Inclusify: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams

Dedication

To the loves of my life, Piet, Katy, and Kyle Johnson.

I hope you create and enjoy a more Inclusifyed world.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging

Chapter 2: The ABCs of Breaking Bias

Chapter 3: Three Lessons to Put You on the Path to Inclusifying

Chapter 4: Meritocracy Manager: How Can Merit Be Bad?

Chapter 5: Leadership Strategies for Meritocracy Managers

Chapter 6: Culture Crusader: The Curse of Crusading While Homogeneous

Chapter 7: Leadership Strategies for Culture Crusaders

Chapter 8: Team Player: Taking the Me Out of Team

Chapter 9: Leadership Strategies for Team Players

Chapter 10: White Knight: When He Doesn’t Save the Day

Chapter 11: Leadership Strategies for White Knights

Chapter 12: Shepherd: Being Transparent with Your Flock

Chapter 13: Leadership Strategies for Shepherds

Chapter 14: Optimist: Positivity Without Action Does Not Get Results

Chapter 15: Leadership Strategies for Optimists

Chapter 16: My Inclusify Journey

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Another day, another corporate cafeteria. The setting was typical, the actors were the same, even the costumes were typecast: large beige building with lots of free snacks and high-performance beverages; the human resources (HR) specialist in her blue skirt suit, me in black heels, black pants, and a jaunty jacket. But there was something a little different about that day back in July 2016.

I was interviewing top-level executives and subordinates at a Fortune 100 company to learn how the best leaders get results while leading in a diverse environment, part of my research at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. I had just taken an all-day flight to New York after doing some work in the Netherlands, so I wasn’t sure if my jet-lagged brain was firing on all cylinders.

As I entered the cafeteria, I tried to listen intently to the HR specialist who was filling the dead air with details about all of the new programs the company was running: pulse surveys, mentorship programs, leader training, job rotations.

But in that moment, I was preoccupied with one of my meetings earlier that day. I had interviewed an executive, Jim, who had said impressive things about his approach to leading in a diverse environment. He had seemed great. But then I had interviewed a member of his team, Tawny, who had told me a whole different story. I’m asked for my opinion, but in the end my opinion never matters, she’d said. It made me wonder: Was Jim a bad leader? Was Tawny an underperforming employee who liked to complain? Or was it a bit of both? Clearly, there was a disconnect. I wanted to know more.

As I paid for my sandwich and bag of Doritos, the musical sound of a multitude of different languages caught my ear. Looking around, I found myself in a room filled with people of all different ages, races, and genders. I was not at all surprised at the diversity of the crowd—we live in a diverse world, and this was a global company based in New York. But what stood out to me that day, even though I had seen it many times before, was that most people were seated in homogeneous groups. There were a table of Asian Americans, a table of young white women, a table of Latinos, a table of old white guys, a table of young white guys.

It made me wonder: If we are all segregating around the lunch table, do we do the same around the conference table? I knew that when it comes to starting companies, women, people of color (POC), and women of color (WOC) are more likely to start teams together.¹

Likewise, venture capitalists are more likely to partner with founders who share the same background. But they do so at their own peril. For example, a group of venture capitalists is 25 percent less likely to invest successfully when all members are of the same race than when there is diversity on the team. Why? Because they are missing out on different perspectives. We see the same negative effects in homogeneously educated groups: venture capital teams are 18 percent less successful when they invest with another venture capitalist who graduated from the same alma mater.²

So if the lunch table behavior I was witnessing extended to the meeting table, this organization’s teams were probably not performing as well as they could. It might also help to explain the confusing interviews I’d just conducted with Tawny and Jim. In fact, it might explain why, in general, most corporate diversity efforts fail.

I thought Jim had said all the right things about leadership during our conversation. But Tawny’s experiences did not jibe with her boss’s words. I felt as though she was talking about a completely different person than the one I had met. It was classic he said, she said.

HE SAID: I really like people to try new things. That is how we innovate.

SHE SAID: Let’s just say, if someone’s new idea doesn’t work, there will be consequences.

