LEADING WITH YOUR EARS

Leaders are key to achieving a sense of belonging, yet how? It’s certainly not one or two big programs that build a culture of belonging. Leaders who make a deliberate effort every day to listen deeply to their people with a genuine intent to understand have an edge. We call this leading with your ears. These leaders ask open-ended questions. They take the time to hear people’s stories and about their life experiences, to learn their goals and aspirations. They create the space for employees to feel safe showing up as they really are.

A leader should get to know their people and connect with each person on both a professional and personal level. This is one of the core elements of building a strong culture of belonging. If you’ve ever been fortunate to work on one of those special teams where everyone knows their role, everyone feels connected to each other, and tapping into each person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities is a seamless process, you know what we mean. Each person feels confident they are seen, heard, valued, and understood. They truly feel they belong on that team. It’s an “I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine” culture.

Over time, leaders can develop that level of trust, connection, and understanding. It starts with knowing your people’s needs and then having the insight to help them achieve their goals. It involves cultivating a collective vision for the future and then applying that vision to every person on the team. It requires coaching and guiding through day-to-day interactions that take your people from where they are to where they want to be. By getting to know everyone personally and becoming a partner in their career journey, you begin to build a culture of belonging. And as a result, each person will work harder, be more loyal and more committed, and perform at a higher level.

One of the reasons it’s so critical to spend time getting to know your people at a deeper level is that all of us so often default to some story we create in our minds about people’s background, culture, ethnicity, gender, ability, or skills. Based on the very nature of how our minds work and the experiences we’ve had, the books we’ve read or movies we’ve seen, the news, the media in general, our parents, our families, our teachers, and all the positive and negative experiences we’ve had up until now, we zone in on this single one-dimensional story of a person.

Can you see the discrepancies between being an inclusive leader and using single stories to make critical people decisions?

At the beginning of each Inclusive Leadership course we teach, we have participants watch the influential TED Talk of author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled “The Danger of a Single Story.”1 You can use the next QR code to access the video. From the many times we’ve watched this video, we’ve learned along with our participants just how vulnerable we all are to the single story about a person or a particular group of people or even a company, especially when they are different from us.

All leaders, us included, have single stories that may influence how we perceive someone’s ability and whom we hire, promote, and fire. It’s important to be aware of this possibility. In Adichie’s TED Talk, she emphasizes how power plays a factor. Those in positions of power and privilege have a greater ability to control the narrative, whether that be via the media or through access to other people in positions of power, such as politicians or senior leadership in the organization. But no matter what position we hold, we all can be trapped by the single story.

Adichie herself admits she fell into that trap during a trip to Mexico. “I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans, and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

Here’s a “single story” from our Amazon days. There was a large manufacturing company in the Seattle area that had the reputation for being slow and bureaucratic. (The danger of a single story applies just as easily to companies as it does to people.) We were in a hiring- decision meeting discussing a candidate from this company. Amazon sees itself as a flat organization that is anything but bureaucratic, so the single story of this manufacturing company played a significant role in the discussion. Although this candidate met every criterion and presented as an excellent hire, one leader expressed strong reservations. He felt that this person would not be successful since a previous hire he knew of from this company struggled with the speed and intensity of Amazon. He had a single story about the manufacturing company and the one employee he encountered from there, and he projected it onto all its employees. We challenged his perspective, ultimately hiring the candidate, and in doing so dropped a pebble of open-mindedness we hoped would cause a ripple in similar situations.

In the same way that you are looking to expand your stories of individuals, you should look to expand your stories of your competitors and other companies, especially those from whom you attract potential candidates. To paraphrase Adichie, it’s not that the stereotype drawn from the single story is wrong—in the case of the first employee, it wasn’t—it’s that it’s incomplete. It simply isn’t the whole picture.

Getting to know your people goes a long way toward challenging single stories and driving connection and trust. But how can you support your team members in building individual connections with one another? How can you build inclusive teams which share that vision of a culture of belonging, a place where every individual supports and values every other individual?

It starts at the beginning: recruitment. Building a culture of belonging depends on leaders selecting people for the team who value inclusion and belonging. Who prioritize “we” over “me” and team wins over individual glory. Who share their experience and knowledge and help team members avoid mistakes. Who learn from mistakes when they occur.

