This is Part 1 of a six-part series on Inclusion as a Growth Strategy.
In the public life of the United States today, inclusion can feel like a quaint, impossible concept. News and social media sites are filled with group against group, one identity pitted against another identity, mistrust and anger all around.
But in the offices and warehouses of global institutions, C-suite leaders understand that for their enterprises to survive and thrive in a world in which their employees and customers span multiple countries, languages, generations, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds – they need their organizations to be inclusive.
The world seems fractured at this moment in time. One reason people are quick to cling to and defend their particular identities (whether gender, cultural or generational, or any other designation we strongly relate to) is because the natural, yet clunky, first step in any pursuit of equality is to start with putting people in boxes and counting them. This is how most of our corporate diversity programs operate. As I said, it’s a natural step – but it’s just the first step.
Diversity does not automatically lead to inclusion. Diversity gets more attention because there’s a formula – numbers to meet. Inclusion is not as easy to define, let alone measure and track.
This is why inclusion is one of the last remaining true growth opportunities for businesses. Starting with this article and for the next five in the series, I will explore what C-level executives think about inclusion, what they’re doing to increase inclusion, and what role inclusion plays in their growth strategies. For this series, I invited CEOs, chief human resource officers and other senior executives from 19 global corporations to share their insights. In the articles that follow I’ll share their stories and vulnerabilities, but for now let me set the stage for what I believe is the most important growth strategy leaders can embrace today: inclusion.
An inclusive organization is one that builds systems that actively enable people to:
- be and express whatever identity they authentically claim, and
- at the same time, look for ways to elevate the individuality of others.
Inclusion is active: It’s a system for making sure the organization is welcoming at every level to every individual. Inclusion is also a behavior that opens our minds to the importance of being more interconnected and interdependent upon each other – within our departments and across the enterprise. Today’s speed of change and transformation demand it.
In organizations with a mandate to produce more, sell more, gain more market share, and keep Wall Street at bay, it’s easier to place people in boxes and just tell them what to do. That’s what I experienced during my days in Corporate America and I quickly came to the realization that the organization was trying to define my capabilities and control the ways I should think.
That may have been efficient a few decades ago for determining performance predictability models. But we live in an age in which boxes and broad categorizations of employees and consumers aren’t relevant anymore. Yet that old corporate playbook hasn’t kept up with our new reality. Our blindness to this new reality results in widening performance gaps and missed opportunities for growth.
You Already Know How Important Inclusion Is
We all know we’re in the midst of a massive Cultural Demographic Shift (CDS) – a term my organization coined as a way of saying that large cultural segments of the population are reaching critical mass or numbers sufficient to have a significant effect on what we all do and how we all act. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States is projected to become a majority-minority nation for the first time in 2043. While the non-Hispanic white population will remain the largest single group, no group will make up a majority.
Also consider that, combined, Millennials and Generation Z will be the largest workforce of our time. Millennials alone are “more ethnically diverse, more technologically savvy and more educated than their predecessor generations. A fifth of them have immigrant parentage and the majority have friends with a different ethnic background.” (The Keckley Report October 2, 2017, “My Take: Millennials aren’t Buying What We’re Selling”). This same holds true for Generation Z (see this Wall Street Journal article for more insight into Generation Z).
And both groups are keenly aware that Corporate America can’t control them.
Millennials and Generation Z embody individuality in this age of personalization. If you are not ready for the inclusivity and personalization they demand, they will leave you behind, quickly.
These realities should be reflected in every organization’s growth strategy, from how you plan for future growth, allocate capital and financial resources, create the right products and services, form the most effective workgroups and organizational teams, and identify the strategic partnerships to strengthen your organizational knowledge and wisdom. These shifts have a significant impact on your ability to win the war for top talent, build brand loyalty, and conceive of and successfully introduce new innovations in your products and services.
If you’re still trying to identify the business case for inclusion, then you and your business do not get it. The business case is: without inclusion, your business will experience gradual and then rapid declines. With inclusion, you’ll be poised for growth.
By Design, Organizations Are Not Built For Inclusion
It’s no wonder organizations are struggling with inclusion. They’re not built for it (yet).
Let’s break this down:
- The corporate playbook was not designed to lead or serve mass differences.
- For decades, brands have not only attempted to define how employees should act or behave at work, but also have tried to influence consumers to make certain purchases to create idealized “lifestyles.”
- Today we’ve entered a new age of personalization, in which employees and consumers want to align with brands that are capable of leading and serving them based on a person’s own values, unique needs and desires. This shifts the balance of power from brands and businesses to individuals.
Brands that make employees and consumers feel included on an individual level will have a huge advantage over those that don’t. But it takes a concerted, strategic effort that many organizations are not investing in the right way.
You wouldn’t buy an old typewriter factory and try to turn it into a hotel without making some structural changes. So why would you think you can be inclusive without making some deliberate and planned changes to the structure of the organization and mindset of its leaders?
