Inclusion Leadership Quotes

inclusion + engagement = execution muscle

Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.

The next time you are in a meeting, ask the quietest person what they think. Invite everyone into the conversation. If you are on a conference call, ask the people on the phone to share their thoughts first.

Urging an organization to be inclusive is not an attack. It's progress.

Stop talking about inclusion and engagement and start including and engaging in every conversation, every meeting.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.

Avoid dull facts; create memorable images; translate every issue into people’s lives; use simple, everyday language; never use big words when small words will do. Simplify the concept that “we are trying to construct a more inclusive society” into “we are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

a workplace can look as diverse as the United Nations, but if the employees are not truly respected, not truly valued, not truly involved, and not truly treated with dignity, what you have is a great photo opportunity, not real inclusion.

One day we need to discuss and find solutions to how these complex systems should operate and fight for inclusivity

Regulation is a good thing, until it cripples innovation and limits participation and inclusivity

Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusiveness is being asked to dance.

the marketplace is capable only of calculating exclusive costs; that is; excluding all possible costs that interfere with profit. Leadership of society requires the calculation of inclusive costs. To invoke the marketplace, as if calling upon the Holy Spirit, is to limit ourselves to the narrow and short-term interests of exclusion. (IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)

When I’m sitting by my gay friends in church, I hear everything through their ears. When I’m with my recently divorced friend, I hear it through hers. This is good practice. It helps uncenter us (which is, you know, the whole counsel of the New Testament) and sharpens our eye for our sisters and brothers. It trains us to think critically about community, language, felt needs, and inclusion, shaking off autopilot and setting a wider table. We must examine who is invited, who is asked to teach, who is asked to contribute, who is called into leadership. It is one thing to “feel nice feelings” toward the minority voice; it is something else entirely to challenge existing power structures to include the whole variety of God’s people. This is not hard or fancy work. It looks like diversifying small groups and leadership, not defaulting to homogeny as the standard operating procedure. Closer in, it looks like coffee dates, dinner invites, the warm hand of friendship extended to women or families outside your demographic. It means considering the stories around the table before launching into an assumed shared narrative. It includes the old biblical wisdom on being slow to speak and quick to listen, because as much as we love to talk, share, and talk-share some more, there is a special holiness reserved for the practice of listening and deferring.

When abled people get ASL and ramps and fragrance-free lotion but haven’t built relationships with any disabled people, it just comes off like the charity model once again—Look at what we’re doing for you people! Aren’t you grateful? No one likes to be included as a favor. Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.

This book is about the difference between a self-focused inward mindset and an others-inclusive outward mindset. It will help you become more outward in your work, your leadership, and your life. It will guide you in building more innovative and collaborative teams and organizations. And it will help you see why you like many of the people you do and what you can do to become more like them.

As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. From high rates of education, employment, and economic growth to low rates of teen births, domestic violence, and crime—the inclusion and elevation of women correlate with the signs of a healthy society. Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together. Countries that are dominated by men suffer not only because they don’t use the talent of their women but because they are run by men who have a need to exclude. Until they change their leadership or the views of their leaders, those countries will not flourish. Understanding this link between women’s empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity. As much as any insight we’ve gained in our work over the past twenty years, this was our huge missed idea. My huge missed idea. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.

{D]iversity, equity, and inclusion' represents a new mode of institutional governance. Diversity is the new system of racial standing, equity is the new method of power transfer, inclusion is the new method of enforcement. All of this could be presented to institutional leadership in a language that appears to be soft, benign, tolerant, and open-minded — something that, combined with the threat of accusation, elite administrators were culturally incapable of resisting.

after challenging France by arming and bankrolling the Algerian revolutionaries, he had the courage to send thousands of his troops to Yemen, on the Saudi borders, to support the revolutionaries in their coup against the country's antiquated royal regime. Nasser's project appeared to be a true revolutionary avalanche. Syria begged to unite with Egypt under his leadership. The Syrian leadership accepted union terms with Egypt that in effect dissolved the Syrian state. Several Iraqi leaders invited him to Baghdad to announce Iraq's inclusion in the ‘United Arab Republic’. Lebanon's Muslims and Druze hailed him as their leader.

