Event wrap-up: Engaging Diverse Teams — Essential Skills for Today’s Leaders
Part of a series of stories that explore inclusion as a fundamental leadership skill for the future of work.
Helen Babb Delia, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas, in collaboration with development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Sally McNamara, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Soolin Barclay and Courtney Guilliatt.
On Tuesday December 6th 2022, the State Library Victoria and RMIT FORWARD hosted an event on ‘Engaging Diverse Teams — Essential Skills for Today’s Leaders’ in Melbourne, Australia.
Here’s an overview of what we talked about, and how that links our belief at RMIT FORWARD that the future of work requires new skills essential to working successfully with diverse teams.
The reality of work
The population and workforce of Australia continue to change dramatically and workplaces are becoming more diverse.
The results of the 2021 census showed Australia is becoming a more diverse country; the Respect@Work legislation in Australia has been passed and introduces a positive duty on employers to take proactive steps to end harassment, violence and discrimination in the workplace; Unilever has launched a 4-day work week trial after a successful pilot in New Zealand.
It doesn’t matter which company or industry we work in, we’ll all be members of increasingly diverse teams — teams with varied perspectives, lived experiences, identities and expectations.
The leadership we offer and the ways we engage and lead teams of people with diverse identities, experiences, and opinions must change to embrace the idea that inclusion is leadership. Increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace can lead to constructive conversations and better outcomes for teams and organisations. Leaders need the right skills, and to invest the time to practice them, in order to deal with difference successfully and make the most of this potential.
Setting the context
We started the event with a context-setting panel featuring three diverse speakers who brought to the discussion their experience in diversity, equity and inclusion innovation and negotiation and mediation. They were:
- Helen Babb Delia (Development Partner, RMIT Forward, The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation, and CEO, Yes Get It)
- Deanna Pantín Parrish (faculty member at Harvard Law School and Assistant Director of the Harvard Negotiation Teaching Network) and;
- Claudette Llapitan (diversity, equity and inclusion innovator currently working for organisations Toll Group and Iress and host and producer of the podcast Same, same but different).
The questions we asked our panellists included:
- Why is what we’re talking about important for today’s leaders — rather than sometime far off into the future?
- What do you think often gets missed in this work?
- What can we do about it?
The discussion covered points including:
- The future of work necessitates that inclusion is leadership.
- A recent study published in MIT Sloan Management Review showed that the number one reason people left workplaces in 2021 was because of toxicity — specifically lack of inclusion and disrespect.
- Inclusion isn’t just a one-on-one practice. Cultivating a sense of inclusion in the workplace requires more than strong interpersonal relationships. While individual skill building is essential, that must be matched by the equitable design of systems, processes, policies and teams, all of which signal expectations of behaviour and culture
- It’s easy for people to think of diversity and inclusion work as separate to their role. A big ‘aha!’ moment that makes a real difference for each of us, and the people we’ve worked with, is realising that we all play a role, every day, in making the workplace and community more inclusive. It’s only when we take this role just as seriously as our other professional responsibilities— with the same level of accountability and measurability — and work on it every day that we create lasting change.
- The reality is that everyone has the power to influence diversity, equity and inclusion outcomes at work, whether it’s in your job description or not. Wherever you have power to make decisions, influence an approach or suggest language, products or actions, you also have the power to be a leader or a gatekeeper. Use this power wisely! A question to ask if you’re saying ‘no’ to something is to pause, reflect and ask, ‘why am I saying no?’
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion needs be approached through an intersectional lens (rather than in silos). This helps acknowledge multiple oppressions, and that not everyone’s experiences — even among those who have been historically marginalised— are the same. This is especially the case in Australia where bringing an intersectional lens is still a newer concept for some groups (more about intersectionality at this link).
- Increased differences do not need to mean increased disputes. Instead, they are our teachers: a call to action for us to embody more inclusive leadership skills. To do this successfully, leaders need to develop the right skills for this future of work, including the skills needed to have difficult conversations.
Skills building session
Most of the event was dedicated to skills building with our 70–80 strong audience members led by Deanna Pantín Parrish. Deanna focused specifically on the skills of listening with self-awareness and non-judgment and responding to difference with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
The reality of work now and in the future is that people leaders need to develop a different skillset than they were promoted or hired for. Whether we are engineers or project managers, we are all also professional communicators.
Just as we need to refresh our skills to work with new technology, new legislation and new client demands, so do we need to continually work on the skills to be relevant in the communities within which we work, to serve our teams and deliver the best products and services.
We’d like to thank everyone who attended and participated in the event and especially our guests Deanna and Claudette, and our hosts at State Library Victoria.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
