Inclusion isn’t a trend that goes in and out of style. Nor is it a buzzword, a catchphrase, or something to put on your company’s Careers page to check a box. Inclusion is an important pillar of a healthy, productive company culture. Businesses that prioritize inclusivity are more likely to attract top talent, foster creativity, and improve their employee engagement. The more your employees feel valued and respected, the more likely they’ll stick around, lowering your turnover rates and helping your overall productivity.
However, creating an inclusive culture can’t simply mean focusing on diversity hiring. It also demands that leaders—particularly middle managers—actively champion inclusion, day in and day out.
Managers are the linchpin in driving inclusive behavior within teams. They’re the ones who shape your team dynamics, set company expectations, and influence how employees feel respected and valued. Without the right training, however, even the most well-intentioned managers can accidently perpetuate exclusionary practices. Whether it’s through bias or lack of awareness doesn’t matter—if you aren’t able to help employees feel included within your organizational culture, they’re going to seek employment elsewhere. By providing managers with what they need to communicate inclusively, HR can turn managers into people who see, know, and understand their employees in whole new ways.
So how can HR professionals train managers to be inclusive leaders? Here are a few ways to equip your managers with the tools and knowledge necessary to foster a truly inclusive workplace.
Help Them Understand What Inclusive Leadership Is and Isn’t
Before jumping headfirst into training, it’s important to define what inclusive leadership is and isn’t. For instance, many people equate inclusion with diversity, but they’re two different—albeit related—concepts. Diversity refers to the wide range of backgrounds, identities, and experiences that employees bring to work, while inclusion is the practice of curating an environment where everyone, regardless of that background, feels empowered to contribute.
Inclusive leadership, therefore, involves managers actively working to create that environment. This might require managers to recognize and value diverse perspectives, ensure everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources, and advocate for equitable treatment for employees.
It doesn’t look like having diversity-based quotas, discriminating against people based on characteristics they can’t help, or constantly trumpeting about how hard they’ve worked to create a diverse team. Diversity isn’t just a gold star people can cheer about—if it doesn’t have meaningful impact, then it’s pointless.
Promote Self-Awareness
In recent years, unconscious bias training has gotten a bad rap due to poorly run programs and ridiculous stereotyping. But that doesn’t mean all self-awareness of privileges and perspectives is bad. Managers must be able to reflect on their own behaviors, assumptions, and biases to effectively lead diverse teams. Nobody doesn’t have bias; everybody brings their own unique background, upbringing, and viewpoints to situations. Avoid villainizing biases and instead encourage managers to simply understand them and how they may be helping or hindering the work environment. Otherwise, these biases can easily shape managerial decisions, even without intention. You don’t want unconscious biases influencing hiring, promotions, feedback, or the distribution of work.
HR can train managers to become more aware of their own biases by offering training that includes identifying those biases, understanding them in terms of decision-making, and implementing strategies to combat those biases. This practice requires a lot of humility and patience, but good managers will be able to handle the scrutiny and feel empowered to become the best managers they can be.
Encourage Active Listening
Active listening is simply the act of listening attentively and without judgement. Active listening involves not only hearing what employees say but also understanding the underlying emotions and concerns. Managers should be trained to ask open-ended questions, give employees time to speak, and avoid interrupting. Even small body-language red flags, like lacking eye contact or seeming distracted, can create communication issues during sensitive conversations.
What does active listening have to do with inclusion? First, people feeling heard is a foundational part of them feeling included. If they don’t feel like they have anyone they can go to with concerns or issues, they’re not going to feel like they have a place within your company. Secondly, people from different backgrounds might have different communication styles, but all of those can be actively listened to. Just because someone is using different verbiage than you would or using a different tone doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a listening ear. And finally, if your managers haven’t been fostering an inclusive environment, it’s important that employees have an opportunity to present that information. Otherwise, you’re going to have a huge turnover problem with no understanding of why. Keeping doors open between managers and their employees is vital when it comes to inclusivity, and active listening plays an important role in that.
Create an Accountability Framework
Finally, an inclusive work environment requires ongoing commitment and accountability. HR can help managers maintain a focus on inclusion by creating a framework for measuring and tracking progress. Otherwise, you’re creating a directive with no follow-up and demonstrating that you don’t believe inclusion is that important.
Setting clear inclusivity goals will help managers keep their eye on the prize. These could include an increased diversity in hiring and recruitment, ensuring that employees from underrepresented groups have access to career development opportunities, improving employee engagement scores in areas related to inclusion, ensuring that performance reviews are free from bias by implementing structured feedback, ensuring team communications are inclusive, or mentoring underrepresented employees. Managers should have a role in crafting these goals and give their own ideas about how they can make the workplace more inclusive.
At the end of the day, managers need to be held accountable for their role in fostering an inclusive workplace. This could be incorporated into performance evaluations, with the above-mentioned inclusion-related goals as part of their overall job performance assessment. By creating an accountability system, HR ensures that managers stay focused on driving inclusivity in meaningful, measurable ways.
Claire Swinarski is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.
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