Case Study: Inclusive Leadership
Build a Competitive Advantage With Cultural Agility
Embracing diversity in the corporate world is a good first step, but it’s not enough to achieve optimum productivity. Companies must also have leaders willing and able to demonstrate inclusiveness. Embarking on a cultural agility journey is a great place to start.
Diversity has a much broader meaning today than previous, more traditional definitions that focused exclusively on gender and ethnicity. Likewise, inclusiveness is now working its way into the corporate lexicon and is a critical part of strategies to implement diversity policies across companies.
Many organizations focus on attracting employees with diverse backgrounds. They prioritize hiring an ideal mix of people and creating affinity groups, yet they struggle to retain the right talent. Turnover patterns don’t change.
Companies tend to believe the answer to this challenge lies in policies and procedures. However, research suggests that the solution requires leaders to change their mindset and create a corporate culture that’s inclusive of everyone. For example, a company with a policy that emphasizes diverse hiring practices but then excludes employees with certain backgrounds from leadership roles is not positioning itself for success. In fact, organizations with a highly diverse workforce that do not have an inclusive environment are likely to be more dysfunctional than organizations without a diverse staff.
Correlation Between Diversity and Inclusion
Organizations that practice both diversity and inclusion experience high levels of collaboration, engagement, and retention, which provide a competitive advantage. Figure 1 shows the relationship between diversity and inclusion:
Quadrant A shows high diversity but low inclusion.
Quadrant B represents low diversity and low inclusion.
Quadrant C shows high inclusion but low diversity.
Quadrant D represents both high inclusion and high diversity.
The leadership role in a company and on teams is crucial to drive performance in a globally diverse and inclusive environment. Teams that are created without a particular emphasis on diversity typically perform at average levels. By contrast, global and culturally diverse teams experience heightened risks and opportunities, but they can also achieve high performance if the team leader prioritizes inclusiveness.
The Journey to Cultural Agility
A commitment to inclusion starts with developing cultural agility, which is the ability to effectively navigate, communicate, interrelate, and function in diverse settings. Culturally agile leaders are adaptable and flexible to help the business.
Developing cultural agility starts with an open attitude, which leads to self-awareness, awareness of others, knowledge, and developing cross-cultural skills. Figure 2 shows the continuous cycle of cultural agility:
Open attitude is the prerequisite for engaging in the learning process of developing cross-cultural effectiveness.
Self-awareness facilitates other-awareness and must be grounded in cross-cultural knowledge to become useful.
Cultural knowledge, must be translated into cross-cultural skills to become effective.
Leaders who are agile enough to diagnose team dynamics should also exhibit change behaviors. Any leader unable or unwilling to use these behaviors can negatively impact the organization in a number of ways:
· Unconscious bias in the grooming of individuals
· Unequal and inequitable standards
· A lag in using diversity and inclusiveness to further client relations and grow accounts
· An inability to retain talent
Micro-behaviors also play a critical role on the journey to cultural agility. These are small, subtle, often unspoken, and unconscious behaviors that communicate dispositions, attitudes, biases, and sentiments. These behaviors include body language, voice tone, and facial expressions that positively or negatively impact others. The behaviors put some team members at a disadvantage while benefitting others.
Four Key Skills to Attain Cultural Agility
Companies are discovering that innovation and developing new solutions and processes oftentimes requires a different way of thinking. A diverse, inclusive, and culturally agile environment lends itself well to looking at challenges in new ways and coming up with new solutions. These four skills are essential to achieving that agility:
1. Cultural due diligence. Adequately assessing the possible effects of culture in relationships.
2. Style switching. Using a broad and flexible behavioral repertoire to accomplish a person’s goals.
3. Cultural dialogue. Illuminating cultural underpinnings of behavior and performance, closing cultural gaps, and creating cultural synergy through conversation.
4. Cultural mentoring. Advising, teaching, and coaching individuals in their sphere of influence to recognize the cultural underpinnings and consequences of their behavior, understand the cultural and behavioral requirements for true inclusion, and support change through inclusive behaviors, practices, and approaches.
Leaders with these skills embrace employees’ differences and, by example, show that they are inclusive and diverse. These skills ultimately make them more effective leaders.
Ready to start incorporating cultural training to build global leaders? Berlitz enables customers to grow and thrive through language, cross-cultural, and leadership training — all necessary to be successful in today’s global business environment. Programs are catered to the needs of your business and we have the flexibility to design and deliver integrated development solutions that are the right fit for your organization. Find out more at Berlitz.com.
