar team, because difference turns into friction rather than insight.

It is also not consensus. Inclusive leaders still decide, sometimes against the majority. What they do differently is make sure the decision was informed by the full range of views.