2 July 2024 | Dr Jo Kandola

Inclusion beyond leaders: Who is accountable?

Leaders have a crucial role to play in driving inclusion, but they can’t be expected to do it alone. Everyone in your organisation needs to be made accountable for inclusion and given the right support and training.
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While leadership buy-in is crucial for inclusion, it shouldn’t be left to leaders alone to shoulder the responsibility for driving organisational behaviour change. Nor can we just train our leaders to be inclusive and then sit back and hope that these behaviours will somehow filter down to everyone else. So how can we set large-scale organisational behaviour change in motion and most importantly, keep it going?

It goes without saying that leaders are vital to ensure effective organisational change. Leaders should always set the standard expected by an organisation, and for any D&I initiative to succeed, senior leadership needs to be engaged and committed to the process. Leaders also need to endorse and promote any training or development opportunities to their team members and create an environment where diversity and inclusion can be discussed openly, and where issues can be raised without fear of negative comeback.

However, working with leaders to demonstrate and champion inclusive behaviour is not enough on its own to drive organisational change. Everyone in the organisation needs to feel included and be made accountable for inclusion. Focusing solely on leadership can create bad feeling and resentment among the lower echelons of the organisation.

There may be perceived unfairness among more junior staff for not being allowed to engage with learning and development around inclusion, not to mention resistance to learning from leaders who have perhaps broken trust or behaved exclusively in the past.

Understand the limitations of trickle-down leadership

The trickle-down leadership effect refers to how the behaviours, attitudes, and actions of senior leaders in an organisation can shape the behaviour and culture of individuals at more junior levels. A 2016 study in the Harvard Business Review examined 360-degree assessments for high-level managers and their mid-level manager direct reports and found highly significant correlations in several behaviours. The study ultimately concluded that leadership behaviours can indeed have cascading effects on an organisation.

However, this approach can be a double-edged sword when it comes to driving inclusive behaviour change.

Perhaps the main limitation of the trickle-down inclusive leadership approach is that it’s not only ‘good’ behaviours that are passed down by leaders. The HBR study also found significant levels of the same undesirable behaviours being displayed by both leaders and those below them in the hierarchy, indicating that bad habits and negative leadership styles can be passed down and infiltrate lower levels of leadership and junior hires, perpetuating exclusive behaviours and further entrenching ‘toxic’ working environments.

Another downside of this approach is that even if leaders are making an effort to behave in a more inclusive way, they may well have different inclusion strengths and weaknesses to their team members. This means that where leaders will be focusing on blind spots or challenge areas that are relevant to them, those in their teams may already have natural strengths in these areas but have no opportunity to address their own blind spots and areas for development.

Make everyone accountable for inclusion

Fostering a truly inclusive working environment isn’t just the responsibility of leaders, people managers or HR professionals. Everyone should be accountable for inclusion, and offering inclusion training to those at all levels of your organisation allows you to share that responsibility and drive widespread, lasting behaviour change.

The approach we’ve found to be most effective in driving significant organisational change in organisations is a top-down, bottom-up approach – that is, reaching both your leadership and wider team members simultaneously when delivering diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

This allows you to overcome the limitations of the ‘trickle-down leadership effect’ and will help to engage those across your organisation to work towards a common goal. Where everyone has the same opportunity and responsibility to foster a more inclusive environment, there is greater momentum towards driving and sustaining behaviour change.

Implement scalable learning solutions

Interventions that are easily scalable, like e-learning, allow us to reach deep into the organisation and train a lot of people at the same time – and they also open the way for personalised learning content that target individuals’ development needs.

Kandola+ digital learning programmes use unique diagnostic inclusion tools to identify individuals’ inclusion strengths and weaknesses and target specific areas for development, as well as enabling progress to be measured at both an individual and organisational level. Many of our clients, for example, choose to run our Inclusive Leader training and Inclusive Teams training programmes concurrently. Leaders are empowered to set the standard for inclusive behaviour, with their diverse teams understanding the roles they must play in supporting each other and fostering a more inclusive and effective working environment.

Kandola+ digital DEI solutions allow you to reach into all levels of your organisation, wherever your employees are in the world so that everyone knows what the organisation needs to do to improve. Get in touch with us to discuss how our programmes can help you to achieve a more inclusive and effective working environment and deliver behavioural change at scale.

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