In any society, organization, or team, the best results come when every person makes their greatest possible contribution to the success of the group. A baseball team would never take the field with only eight players; it needs all nine to be successful. The team's best performance comes from every individual's best performance. Therefore, in order to lead a group to the best possible outcome, leaders should be concerned with every person's performance.
Inclusive leadership is about performance. Inclusive leadership is not a tool to achieve demographic targets for the sake of diversity. It's not about programs or policies targeted at underrepresented groups. A leader with an inclusive approach, who maximizes the performance of every follower, will outperform a leader satisfied to lead only some of the followers.
Despite that truth, there is abundant evidence that people are frequently left behind in society, large organizations, or even small teams. Why does that happen? Why are so many leaders leaving potential performance on the table?
Leaders tend to be exclusive because people are different, and difference is challenging. Difference creates psychological hills and valleys in the geography of a leader's group of followers. Without a conscious effort to be inclusive, leaders will stick to the valleys as they walk the land, because it's easier than taking the hills.
Imagine a hypothetical leader responsible for a group of followers. Considering any traits or characteristics, some of the followers will be more similar to the leader and some will be less similar. Age, gender, race, educational background, nationality and regional origin are commonly discussed characteristics, but job experience, preferences for introversion or extroversion, hobbies or anything else can all be avenues of similarity or difference. The main idea is that the followers are distributed along a spectrum from most to least similar to the leader.
It is easier to lead people who are similar and more difficult to lead people who are different
We know ourselves far better than we know other people. In absence of a clear understanding of another person's preferences, we assume they prefer the same things we do. We know how we want to be led, so we assume other people want to be led the same way. So most leaders will provide the leadership they would want to receive. The followers most likely to respond to that leadership are the followers most similar to the leader.
The lack of understanding of others can also leave a leader blind to unique challenges faced by less similar followers. If we're unaware of challenges we cannot lead others to overcome them. If left unaddressed, the challenges unknown to the leader can become performance barriers.
Followers similar to the leader are also more likely to have had similar experiences. Similar experiences help strengthen group understanding and identity among the leader and similar followers. A leader will find it far easier to engage with similar people than with less similar people who have had difference experiences.
The leader's relative ease engaging with similar people is the driver of an exclusive climate. In the free market of an organization, the leader's time and attention is the currency. Perhaps without intent or even noticing they're doing it, the leader is likely to invest their time and attention in the followers that seem to have the greatest performance return on the investment: those who feel easiest to lead. Those followers are usually the ones most similar to the leader. The less similar followers don't get the same investment.
The organization suffers from an imbalance in the provision of leadership
Without consciously trying, but instead flowing along with the unconscious tendency to engage more with others who are similar, the leader has created an exclusive environment. Leadership is not evenly provided to all the followers.
Making matters worse, the leadership imbalance creates a feedback loop that solidifies and strengthens the exclusive climate.
Benefiting from a stronger leader-follower relationship, the similar followers start to perform at a higher level than the different followers. The leader sees better results from the similar followers compared to the different followers. As they receive more leadership investment and their performance increases, similar followers enjoy the relationship and seek out the leader more than the different followers do. The positive feedback loop means the leader will continue to invest more in the high performing followers, who happen to be more similar, than in the lower performing followers, who happen to be less similar.
There are many undesirable outcomes in this situation
First, even if the leader doesn't notice, the less similar followers are sure to notice that they are not being equally served. Their performance is likely a small fraction of their potential and they'll know it. They are likely to disengage from the organization. In another vicious feedback loop, it will be easy for the leader to blame the less similar followers for their disengagement, citing the success of the more similar followers as evidence of the leader's righteousness. Faced with an inhospitable climate, the less similar followers will leave the organization.
Second, because the different followers aren't performing up to their potential, the entire group isn't performing up to its total potential. The group is only getting the best from the similar followers, not the best from everyone. The exclusive environment has cost the group performance. The stakes are that high: inattentive, exclusive leadership can doom an organization to failure.
Finally, as the organization chooses its next generation of leaders from among its top performers, who all happen to be similar to the current generation of leaders, the new bosses will be the same as the old bosses. The exclusive culture will perpetuate for another generation. If an organization's pool of leaders is already homogeneous, as many are, it will continue to grow an equally homogeneous pool of leaders into the future. The organization will continue to suffer from lost performance potential until it can break the cycle.
It is possible to have deliberate, inclusive leadership and an inclusive climate that enables everyone to work to their potential
What should leaders do to avoid this disaster? Leaders can, and should, fight against the subconscious tendency to focus on similar followers and leave others behind. Leaders need to embrace the challenge of leading everyone. This is a leader’s work. Through deliberate, conscious leadership practices leaders can avoid the pitfalls I've described. This series of articles will next describe what I believe to be successful strategies to lead inclusively.