HE SAID: I am all about empowerment—I like to let people do things their own way.

SHE SAID: We really get no guidance at all. He calls it ‘empowerment,’ but I just feel lost.

HE SAID: I always ask for everyone’s input on decisions. But at the end of the day, it is my job to decide.

SHE SAID: I am allowed to be in the room and give my opinion, but I’m not really included because in the end my opinion never matters.

Tawny wasn’t done. She added that her performance wasn’t recognized. She told me that she’d landed a large client, yet Jim had never even mentioned it. She also complained that she did not feel like part of the team. In fact, she said, "there is no team, just a bunch of people trying to outperform each other to please Jim. But we’re all on our own. It feels like The Hunger Games."

As a result, Tawny, like so many others in the United States today, was not engaged in her work; she was just going through the motions to get through each day and was no longer taking on new challenges. It weighed on her that we spend the majority of our waking lives at work, and she’d had enough. She had decided it was time to look for a new job.

For the last fifteen years, I have been studying the intersection of leadership and diversity: how teams perceive female and minority leaders and what leaders can do to increase the variety of race, ethnicity, experience, background, and perspective in their workforce. In that time, despite the notable increase in companies making diversity a priority and implementing diversity programs, the Fortune 500 has not made much progress. There is still a dearth of women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ in the top ranks of organizations. As of 2019, women and POC comprise only 25 percent and 27 percent of executives, respectively. Only 5 percent of CEOs are women. Five percent! This is despite the fact that women make up 51 percent of the population and minorities make up 39 percent of the population. For example, 13 percent of the population—but fewer than 1 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs—is black.

Even at companies that try hard to recruit women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ, leaders report that the diversity management efforts are not working. In April 2016, I spoke at the White House summit on diversity in corporate America to an audience of Fortune 500 chief executive officers, chief diversity officers, and other thought leaders. Our conversations made it clear that they, too, were struggling to get the most out of their diversity efforts. Their teams weren’t bonding, their employees’ engagement was low, and some employees felt excluded.

After meeting Tawny, I became curious to learn more about what leaders could do to fully harness the power of diverse perspectives and ensure that they keep their talented employees and attract new ones. It’s not just CEOs who need to solve this problem. CEOs may change policy, but it is the managers throughout the organization who have the strongest impact on teams. I went on a quest to understand why some leaders are able to attract, retain, and engage diverse teams while others miss opportunities or fail altogether. I read the research, conducted laboratory experiments, did field studies with a multitude of organizations, and interviewed more than a hundred leaders and followers, including the CEOs of major corporations who were getting it right, according to their employees and profit-and-loss reports, and leaders at all levels who were getting it wrong. I uncovered the two skills that the best leaders had in common.

First, they embrace different perspectives and backgrounds. Second, they fit all the unique pieces together to create a cohesive, interdependent team with a shared purpose. Together, this set of behaviors enables people to do what I call Inclusify. Unlike diversifying or including, Inclusifying implies a continuous, sustained effort toward helping diverse teams feel engaged, empowered, accepted, and valued. And although few people are born Inclusifyers, there are specific steps that leaders can take to become one.

Some leaders say, "I don’t see why I should have to change my behaviors so others can feel comfortable." Fair enough. You don’t have to. But you should want to. If I offered some tidbit of advice that was sure to increase sales, drive innovation, or reduce turnover, wouldn’t you want to do it? Inclusifying achieves all of that and more. And it is not painful. Racism, sexism, harassment—those things are painful. Creating a diverse, inclusive workplace can make your work more enjoyable.

My goal is to share the lessons I have learned that can help leaders understand why their current approach to diversifying their workforce may not be working and what they can do about it. None of the bottom-line benefits of diversity has to come at the cost of happy employees. Leaders who Inclusify will have better relationships with their teams, elicit greater productivity from all of their workers, and create a more positive environment for everyone. Inclusifying can change a company by making it possible for unique perspectives to be heard, thus allowing the best, most innovative, and creative solutions to emerge while creating an atmosphere in which all employees can be truly engaged.

