Blog Entry

I’ve been watching two former clients struggle with inclusive leadership from afar, and I’m preparing to re-engage with one of them. This stuff is really hard, and it takes intense commitment and constant practice to shift. The difficulties stem from two problems:

1. An overly simplistic mental model of what it means to be inclusive or collaborative
2. Lack of deep humility

To illustrate the challenges around mental models, it’s useful to examine the Interaction Associates’ decision-making model, which shows the involvement required for different types of decision-making:

I like this chart, but it’s easy to misinterpret. The Y-axis shows “level of involvement,” which is not quite the same as time.

Many people are under the mistaken notion that a more inclusive process takes more time, time you don’t always have. True, greater involvement requires more time. However, the more involved your stakeholders are in the actual decision-making process, the less time it takes to activate them. While it may be faster to make a decision by fiat, the process of getting buy-in afterward may take much longer and may be less effective than it would have been had the decision-making process been more inclusive in the first place.

Committing to being more inclusive is an important first step, but successfully practicing inclusivity is an even greater challenge. Another obstacle in our mental models is that we often conflate leadership with decision-making. This assumes that, ultimately, the burden is on the leader to be smarter than everyone else and to make the “right” decision. This is a weighty responsibility, and it’s misguided.

Leadership is about facilitating the group’s collective intelligence, which, given the right group makeup, should always be greater than any individual’s intelligence. This requires deep humility to do well, which is not necessarily an attribute that most people associate with leadership. Humility is not about disavowing your own power. It’s about weaving your own power with everyone else’s, so that something much greater emerges.

The most underrated, underutilized tool for doing this is the power of acknowledgement. When I’m exposed to new groups, I keep a running tally in my head of how often people acknowledge others. It indicates deep listening, shared language, and reciprocity.

One of the best groups I’ve seen at doing this is the Hillside Group, which is the pattern language community. The first time I attended one of its meetings, I was struck by how often people cited each other, not just in the context of the meeting itself, but in the context of the ongoing work. People constantly reflected back what they heard other people saying, and when they later referred back to these ideas, they were always careful to re-acknowledge those who had first mentioned these ideas.

Lack of acknowledgement often trips up leaders who are trying to be more inclusive and who are even spending the time to do so. They might say, “I listened, and here’s what we’re going to do.” This might even be true. However, there is often no evidence of listening in their words, because there is no explicit acknowledgement of other people or of their ideas.

If you’re trying to be inclusive, but if those around you insist that it’s not working, ask yourself how often you’ve acknowledged others in your practice. It takes deep humility and empathy to do this well, but it will result in healthier, higher-performing groups. There is no better way of fostering a sense of inclusion than acknowledgement.

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