We all have the power to make others feel included AND it’s a game changer for business performance
It’s inclusion week next week at RSA and that got me thinking, if I want to write about inclusion and business performance, I should be a little more personal because, well that’s what inclusion is all about!
I’ve just finished a book that was set in India (‘The Storytellers Secret’ in case you’re interested). In it there was a character who belonged to the caste known as ‘the untouchables’. It reminded me of a trek in Nepal I did. An adventure that included leeches, crocodiles and rhinos. In heavy monsoon rain we took shelter in the porch of a house. The owners came home and invited us in to eat our meal. We gratefully accepted but were then horrified that rather than join us, the family moved out to the stable and refused our offer of sharing the meal with us. They were ‘the untouchables’. We soon realised they would only eat when we stopped eating. So that’s what we did. Their unwritten rules and hidden barriers meant that they didn’t feel they could share a meal. But we could change that by stopping eating before it was all gone.
We all give labels to things. It helps us understand the world and operate easily. Sometimes those labels are helpful and others they constrain interacting and make people’s lives harder. Sometimes those labels are embedded in years of attitudes and experiences and even if we don’t want the barriers to exist they are hard to overcome. Sometimes we don’t even realise those barriers are there.
That got me thinking even more, despite having an incredibly close family there was a period I felt excluded. I’d car crashed my life by marrying and the wrong person (a long story to be shared over wine!) and all of a sudden I was the odd one out. Everyone else was happily married with kids and I was in my early 30s, single and trying to find a different path in life by escaping to the big smoke. Family events were HARD. Not hard because of anything they did, they were still the close family who accepted everything about each other, warts and all. It was hard because I felt the odd one out and constructed my own barriers. The thing that was the game changer was sharing my life and my differences. After that I was back to feeling part of my close family, despite my differences.
So what does any of this have to do with work? Well, we all have the power to make people feel included and accepted. Lots of people have hidden stories. Barriers are sometimes self imposed and others are due to a whole history of experience in the world. If we let those barriers remain then performance and teamwork suffers. For me, this is where both strong Leadership and HR can really make a difference. Working together to create and embed a truly inclusive culture is a game changer when it comes to high performance and delivery. Huge bodies of evidence show diversity improves decision making and gets better outcomes. Setting the culture and training individuals to encourage inclusivity and value differences will ensure we can both recruit and retain diversity and enable improved business results.
What do you do to improve inclusivity in your workplace?