Engagement is paramount to a successful business. It is a key driver of performance, with the most highly engaged workers outperforming others by 10 percent in customer ratings, 21 percent in productivity, and 22 percent in profitability.³ Overall, companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent.

Inclusifying is the leadership skill of tomorrow, but you can capitalize on it today. It starts with understanding the two most basic human drives: to be unique and to belong. In other words, we want both to stand out and to fit in; to be singularly ourselves but also to be part of the collective We. I did not invent this concept; psychologists have long recognized that we strive to balance these fundamental human desires.⁴ And it has been theorized that achieving these needs is essential for employees to experience inclusion at work.⁵ Yet what I noticed is that most of the leaders I interviewed underestimated the importance of helping their team members feel as though they belong or miscalculated the importance of celebrating their team members’ uniqueness.

Luckily, there are ways that leaders can create an environment that allows their team members to meet both of these fundamentals. For employees to feel like themselves, leaders need to embrace their team members’ differences and highlight the benefits of listening to varied perspectives. For followers to feel that they belong, leaders need to show every team member that he or she is a valued, essential piece of a larger group with an important mission.

Of course, these two ingredients have an inherent tension: being your unique self is easy if you don’t have to interact with people who are different from you, and creating a team is straightforward if everyone on the team is the same. Because of this tension, most leaders miss out on one or the other of these two ingredients and end up with either cohesive teams of people who all act similarly or a lot of diverse individuals who don’t gel.

More than once as I conducted my research, I would be talking to a leader and suddenly feel a sense of dejà vu. Everything they said would seem eerily familiar, and their style would remind me of someone else. Later, I would go back to my notes and find that many leaders I’d interviewed had expressed themselves similarly. They shared common challenges because they weren’t focusing on one of the two key human needs—they were not adequately allowing people to be themselves, or they were unsuccessful in making people feel as though they belonged.

Over time, my interviews began to reveal six specific archetypes, falling along two axes (see the chart). Leaders who underestimated the importance of the team often had employees who did not feel that they belonged; leaders who ignored the benefits of listening to different perspectives left some people feeling that they could not be their unique selves.

Some leaders did neither. Others did both minimally and had not yet fully committed to embracing and implementing either. As I heard more and more stories, I concluded that most leaders fall into one of these four buckets, which I call the Four Follies, that keep them from getting the most out of their teams. These follies are: missing out on uniqueness, missing out on belonging, missing out on both, and not fully committing to either. Those who avoided the follies hit the sweet spot that made them Inclusifyers.

Inclusifyers had realized the importance of both these essential human drives and therefore were able to get the most out of their diverse teams. Interestingly, the mistakes that leaders made were often similar. For example, two leaders from very different companies, industries, and professions would ground their leadership philosophy in the belief that the strongest players win and use identical language about wanting to hire the best person for the job. But as I’ll explain, it’s a myth that the strongest always win, as is the idea that there is ever a best person for a job, and leaders and managers who rely on these unfounded beliefs to direct their hiring, firing, and promotions actually hurt their business. The people I met were rarely ill intentioned; they just really believed in the myths they had been taught.

Interestingly, the myths and mistakes that were common for white men to believe differed slightly from those that impeded women and people of color and led two of the archetypes to manifest differently. Altogether, there are six archetypes highlighting the subtle ways in which leaders miss out on uniqueness and belonging:

Meritocracy Manager: Wants to hire the best people for the job but does little to appreciate the unique qualities of his employees or help them feel that they belong to the same team.

Culture Crusader: Focuses on creating a team of like-minded people and ends up forgoing the benefits of incorporating different thoughts, perspectives, and backgrounds.

Team Player: A subset of Culture Crusaders (mostly women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ) who work so hard to assimilate with the group that they lose touch with the value their own and others’ diverse perspectives add to the team dynamic.

White Knight: Takes a paternalistic approach to women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ and tries to save them. The resulting lack of emphasis on shared goals diminishes team cohesion because people cannot see how they fit together.

Shepherd: A subset of White Knights, Shepherds are women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ who offer in-group support but in doing so cause people to question their motives, resulting in a less cohesive team.

