Why Building an Inclusive Team Takes Longer Than You Want

If you run a business where quarterly targets dominate every conversation, the idea of committing years to something before seeing a return probably sounds uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth sitting with, because it describes exactly what building an inclusive culture requires. Ian Treloar is a long-time friend and former colleague of mine who has spent 18 years growing truffles. He has added minerals and nutrients to soil, planted trees, and waited. The results have arrived. A kilo of truffles can sell for over $4,000. You can check out his site here.

Before you can grow truffles, you need to understand them well, plant trees and let them take root. The truffles then take a minimum of five years to begin emerging after the trees are planted, and seven to eleven years to reach peak production. They only grow in extremely specific conditions, but when they do, the rewards are substantial.

Truffles remind me of inclusion culture in a company.

The business case for inclusion:

You cannot switch inclusion on. It takes work, commitment and time — which sits awkwardly against the pressure of quarterly targets and the crisis management that dominated much of 2020. It is also crucial for the sustainability of the workplace, so it warrants attention. Research by HBR found that teams led by inclusive leaders are 20% more likely to make high-quality decisions and 29% more likely to engage collaboratively. Additional research by Bersin/Deloitte showed the following benefits:

As we become a multigenerational workforce, including all groups of people becomes a growing challenge for leaders. Millennials particularly want to feel a sense of open inclusion in the employers they choose. By 2025, 75% of the global workforce is predicted to be millennials, many in leadership positions. This demographic prioritises diversity and inclusion above most other parameters, including salary. And yet only 12% of organisations can positively identify their inclusive culture, and 40% of those are focused on compliance alone.

Inclusion is also BIG business:

In their book The Inclusion Dividend, Kaplan and Donovan state that companies on the S&P 500 invest about $8 billion annually to build a more inclusive corporate culture. They do it because it makes them money. The S&P 500 corporations that also made it onto Working Mother's 100 top companies for inclusion brought back 98% on every dollar, compared to 89% for the S&P 500 as a whole over the same three-year period.

Back to Ian's truffles. If you can imagine an 8x better business outcome, that is something like what Ian feels when he lands a crop. It is not easy to achieve. Ian is playing a long game, knowing that even when he cannot see immediate results, he has to keep working at it because the payoff is significant. The key is improving the quality of the soil over time, removing the weeds that soak up nutrients whilst adding little value, keeping his eye out for clues that indicate progress, and replicating what works across the wider environment.

Ian also knows he cannot detect truffles on his own, so he has canine assistants. They are closer to the ground, sniffing out what is happening underground, and they give him the hints he needs to know his hard work is starting to pay off.

So how do we take all this truffle talk and apply it to creating an environment of inclusion in your workplace? For me, it starts with 3 As: Awareness, Alignment and Action.

Awareness starts with people understanding what inclusion is. Research by Queens University in Canada found that 40% of employees did not know whether their company had an inclusion programme or not. Inclusion is about organisations and leaders working to ensure everyone feels they have a seat at the table and a voice to speak. It is like being invited to the party and being asked to bring your favourite song to add to the playlist. Awareness also needs to extend to what is going well and what is not, so some form of assessment and adjustment process needs to exist to highlight progress and successes, or to bring areas of underperformance to the forefront. Awareness needs to run through values, strategy, processes and people.

Alignment means everyone understands the expectations on them when it comes to inclusion. There is a strategy, plans, defined activity and measures so that everyone knows what they need to do. There also needs to be an active conversation around expectations across the business — through all teams and functions, not only at the top table. Interpretation of inclusion needs to be considered business-wide, extending to talent planning, benefits and rewards.

Action is about making it real. Inclusion is not a policy on a shelf or a poster on the wall. Making sure people know about your inclusion initiatives and involving them in being part of the change is key. Creating champions and highlighting role models in the business helps to demonstrate best practice in action. Leaders who consciously engage themselves and their teams in inclusive activities create inclusive environments. It is also about dealing with the situations where the process or people fail to live up to expected standards.

Where these 3 As overlap, you also find the key elements of Clarity, Coordination and Communication. The 3 As need to exist as a holistic and coordinated culture initiative led by leaders and teams alike, not as linear steps. I say the words out loud and ask what we need to achieve them: Aligned Action, and Action Alignment. The 3 Cs form both the results and specific pieces of work — to get awareness and alignment, leaders should focus on clarity, and so on.

Every time I talk about inclusion with leaders, the gap appears in one or more of these A areas. Work out where the gaps are in your organisation, focus on closing them, and if you want to discuss how to do that, I am happy to help.

 

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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