The 5 Disciplines of Inclusive Leaders

Unleashing the Power of All of Us

Andrés T. Tapia, Alina Polonskaia

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781523088225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Food Industry
• Index: Business

Diversity initiatives are falling short. This book shows leaders how to develop the skills needed to build sustainably inclusive organizations using a tested, research-based model developed by the global organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry. According to the journal Human Resource Management, companies are spending over $8 billion a year on diversity programs. Yet today, the senior leadership teams at Fortune 500 companies are far from mirroring the diversity of its workforce and its customers. Andrés Tapia and Alina Polonskaia, senior leaders at Korn Ferry, argue that to build sustainable diversity and inclusion, organizations need to have inclusive leaders at all levels. In this book, Tapia and Polonskaia draw on Korn Ferry's massive database of 3 million leadership assessments to reveal the essential qualities of inclusive leaders. They discuss the personality traits these leaders share and detail how to develop what they call the five disciplines of inclusive leadership: building interpersonal trust, integrating diverse perspectives, optimizing talent, applying an adaptive mindset, and achieving transformation. Tapia and Polonskaia also outline the competencies behind each discipline, describe individual and organizational exemplars of inclusive leadership, and show how the five disciplines enable leaders to unleash the power of all people and to build both structurally and behaviorally inclusive organizations. This book will help leaders foster the skills to deal with today's complex challenges and create a more inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous future for all of us.

PART 1

THE FIVE DISCIPLINES

If traits are the soul of inclusive leaders, the five disciplines—those key competency composites—are the inclusive leaders in action. The five disciplines are what inclusive leaders achieve through skill, persistence, and practice. As the leaders master the inclusion competencies, they go through the same process as when they learn any other set of skills. There are things to learn and apply. There is trial and error. There is feedback and coaching. There is role modeling. There is learning from others. There are risk assessment, trade-off decisions, and bold actions. And these efforts are mobilized at the interpersonal, team, and organizational levels.

The great news is that leaders seeking to be inclusive come to this work already possessing many strengths. They are accomplished in their fields, they are already leading others, and they have been recognized, promoted, and rewarded according to their leadership abilities. But as with mastering any other discipline, whether it be archery, cooking, playing the clarinet, gardening, home building, or you name it, there is always more to learn; there is more knowledge, more insights, and more experiences to be acquired on the road to a deep and nuanced understanding of what inclusive leadership entails and the ability to evaluate the capabilities of inclusive leaders.

In part 1, we plumb the meaning of each of the five disciplines and unpack each of the competencies within them. We bring the science behind the disciplines to life with the perspectives of inclusive leaders and informative sidebars highlighting others who exemplify the competencies.

DISCIPLINE 1

Builds Interpersonal Trust

INSTILLS TRUST VALUES DIFFERENCES

AT TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD, JUAN GALARRAGA WAS asked to take a high-risk assignment. He was charged with turning around a high-volume, high-visibility, and severely underperforming Target store in South Florida. An ambitious Venezuelan immigrant, he accepted the turnaround assignment and within a week had moved to Naples, three hours away.

The situation was even worse than he had thought. He had seen the poor financials before arriving, but not the depth of low morale and hostile finger pointing. Recognizing the skepticism aimed at him due to his relative youth and his being an unknown, and given that he had precious little time to show he could turn things around, Galarraga’s top priority was to quickly build interpersonal trust—not just between him and his new associates but also among the team members themselves.

During his first week, Galarraga called a mandatory all-team meeting behind the store, before the doors opened to customers. When people arrived, they saw a big bonfire. Galarraga instructed them to sit in a circle around it. He asked everyone to write down a story about a disappointment or frustration with something that was going on at the store.

BUILDS INTERPERSONAL TRUST:

is honest and follows through; establishes rapport by finding common ground while simultaneously able to value perspectives that differ from own.

One after the other, each read what they had written. When they were done, Galarraga had them throw their pieces of paper into the bonfire and watch them go up in smoke.

“No more,” he said. “It’s a new day, a new life. Let’s have each other’s back. Today, we start anew!”

That Target store became one of the most successful in the region.

Builds interpersonal trust is a foundational discipline of inclusive leaders. In fact, 100% of the talent professionals who responded to our Inclusive Leader survey said building interpersonal trust is either extremely or very important to being an effective inclusive leader.

Trust leads to credibility and an increased willingness to listen and adhere to directions. It creates a reciprocity between leaders and team members in which both feel comfortable sharing themselves and their perspectives.

Two competencies make up this first discipline: the ability to instill trust and the ability to value differences. Interestingly, each initially leans in the opposite direction of the other, but then they come full circle to reinforce each other, for optimal inclusive impact.

Instilling trust requires finding common ground across differences, while valuing differences requires surfacing the implications of differences to better understand others. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is the paradox of inclusion: inclusive leaders must focus on what we have in common and also proactively unearth our differences.

Finding common ground comes first, before the harder work of surfacing differences constructively. To do so, leaders often highlight the organizational mission and values employees are meant to live, and they communicate the shared short- and long-term goals they are working toward together. As in Juan Galarraga’s story, the messages tend to emphasize that “We are all in the same boat,” “We are family,” and “There is no I in team.”

But focusing on commonalities as a way of establishing trust has its clear limits. There is a point of diminishing returns, where the drive to find commonality as an act of solidarity devalues differences. When this happens, the trust born out of the discovery of similarities begins to erode.

When differences are brought out into the open, inclusive leaders can shape more inclusive practices and procedures to achieve that often touted but often elusive goal of greater diversity leading to greater creativity and innovation.

