Over four weeks, McChrystal Group provided resources to help leaders take action to build and lead inclusive team environments.
Leaders have an exponential influence on an organization’s ability to build inclusive cultures and work practices. We cannot have adaptable teams and we cannot attract and retain talent without encouraging and modeling inclusive leadership behaviors and putting energy into building inclusive environments – it's a leadership fundamental.
The Inclusive Leadership series deep dives into Inclusion, examining four key factors that fall within a leader’s control that impact perceptions of environmental inclusion: increasing fairness perceptions, ensuring involvement in the workgroup for all, empowering voice in decision making and effectively integrating differences.
Fairness: Increasing Fairness Perceptions
One of the foundational elements of high-performing teams is a shared perception of fairness within the work environment. When you look up the term fairness, it will return concepts such as just treatment, impartiality, lack of favoritism, or bias. While we’ve all heard the phrase that life isn’t always fair, most will agree that at work it should be, and leaders have a direct role in ensuring that happens.
Beyond Consensus – Empowering Diverse Voices in Decision Making
Inclusive environments invite different voices to share ideas, and solutions to enable effective decision-making. This article shares why empowering voices in decision-making is critical and shares The Four Layers of Diversity model as an effective framework for leaders to utilize.
Integration of Differences
Integrating differing viewpoints is central to any good decision-making process. Yet leaders often struggle with this – whether it's a biased blind spot to who should be in the room or a lack of psychological safety to speak up. When you don't integrate differing viewpoints into the conversation, you enable groupthink and limit the strength of your decision-making.
Involvement in the Workgroup
Involvement in the workgroup is a key part of inclusive leadership, representing how connected employees are in an organization to one another. Fostering greater involvement can be leveraged by leaders in the strategy, development, and execution process to develop a more successful strategy and more inclusive workplace.
Inclusion Assessment: Fostering an Inclusive Environment
Are you having challenges fostering an inclusive environment for all? Can your organization improve how they attract and retain a diverse workforce? We can assess your organization so you can skip the guess work and use data to act with precision and drive the change you want to see.
Article: The Key to an Inclusive Hybrid Team
What does a hybrid work environment really mean for individuals and leaders? The popular perception is that a hybrid work environment will allow for flexibility and freedom; however, these new operating models are far from a panacea. For those leaders who choose to move to a hybrid model, this change will introduce novel challenges that require a thoughtful approach to combat these challenges and ensure inclusivity.
Article: Psychological Safety
As our notions of collaboration, engagement and even inclusion have undergone fundamental change in the transition to hybrid work, creating a culture of psychological safety within our teams has become even more critical. So, how do we actually put that culture together?
Weekly Whiteboard: Decision Making
Decisions no longer happen in a linear fashion. Leaders can divide the decision-making process into two phases that allow for clarity of information and opportunity for team input to increase inclusion throughout the organization.
We want to hear from you.
We’d love to learn more about you, your team, and your challenges.
Our team is ready to help.