The evangelical position, represented by the personal stories in this book, including my own, understands that a fully authoritative Bible supports the freedom of women under Christ without male supervision to follow their God-given callings and special gifts of the Spirit, including full leadership ministries. This view can be called the “inclusive” view of ministry

Often this shift occurs in reaction to apparent failings of previous generations or leadership. We see the outsider criticizing the previous leader or the church in general for a perceived arrogance and harshness and so, to win their respect or to gain a hearing—for the best possible motives of their salvation—we seek to establish ourselves as distinct from those that are disliked, and then present ourselves in such a way that the sinner is struck by our warmth, care and inclusiveness. This will almost certainly lead to growth. We will gain much positive feedback and on occasion great affirmation as the representatives of a kind of Christianity that is so much more appealing. However, the critical thing to note is that this path will always only buy short-term impact at the cost of long-term gain. Very shortly we will either have to display a very different side—in proclaiming the hard edges of a love that clearly has boundaries (to the disillusionment or greater disdain of the community, for having been conned), or we will shift our presentations so as to never disappoint our newly won audience. In doing this we will have taken the first steps on the path of compromise.

All Inclusive The single principle can be found everywhere, all the time. Everything works according to it. Every life unfolds according to it. The single principle does not say yes to this and no to that. Even though Tao is the source of all growth and development, nothing profits Tao. Tao benefits all without return and without prejudice. Neither is the single principle private property. You cannot own it. It does not own you. Its greatness lies in its universality. It is all-inclusive. The wise leader follows this principle and does not act selfishly. The leader does not accept one person and refuse to work with another. The leader does not own people or control their lives. Leadership is not a matter of winning. The work is done in order to shed the light of awareness on whatever is happening: also, selfless service, without prejudice, available to all.

People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.

even in leadership positions, many women are still treated as less-worthy peers. They are expected to be grateful for their inclusion, as though they did not work even harder than their male counterparts to get there. They are spoken to as subordinates by less qualified colleagues. Their ideas are discredited until those same ideas are articulated by a male colleague and then, suddenly, they are seen as the best ideas.

2. “When you make simple things complicated, you will struggle over issues others with very little effort are excelling at, and you will naturally find all the rational opinions and suggestions why you should stick to your ineffective approach. Don't because you want things perfectly done refuse to take the reasonable simple steps you can take now; if you are a leader of a people, try not to define Integrity in terms of your own sense of piety, try an inclusive baseline approach or, you may just end up driving your people insane

Hurricane Humans (A Sonnet) Come all ye misfits and rebels, Let's march to shatter the games. Break all golden chains of comfort, Let's work forgetting our names. Come all ye sneered and mocked, We must burn as flames of unity. Let's turn into a human tsunami, And wash away all hate and rigidity. Hurricane humans we are o brethren, Savagery no more is master to us. The fountain of inclusion is our lifeblood, We won't let tradition break our universe. Let’s finally build the kingdom of heaven, With clay from our heart’s unifying Eden.

Maybe you didn’t intend to build or support an unfair reality, but you can change it, now that you are learning how. This is every leader’s most sacred responsibility, particularly if their road to leadership has been smoother because of their identity.

Perhaps more concerning, though, is the fact that inclusion of people of color in power structures, particularly at the top, can paralyze reform efforts. People of color are often reluctant to challenge institutions led by people who look like them, as they feel a personal stake in the individual’s success. After centuries of being denied access to leadership positions in key social institutions, people of color quite understandably are hesitant to create circumstances that could trigger the downfall of “one of their own.” An

People who feel excluded get angry and act out their anger in the team. No man is an island, no person can function isolated from the group. When you create a team, any kind of team, inclusion is fundamental. Without every member feeling deeply that he or she belongs to that group there is no team.

If the parents felt they had a healthy line of communication with the children's ministry team and the church was following up in a timely manner, they tended to reflect on the setbacks less negatively. Parents were more likely to continue their involvement with the church if they perceived the children's ministry leadership was working proactively to appropriately accommodate their child.

Being an innovative CIO means learning fast, being inclusive, embracing multiple viewpoints and taking calculated risks.

Digital management is responsible for designing, enabling, and enforcing a collaborative, innovative, intelligent, inspiring and inclusive working environment.

