In my last couple of blogs, I have described and tried to decipher the BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible) context we live and do business in. And I have shared my observations on how we can try and overcome the challenges of a BANI world, and evolve from ‘struggling to survive’, to ‘learning to thrive’ in this context. But, you may wonder and ask, why I believe that the answer lies in THE POWER of I, and why I came to craft this unique leadership model. In this, my sixth blog, I am therefore attempting to answer these questions, and to link it with what we are all seeing happen around us…
In the last few years, we have all faced unprecedented situations both, on a professional and a personal level. I’m pretty certain, no one would disagree with that. Around Christmas 2019, if anyone had told me that in a few months’ time, a virus in one part of the world would bring countries and businesses at the other end of the globe to a standstill, I would have laughed and called the person a doomsday/ conspiracy theorist! And yet, this actually played out. Could you have imagined that all travel would cease, that children would attend online school from home on screens for months and even extending into a few years, that perfectly healthy people would suddenly fall ill with the same deadly virus, or with other, seemingly unrelated ailments, and would never recover? We all felt like we were living through a never ending nightmare, with wave after wave of this calamity. Thankfully, by sometime in 2022, things slowly started to improve. The cases of COVID infected people started falling or at least becoming milder, and we went back to physical work and school. Usually when it comes to remembering negative occurrences, the human brain depresses poignant memories and blurs them just enough to be able to forget and move on. Perhaps, the three years of COVID from 2020-2022 will defy this… or maybe the human spirit will triumph over this too…
But either way, we must admit that life as we knew it, and what we called ‘normal’ will never return. Even today, months after offices physically opened, organisations are struggling to bring their workforces back, and are grappling with what would be the most effective model in the longer run. Even today, many businesses have not regained their pre-COVID scale and stability, and shudder at the slightest hint of an untoward incident that could shake their foundation. The memory of the COVID era, and the challenges thereon have altered the leadership context forever. Leaders can no longer deploy strategies and styles from the past, and assume that they will herald success now, or in the future. The problems are new and different, and the solutions are unknown. So how in this scenario, can leaders be successful and create a positive impact? My work, research and observations tell me, that the most effective , and perhaps only way is by cultivating ‘Inclusive Leadership’.
When a problem is new, and its solution unknown, the best way to try and crack it is by putting together different people, with varied ideas and unique ways of perceiving things, to think and problem solve together. This assumes two things:
- that the people coming together are different from each other and hence bring diverse capabilities and views, and
- that this diversity can be harnessed constructively, rather than degenerating into conflict or dysfunctional differences of opinion and approach, which will cost time and money, to no avail
That is precisely what THE POWER OF i aims to create and enable – an organisational ecosystem that can attract and retain diverse talent, and a culture and DNA, which will enable diverse many to co-exist, collaborate and co-create solutions. So, how will such an ecosystem be built? How will such a culture be developed? By cultivating and growing Inclusive Leadership – leaders, who individually understand the crucial need for high diversity, and collectively possess the capabilities to nurture it; leaders with the agility to adapt and evolve quickly, and the humility to leave the limelight and to let go, so that the collective power of the diverse pool can be harnessed for larger benefit.
DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), has become a very popular term in the corporate world, and most large organisations have appointed Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs). I have worked with numerous organisations that have been focussing on DEI and actively tracking it. And yet, the number of such organisations that have accomplished real and significant progress in this space are few. Fairly soon after the rising trend, articles are already being written on the fall of the CDO. So, what is going wrong? My experiences and insights tell me that we have been going about this in the wrong order. Organisations have led with the ‘D’. Assuming that ‘what gets measured will get done’, they have set diversity targets, and then focussed their energies on hiring diverse talent, to meet workforce diversity metrics – percentage of women, mix of ethnicity, number of disabled people etc. They have failed to realise that accepting, embracing, leveraging and celebrating differences, more often than not, goes again the basic grain of the human race! Over time, human beings have gravitated towards people that are similar to them, and have rejected those that are different from them. The human brain simplifies complex people issues and decision making by compartmentalising others, based on similarities and differences. So when we bring diverse folks into an organisation and assume that they will work well together, we are operating with a huge fallacy. For the ‘D’ to bear results, we first need to put the ‘I’ in place. If and when we are able to create an inclusive organisation and culture, then will diversity thrive and lead to equity of experience and opportunity. It’s time for us to put the ‘I’ before the ‘D’. It’s time for us to create THE POWER OF i.