This is how instills trust and values differences end up reinforcing one another. Finding commonalities instills the initial trust that allows for the higher-risk exploration of differences. Then, as leaders surface and embrace differences, they build further trust with all their team members.

INSTILLS TRUST

He who does not trust enough, will not be trusted.

Lao Tzu

There are plenty of strong leaders who are very good at instilling trust in people like themselves. Inclusive leaders, however, are distinguished by their ability to instill trust in the face of all forms of difference. This is particularly difficult because, biologically and neuroscientifically, we are programmed to be less trusting and more critical of those who are not like us.¹

The following leaders, in very different organizations and from very different cultures, instilled trust in similar ways: by focusing on what their very different team members had in common.

Hengliang Pan, General Manager of the Global After-market Business at LiuGong Machinery, headquartered in China, said:

I was leading a project on global cost pricing and one of the VPs [vice presidents], also from China, was much older than me and had significantly more global experience. We were so different from each other that there was a lot of conflict; it affected the other team members, who were from other countries and functions as well. We had a meeting where we got to air our different points of view, but the turning point was when we talked about how we all were working for the same business and we all wanted to grow it. It is important to find a common goal, because everything we do, we do not do for ourselves but for the business to grow.

Gabor Gonda, Managing Director–Central Europe at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), related, “I have had to restructure various projects or start them from scratch. Every time I grant 100% trust from day one, with the assumption that people are good. I assume that everyone will respect if others take the risk of sharing something vulnerable about themselves. It makes you look human. If you are willing to do this, the others become more comfortable in doing the same.”

Freada Kapor Klein, founder of SMASH and co-founder of Kapor Capital with her husband, said:

I am completely underwhelmed by people who lead with where they work and where their degrees are from. I’m much more interested in their stories and the emotional, social, and geographic distances they have traveled. We look for people whose lived experience actually leads them to identify problems and solutions that those in the majority don’t see. We ask them not what they believe but what have they done to work on diversity and inclusion. If they can’t tell us specifically what they did yesterday or last week toward greater equity, I don’t believe them. We found that in the entrepreneurs we fund, if they have been confronted by the injustices of the criminal justice system, the education system, the credit system, this is what has driven them to create a business to solve those very problems.

Of course, the universal experience of eating is a surefire way to break down walls and build inclusion. Mervi Lampinen, a Director of Information Technology (IT) at MSD Sharp & Dohme in Germany, shares her inclusive approach, which is in some ways countercultural to her German context: “I cook! Any time we have people coming to Germany I always invite them to my home, where I cook. The food and home environment is very informal and inclusive. It brings people together by bringing down barriers. This is especially helpful in German culture, which has a very strong hierarchy. Food helps dismantle the hierarchy and brings everyone to the same level.”

Frode Berg, Managing Director of Nordics at Experian, zeroes in on people’s common desire for those around them to be reliable:

It’s important to really do what you say you are going to do and be fanatical about it. Do not change your story line; if you have promised something, then you better deliver it. That is the way you build a bridge of trust with someone, who may have every reason to be a bit biased against you if there are cultural or language differences. And if for some reason you cannot do what you said you were going to do, be quick with acknowledging it, and share how you will fix and address the situation—and abide by the new time frame.

Anil Sachdev, CEO of the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), in Gurgaon, India, told us how common it is for people to long for transparency and reliability; even when the truth is painful, it instills trust. He shares his story of heading operations when the market was in very bad shape and cash for salaries and other spending was very tight: “We were transparent about the current state and made a commitment that we would not lay off the workers as long as there is cash. Further, once cash shortages began to cut into payroll, we started reducing compensation at the top with layoffs as the last resort.”

Missteps in building trust may arise when people build on shaky or irrelevant ground. Lou Nieto, former president of Consumer Foods at ConAgra, shares how people often build trust by building teams around them with people similar to them: “I was a director-level person reporting to a VP who was not a very strong performer. He tried to build trust with me on the basis that we went to the same fraternity, though in different schools. But this wasn’t a social setting, it was a business setting, and at the end of the day my loyalty was to the business. The commonality that needed to matter to build trust was high performance, not both of us knowing the same secret handshake.”

Instilling trust also requires learning to be discerning when, even when valuing differences, it would be best not to highlight differences. Sachdev from SOIL tells this story:

I was in Japan with people from twelve different countries in a fellowship program to learn about the Japanese culture of productivity. In the evening, after the fellowship program was done for the day, my Mitsubishi colleagues would entertain me. On the bus the next morning with the fellowship participants, I would be asked what I did in the evenings.

STORYTELLING GOES TO THE HEART OF TRUST

INSTILLS TRUST ■ Kevin Cashman, Minneapolis

Two enterprise CEOs from the same company I was coaching came onstage, one after the other, to unveil their new agendas tied to the organization’s already-declared transformational change.

The first CEO bombed in front of that audience of three thousand. The second one soared. Both were highly skilled and experienced. Both had attractive and well-put-together presentation slides. Both spoke to organizational values as the keys to the desired transformation. But one left the audience cold and cynical, the other engaged and inspired.

What was the difference?

The first CEO, who had a reputation of being a fact-finding leader, assumed his job was to inform. He listed the five values he felt were critical to the organization: value 1 . . . value 2 . . . value 3 . . . value 4 . . . value 5. . . . The group, which had been poised to hear fresh, different, and engaging ideas, was stunned. A resistant quiet blanketed the room. People moved back from the edges of their seats and leaned into their seatbacks with a disappointed, distrustful thud.

Is this all you have? Do you really care about these so-called values, or are you just mouthing the words from HR? Do I really want to entrust my career and creative energies to ...