Getting to fifty-fifty is incredibly complex and nuanced, requiring many detailed solutions that will take decades to fully play out. To accelerate the process, change needs to start at the top. Like Stewart Butterfield, CEOs need to make hiring and retaining women an explicit priority. In addition, here is the bare minimum of what we can do at an individual and a systemic level: First of all, people, be nice to each other. Treat one another with respect and dignity, including those of the opposite sex.That should be pretty simple. Don’t enable assholes. Stop making excuses for bad behavior, or ignoring it. CEOs must embrace and champion the need to reach a fair representation of gender within their companies, and develop a comprehensive plan to get there. Be long-term focused, not short-term. It may take three weeks to find a white man for the job, but three months to find a woman. Those three months could save three years of playing catch-up in the future. Invest in not just diversity but inclusion. Even if your company is small, everything counts. And take the time to educate your employees about why this is important. Companies need to appoint more women to their boards. And boards need to hold company leadership to account to get to fifty-fifty in their employee ranks, starting with company executives. Venture capital firms need to hire more women partners, and limited partners should pressure them to do so and, at the very least, ask them what their plans around diversity are. Investors, both men and women, need to start funding more women and diverse teams, period. LPs need to fund more women VCs, who can establish new firms with new cultural norms. Stop funding partnerships that look and act the same. Most important, stop blaming everybody else for the problem or pretending that it is too hard for us to solve. It’s time to look in the mirror. This is an industry, after all, that prides itself on disruption and revolutionary new ways of thinking. Let’s put that spirit of innovation and embrace of radical change to good use. Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now.

Sometimes you’ll find work that’s worthy of attention but which an organization is incapable of paying attention to, usually because its leadership doesn’t value that work. In some companies, this is developer tooling work. In others, it’s inclusion work. In most companies, it’s glue work. There is almost always a great deal of room to do this sort of work that no one is paying attention to, so you’ll be able to make rapid initial progress on it, which feels like a good opportunity to invest. At some point, though, you’ll find that the work needs support, and it’s quite challenging to get support for work that a company is built to ignore or devalue. Your early wins will slowly get eroded by indifference and misalignment, and your initial impact will be reclaimed by the sands of time.

You don’t need to have a fancy job title or even actually be in the workforce to help encourage and advocate for more diversity in leadership. We all have a role to play in creating a world with more inclusive leaders.

The bottom line is this: if you really want to lead, you just have to get good at aligning people.

Propose A simple proposal is presented as an informal draft to the group for deliberation. Probe The group gathers feedback using 4 of the 5 Cs (Clarifications, Compliments, Concerns, and Changes) to improve upon the proposal. Re-Propose After taking a break to integrate the feedback collected so far into a second version of the proposal, the second version is presented to the group. The group is then tested for the 5th C—Commitment—using polling. Suggestions for changes are made until the desired level of agreement is achieved. Close The leader finalizes the agreement verbally or in writing and sends documentation to all key stakeholders.

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

behind the act of allyship is to avoid being called racist and/or to receive a reward through social recognition, praise, and acknowledgment. The act of allyship creates the look of diversity and inclusion but does not come with any change at a deeper level through policy change, commitment to antiracism education, transfer of benefits or privilege, etc. The act of allyship is symbolic but not substantive. The act of allyship is one that is led by a person with white privilege who is not listening to, partnering with, or following the leadership of the BIPOC they want to help.

Exclusivity detracts collaboration. Inclusivity attracts participation.

Talking about diversity and inclusion in the workplace is one of the most important conversations you will ever have with your employees.

Success in today's competitive marketplace favors leaders who are transparent and forward thinking, those who promote and celebrate diversity, and individuals who maintain a commitment to inclusion.

If you want to be an effective and memorable leader, get comfortable fostering a culture of inclusion, collaboration and creativity.

The men who built Africa’ are stories to be told in the future. A future that may never come, yet we hope for it. For what is a man without hope? A dead man. A selfless youth-inclusive forward-thinking leadership is all it will take. Just a reminder, we are our enemy, and greed is what drives most so-called leaders today; the truth hurts. The shackles of modern-day slavery are not out of sight after all.

The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won’t Learn in Business School and Pushback: How Smart Women Ask—and Stand Up—for What They Want. As the same time, Rezvani created Women’s Roadmap, which engages in women’s leadership development and helps companies to create inclusive workplaces.