Optimist: Sees value in uniqueness and belonging but is not committed to actively creating change and so maintains the status quo through inertia.

If you want to take a test to find out your scores on the Inclusify matrix, please text matrix to 844-476-9863 and the automated service will share the survey with you.

Further, I learned lessons from what I gleaned during my interviews with business leaders and have translated them here so that anyone can learn to be an Inclusifyer. My interviews revealed eight key behaviors exhibited by Inclusifying leaders. Four of them focus on supporting uniqueness (or the SELF) and four of them focus on enhancing belonging (or the TEAM). Throughout this book we’ll explore these concepts in depth.

To encourage uniqueness:

• Support: Inclusifyers publicly support diversity. They do not pretend to ignore difference; instead, they recognize and embrace it.

• Empathize: Inclusifyers get to know their people so they can begin to understand the needs of their team members.

• Learn: Inclusifyers have a hunger to learn from others’ unique perspectives and try to hire people with diverging opinions and bring out different perspectives within existing talent.

• (Be) Fair: Inclusifyers see that it is essential for employees to feel that they are treated fairly. This means reaching not only equality but also equity by giving people what they need to be successful.

To create belongingness:

• (Be) Transparent: Inclusifyers are aggressively transparent about their practices, so people know how things work in the organization and understand how they appear to others.

• Empower: Inclusifyers empower team members to make their own decisions, conveying high expectations for success.

• Align: Inclusifyers actively work to align allies into the diversity and inclusion conversation.

• Motivate: Inclusifyers motivate their teams by building spirit and infusing diversity, inclusion, and belonging into the organization’s values.

We’ll hear about well-meaning leaders who fell prey to one of the Four Follies with unexpected consequences that undermined their teams, resulting in a lack of inclusion. We’ll explore how to recognize the myths and misperceptions that drive these behaviors, and I’ll give you practical road maps and strategies for you to become an Inclusifyer. By learning why uniqueness and belonging are so imperative to their employees, leaders can better understand what makes their followers tick and find ways to encourage all of them to be themselves while ensuring that they also feel like part of the team. The end result is a fully engaged organization filled with diverse perspectives that create innovative and creative ideas that drive value.

In Chapter 1, I will introduce the concepts of uniqueness and belonging and why they are so important. Chapter 2 focuses on how our expectations of and learned associations about different racial and gender groups limit our ability to Inclusify. Most of the time these associations are subconscious and unintentional—what psychologists call unconscious biases. Although these biases are not malicious, they shape our behavior patterns and often form the basis of the myths and misperceptions that are at the root of the Four Follies. Chapter 3 describes the path to Inclusifying and highlights three essential lessons that all Inclusifyers need to know.

The following chapters cover each of the archetypes by describing what they are, what behaviors they comprise, and how well-intentioned leaders can pivot to become Inclusifyers. In the last chapter you can read my Inclusify journey. More resources and downloads are available at DrStefJohnson.com, and you can take the quiz to find out which of the Four Follies you are most likely to fall prey to at Inclusifyer.com.

We hear from a lot of CEOs in this book. But Inclusifying is for everyone, not just CEOs. In fact, it is actually more important for middle managers. Only 52 percent of organizations believe their board members are engaged in diversity and inclusion initiatives, and just 39 percent agree that their middle managers are engaged.⁶ In writing about those middle managers, I have changed their names to protect their privacy.

My hope is to help you maximize the benefits of diversity and get the most out of your team, whether you’re a regional sales manager or a chief marketing officer. My mission is to help you examine your behaviors through a stronger lens than the one most of us have used until now, so the path to Inclusifying becomes clear. We all have the desire to be ourselves while being part of a team. In a competitive talent market in which engagement drives retention and profits, Inclusifying is the key to innovation, growth, and continued success.

Chapter 1

The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging

I feel that when I’m here, I can be myself. I can be loud because it is too damn quiet. But when I voice my opinion, I expect the staff to push back, because I’m not always right. Then we sit down for lunch, and it feels like family dinner where we can all connect.

—JANE, MANUFACTURING ENGINEER

The need to belong is so innately human that no