But let’s acknowledge that there’s a big difference between having shared values of inclusion and living those values. When tensions are high, when leaders are under work stress, when personal ambition and financial goals intersect, leaders, like all humans, can become more insular, prioritizing their own needs. Their values can suffer. This is why leaders must model behaviors of inclusion so that the expectation is continually reinforced among all team members. This is why leaders are key to the daily practices of inclusion.

As a leader, you are a role model, and your people are watching and hearing you all the time—your voice, your body language, your eye contact, your tone, and the words you choose—whether in the hallway, on Zoom, in one-on-one meetings, in staff meetings, or in your emails. If you spend time with kids, you know they’re watching your actions as much as or more than your words. They see everything—all your conscious and unconscious behaviors. They see you. The same goes for your team members.

Through your daily actions and behaviors, you either build up or tear down the trust and confidence of your team. When trust and confidence in you are high, you have created the psychological safety that helps build a culture where people take risks and openly share their ideas and perspectives—even when they are the lone dissenter “speaking truth to power.” But without that trust and psychological safety, team members aren’t going to show up authentically. They won’t feel that they belong. And they certainly won’t share their differing perspectives, which may be the ones the team needs to hear the most.

We all have a natural bias toward people like ourselves. We’ve been taught since we were children that what is different is dangerous and what is similar is safe. As adults, however, we need to acknowledge that what is different makes us stronger and what is similar makes us duplicative.

But it’s difficult to feel you belong when you’re the only one. If you’re the only Black woman, the only transgender team member, or the only employee with a disability in the group, you are less likely to feel a connection to teammates. Being the only one is such a common dynamic for historically underestimated, marginalized, or oppressed people that there’s a name for it: onliness.

When there is one person in the room with a different way of looking at the problem, or they are the one person of color, or the one woman, or the only person with some other dimension of diversity, listen to them. They deserve to be seen, heard, supported, and understood. A culture of belonging is one in which everyone feels safe to be the only one who looks like them or who has had their experiences. A culture of belonging also welcomes individuals who have an opinion on the margins or who are perhaps the lone voice of dissent. They too need to be heard and supported, and their perspectives considered. And they may be right. Every opinion counts.

Leaders need every person’s perspective and creativity to address and solve the difficult, complex problems facing your organization. Leaders need to build a culture where people in the room physically lean in and truly listen to those only voices. That’s when innovation happens. That’s when inclusion and belonging pay dividends.

The daily practices of inclusion are becoming exceedingly crucial to leadership success as workplaces become increasingly diverse. Leaders are hiring people who come from all over the world. We’re all working with people of every culture, faith, ethnicity, physical or mental ability, gender expression, immigration status, sexual orientation, race, language, size, military status, and geographic location, and every intersectionality. Effective diverse teams lean heavily on leaders’ understanding and modeling how to navigate the barriers that prevent people of different backgrounds and life experiences from maximizing their contributions.

ARE WE THERE YET?

As you travel on your Inclusive Leadership journey, you’re going to want to know: Are we there yet? How do I measure progress toward a culture of belonging? How do I measure inclusion? How do I know when we’re “there”?

Certainly, we utilize engagement surveys, ID&E maturity assessments, and other quantitative data such as workforce demographics and hiring, promotion, and retention rates. In aggregate these data tell a story and helps us understand the gaps between where an organization is today and their aspirational future state.

But perhaps the most comprehensive measure of inclusion and belonging comes from connecting directly with the most vulnerable people in your organization, those folks who have the experience of being the only one. Qualitative data from focus groups, one-to-one meetings, informal dialogue, and conversations are incredibly useful for gaining an understanding of people’s lived experience. In these conversations, you need to listen to understand with heart, with deep empathy. To lead with your ears.

The practices you’ll learn here will help build a culture of belonging that benefits your most vulnerable employees—and everyone else too. Everyone benefits from the daily practices because Inclusive Leadership is about leading all people. We all share a desire to be seen, heard, valued, and understood. We all have an innate desire to be included and to feel we belong. And we need to have everyone in the boat with all their perspectives to succeed in reaching whatever goals we set.