An organization that fails to enable, and hear, a diversity of voices is like preparing a multi-course meal using two ingredients. Sure, you might be able to fill a plate but without utilizing a full range of ingredients that provide richness, texture, and spice the resulting taste experience hardly pleases the palate.

Dive Deeper: Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless have come up with a menu of 33 well defined yet simple structures that are designed to allow the inclusion of everyone across all levels of the organization and stakeholder community. They refer to these simple structures as Liberating Structures in their book of the same title.

Inclusion is the story of sunlight falling equally on the garden of flowers (Diversity) and the gardeners (Inclusive Leaders) tending to the plants to grow and flower. Some plants need extra support, some need extra care and nutrition. The sun merely shining (Equality) cannot impact all equally unless they are made receptive (Equity). Only then, can these flowers bloom and bear fruits. Responsibility also rests with those who want to be included, by constantly upgrading themselves to be receptive to the efforts of inclusion. This is what sunflowers do. Diversity can be imposed; Inclusion is a choice. A choice which comes from love.

Our vision should be for each child to have a strong sense of belonging and inclusivity in the very communities that they will be expected to build, lead, and hold together one day...

There are no labels in UDL. There are only fabulous, amazing students with different levels of variability.

Inclusive leadership creates enough room for community involvement.

Leaders cannot afford to ignore or betray this diversity inherent in humanity. in fact, the fear of diversity, and the wish for uniformity, threaten the well-being of the world.

Exclusion

Leadership has an electrifying edge when it comes to shaping culture. Trailblazing leaders carve out the vision, values, and behaviors that guide a group. With unwavering integrity, they ignite trust and foster collaboration, forging a culture that pushes boundaries. These audacious leaders infuse purpose, propelling individuals and cultivating a culture of relentless innovation and unquenchable curiosity.

To lead inclusively, you will embrace discomfort and recognize your own and others’ imperfections as part of what it means to be human.

You show up as an inclusive leader every day, not just when it’s convenient.

We can’t underestimate the need for people to be heard, seen, and respected, which is what inclusion is all about.

Being a human leader means inviting other perspectives and letting go of the need to be right.

We have no idea what anyone else is dealing with until we get to know them, listen to them, and try to understand what they are experiencing.

When we don’t have the hard conversations, the issues we are avoiding talking about go underground, fester, and become more destructive.

Meetings embody and reveal your team culture. They expose who has the power, who gets listened to, and who feels comfortable speaking up.

Every meeting is an opportunity for people to feel seen, heard, and respected.

It is only when you retreat from discomfort that the learning stops.

Inclusive leadership requires us to hear information and viewpoints that often will make us uncomfortable.

As a boldly inclusive leader, you will need to counteract the natural human tendency to hear only the voices you most easily connect with.

Being a human leader means showing up as an imperfect person, with all your strengths and all your flaws.

It takes so little effort to make people feel seen and cared about.

You belong and this space is for you

A great leader realizes this dichotomy of utilizing his platform while placing others on this platform as well. They know mutual respect and how to listen to words and body language.

Foster a culture of exploration and experimentation where diverse perspective and ideas can converge.

A leader’s strength lies not in the might of their authority, but in the depth of their empathy, the breadth of their inclusiveness, and their capacity to inspire.

At the heart of every successful organization lies a culture of inclusion—one that not only accepts but also celebrates individual differences, viewing diversity as a wellspring of strength rather than a mere obligation to be fulfilled.

they tend to follow a common pattern: The incident: Someone writes or says something that’s acceptable to most of society but blasphemy within SJF. The backlash: A major protest occurs both within the institution and on social media, often equating the offender’s words with harm and demanding punishment in the name of safety. The moment of truth: Leadership within the institution—in each case, an institution specifically built to play by liberal rules—is forced to either stand up for its liberal ideals or cede to mob demands. Leadership cedes to SJF: In many cases, leadership initially stands up for liberal values. But when the backlash persists, to avoid being guilty by association, leadership fires the target or retracts their words. Leadership affirms allegiance to SJF: Public statements say something like, “The incident is antithetical to our values. We vow that it will not happen again. We reaffirm our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Being a writer in this century means that we must make our content available also to those who can't read. Inclusivity is important.

If you want to be an effective leader, get comfortable fostering Fostered a culture of innovation, inclusion, collaboration and creativity.

Diversity is inevitable, Inclusion is intentional.

