TRENDICATORS SPECIAL REPORT

Building Inclusive Leadership to Enable Future Success

Inclusion Is a Competitive Necessity
Gartner
Building Inclusive Leadership to Enable Future Success

This lack of inclusion puts exclusive teams at a competitive disadvantage. Our research has found teams that are diverse in gender and highly inclusive perform 40% better than teams that are only diverse.3 Diversity isn’t enough on its own; inclusion is necessary to unlock the benefits of multiple viewpoints and backgrounds.

HR is working to improve inclusion, but the most common approach — unconscious bias training — that 77% of organizations offer is ineffective at producing the outcomes organizations want and need (see Figure 2). HR takes this approach because it hopes helping participants recognize their unconscious biases (their accidental, unintended or subtle judgments) will lead to active inclusion.

Instead of simply focusing on biases, HR should focus on enabling leaders to adopt and maintain more inclusive behaviors and showing leaders what to do in a personally relevant and easy way. Through our research, we found successful inclusive leader programs use three key principles to do this:

Key Takeaways

About This Report

Use organization-specific examples to increase relevance and receptivity. Show leaders examples of noninclusive behaviors that could happen or have happened in their own organizations and contexts, rather than giving them one-size-fits-all examples.

Make inclusive behaviors feel actionable,not additive. Show leaders prescriptive examples of how inclusive behaviors can easily be embedded in general leadership behaviors, rather than teaching inclusivity as an isolated skill.

Embed bias mitigation efforts into existing processes to sustain behavior change. Safeguard against leaders’ biases by making small tweaks to leaders’ processes that nudge them away from unintentional biases and prompt inclusive behavior, rather than assuming training will be fully sufficient.

About the Publisher

About Gartner Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500. We equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities today and build the successful organizations of tomorrow. Our unmatched combination of expert-led, practitioner-sourced and data-driven research steers clients toward the right decisions on the issues that matter most. We are a trusted advisor and an objective resource for more than 15,600 organizations in more than 100 countries — across all major functions, in every industry and enterprise size

Publish Date

August 2021