That level of inclusion requires having systems and process in place to enable inclusion throughout the enterprise in ways that are measurable and attainable. It also requires that your organization, your leaders and your workforce all have the mindset and agility to be authentic and to respond to others being authentic without the fear of judgment.
Your Organization Is Not Prepared For Inclusion – But You Can Change That
Based on interviews I conducted for this series, and also on data my company has collected for years, I can say with confidence: your organization is not fully prepared and nor are your competitors. That means there’s a growth opportunity here for any organization that is courageous and smart enough to move inclusion and individuality to the center of their growth strategies.
Everyone I spoke with feels the urgency for inclusion, and recognizes it as a mandate – not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s the profitable thing to do. They all recognize that it’s a strategy for growth.
The most consistent gap that I’ve identified is that organizations are not certain what they should be solving for to operationalize inclusion. Why?
I’d like to share some perspectives based on my organization’s 10 years of research. In 2018, this topic is no longer only about diverse people with cultural, gender and/or generational differences. This is about everyone in their organizations taking ownership to commit themselves to getting to know their employees and consumers as individuals – and creating strategies that serve the like-mindedness within those differences, rather than practicing reputation management around the differences that corporations are not yet prepared to serve.
Yes, this is hard to do. But it’s certainly not impossible if your organization makes the investment to properly lead inclusion as a growth strategy.
I’ve started advising clients to make a change that seems small but is actually deceptively powerful. Rather than Diversity & Inclusion, call it Inclusion & Diversity – with the goal of eventually removing the word diversity altogether, since we are all diverse individuals. Also, we must be bold enough to recognize that the word “diversity” has slowed down efforts to be more inclusive. (Side note: according to research conducted through client roundtables, eight out of 10 senior executives would rather remove the term diversity completely, claiming that it is too politically charged. This is the same reason senior executives believe they can’t remove it.)
I know, moving words around seems cosmetic. And it is, at first. That’s okay. It helps leaders begin to make a critical mental shift. Why does the order of the words matter? Because diversity doesn’t solve for inclusion (as already noted above). A diverse team doesn’t mean an inclusive team.
Inclusion solves for individuality, and individuality solves inclusion – and together, they both solve for diversity. This fact should remind us that we must start solving for the right thing: Leadership in the Age of Personalization.
Start with inclusion and you’ll empower people to be their individual selves, and to reach the full potential of how they can individually influence the organization. That individuality and inclusion, in turn, will result in the diversity you know you need in order to be the most innovative your organization can be.
Inclusion Is Not A Function – It’s A Growth Strategy
Unfortunately, the steps organizations take to ensure diversity don’t go far enough to also ensure inclusion. An approach that focuses only on diversity tends to be reactive and overly tactical. Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) has always been a cost-center – a compliance-driven functional area that is often part of the Human Resources or Corporate Social Responsibility department. Just because you think you’re doing it right doesn’t mean you’re doing enough. A cost center mentality always limits opportunity.
Compliance and CSR are important, but inclusion shouldn’t be confined to a functional area – it should be a mindset that all leaders and employees embrace that influences how they interact with and engage with their colleagues both internally and externally.
Think about how you view innovation. Sure, you may take a functional approach – funding a state-of-the-art innovation lab and a team of experts to explore innovative ideas full-time. There are upfront costs associated with that endeavor, but you also know that enabling true innovation will pay off over time. You likely also want an innovative spirit to permeate the organization. An enterprise that truly values innovation will want people at all levels and in all departments to learn how to be innovative.
Inclusion is no different.
You might have a functional area devoted to making sure the company has systems for ensuring inclusion. That department might be seen as a cost-center. But if it’s successful in creating systems that infuse inclusion throughout the enterprise, and in training everyone how to think more inclusively (just like people might be trained to think innovatively) – that’s when inclusion becomes a growth strategy rather than a cost.
But to do this correctly, corporations must stop controlling the individual and finally allow individual employees and consumers – whose influence is growing stronger every day – to guide the organization’s growth strategies.
Inclusion is all about letting the individual touch the business, influence more and help the organization mitigate risk and neutralize uncertainty. In fact, employees and consumers often know the requirements for the business better than their own leaders and the brands (they just don’t have a platform to share and express their ideas and ideals). Inclusion is about creating interdependency on people and their unique experiences and capabilities. It is about fostering environments in which leaders can best see, sow, grow and share opportunities for the betterment of a healthier whole.
Our first steps toward anything will be flawed. There’s no shame in that. As leaders, our efforts so far have been on getting those diversity numbers up. But today, that’s just the minimum requirement for any organization. Simply achieving diversity will not give you a competitive advantage. You have to put that diversity to work. And that’s where inclusion comes into play. The organizations that figure out inclusion will be the ones to achieve the growth they seek.
Throughout this article series, I will explore what this means and how companies are trying to operationalize inclusion in various ways.
In the next article (click here for Part 2), I’ll start at the top by examining the role of enterprise leadership in operationalizing inclusion. In the meantime, I encourage you to assess your readiness to lead inclusion as a growth strategy.