The diversity that excludes is not diversity, but an underlying prejudice with an acceptable label hiding its true dark self! Isaiah 5:20.

When we come together in a group to get aligned, it may appear that we are all here to solve the problem at hand. While that is true, under that truth is a more profound one: we are all here to become well-regarded members of the group. However, unless all the members of the group also want that for each other, the environment is not safe for interpersonal risk-taking and playing full out.

The strategic responsibility of leaders is not only to act as a “Role Model” to promote collaborative teamwork and innovative ideas but also to manage the undiscovered vistas of diversity, cohesion and inclusiveness to harbour extravagant gifts.

Hire diverse but like-minded people. An inclusive workforce engaged in a shared mission fosters better, more creative solutions to problems, leading to sustainable growth.

The most accurate way to gauge DE&I progress is to understand the reactions of the stakeholders who matter the most: employees.

Effective inclusion leadership needs to start at the top of the organization.

Our survey measure rated three behavioral attributes of leadership inclusiveness: one, leaders were approachable and accessible; two, leaders acknowledged their fallibility; and three, leaders proactively invited input from other staff, physicians, and nurses. The concept of leadership inclusiveness thus captures situational humility coupled with proactive inquiry (discussed in the next section).

When life throws you a curveball, embrace the chaos, and turn it into your competitive advantage by shifting your mindset and transforming adversity into opportunity.

True leadership is the opposite of individualism, the opposite of one person standing above the rest. It's an encompassing, inclusive thing. I never liked the top-down way of leading. Even if I've been here for years, I shouldn't walk around like I'm a better human than a newbie or treat them badly.

Leaders need to deliberately build inclusive cultures where those ideas and talents can flourish.

As a leader, you need to ensure that no single voice is more heavily weighted than another.

India is a country where universality and inclusiveness are widely practised. We have one of the best advantages very few countries have, including China. Just the sheer diversity of religion, language, practices and ethnicity ... and if we can learn to live in peace, if we can accommodate each other, then we can build a model for the world on how to cope with diversity.

Those techniques used in formulating the agenda and making decisions—transparency, inclusiveness, decisiveness, micro-knowledge (but not micromanagement), and accountability—all will continue to be essential in implementation.

When leadership at the highest levels feel more comfortable with behavior that excludes than with inclusive behavior toward peers, “Houston we have a problem.

The mindset assessment asks questions that measure characteristics such as awareness, helpfulness, accountability, alignment, collaboration, self-correction, coordination, inclusivity, generosity, transparency, results focus, openness, appreciation, recognition, empowerment, initiative, engagement, and safety. Looking at these various elements and averaging results across industries, we have found that people rate their colleagues in their organizations at an average of 4.8 on the continuum and themselves at 6.8, which is to say that individuals rate themselves as 40 percent better than the rest of the people in their organizations across these characteristics.

Emerging technology is making facts increasingly vulnerable, and all of us will soon have trouble discerning what is actually true. Simply put, we’re about to enter an age where facts will no longer be reliable. The information we think is 100 percent accurate may be flawed, and even our best attempt to find the truth may fall short.

In the absence of verifiable truth, competing narratives will vie for allegiance. When we are forced to compete in a battle of narratives, inclusion is still our best weapon: only by leveraging a diversity of voices can we create a winning narrative.

Hartsfield-Jackson, which serves 104 million passengers a year, is the world’s busiest airport, a distinction it has held since 1998. A sudden power outage caused by a fire in an underground electrical facility serving it, brought the airport to a standstill. All outgoing flights were halted, and arriving planes were held on the ground at their point of departure. With, International flights diverted elsewhere. Such is the impact of the lack of proper Business Continuity Planning-BCP. Something still considered alien, as time progresses. One wonders, what will it take the International Aviation leadership to begin propagating for its inclusion into industrial best practices?

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

As the driving force behind schools, administrators exhibit strong leadership skills and a commitment to fostering positive and inclusive learning environments.

Belonging is important for a person’s health, just as it is important to your business’s health.

Inclusion to me means participation. You can "include" people but bringing them along to participate is when individuals experience true inclusion. Our job as leaders is to find ways for each individual to participate

Inclusion to me means participation. You can "include" people but bringing them along to participate is when individuals experience true inclusion.

Our job as leaders is to find ways for individuals to participate to their full potential