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Episode 1 Transcript- Essential Tips for Aspiring Inclusive Business Leaders

  • Writer: Veronica Franco
    Veronica Franco
  • Sep 3, 2022
  • 8 min read

Interview with Amelia Harrison


Introduction


Hello and welcome to Breakdown, the show that helps our listeners to break topics down through easy-to-understand conversations. I’m your host, Veronica Franco. In today’s episode, we will discuss essential tips for aspiring inclusive business leaders based on our research and an interview we conducted with our special guest, Amelia Harrison. Amelia Harrison, an inclusive finance manager, has worked in the business industry for over 20 years with the last 15 years being at a data acquisition and marketing firm called AccuData.


Essential Tip # 1: Acknowledge Personal Bias

Inclusive leaders recognize unconscious biases that influence their moral and ethical decisions (Bagley et al., 2020). Leaders learn ethical behaviors through consistent reflected practices incorporating normative and behavioral ethical approaches simultaneously (Berti et al., 021). Inclusive leaders use normative ethics to create appropriate actions, while behavioral ethics use emotions and social factors to formulate win-win inclusive decisions (Berti et al., 2021). These leaders are committed to reflecting on their daily interactions and how their responses can emotionally impact others (Berti et al., 2021). However, this is not an easy task. Amelia Harrison described her struggles with maintaining awareness of personal biases.

“Sometimes that can be hard, you know. You can get into discussions or debates, and sometimes I think you can lose sight of biases, or you might unconsciously create a bias within whom you're speaking with. So, I’ve tried to take a more mindful approach and more of the listening not to react but listening to really absorb it and then have a more thoughtful response” (A. Harrison, personal communication, July 25, 2022).

Being self-aware of personal biases and how they may influence a situation is imperative for inclusive leaders to stop non-inclusive management practices actively. Taking time to reflect on what others are communicating in a situation and remaining aware of personal biases is more crucial than automatically responding with personally biased undertones. Inclusive leaders recognize that the first step in creating an inclusive environment is through the leader’s ability to be self-aware, reflective, and honest about their personal biases toward themselves and their team.


Essential Tip # 2: Understand the Team’s Individual Concerns

During our interview, Amelia explained the importance of building relationships with her team and frequently seeking their expertise.

“Being a manager, you have to take into consideration the opinions of your employees. So, one thing I’ve learned before being a manager is my opinion wasn’t always taken into consideration, and my supervisor never really had weekly meetings with the team or individually. One [thing] that I’ve done since becoming a manager of the team is I have weekly one on ones individually. We do sometimes have group things, but more so, people will speak more freely when they are individual. We have our weekly one-on-ones, and that’s when they can tell me concerns they have from a work-related endpoint. Like issues, they are having things that need escalation, and also if there’s new things within our organization, some recent changes that are going on. I will ask those probing questions of ‘what's your opinion’ or ‘we recently had this meeting. What did you take away from that?’” (A. Harrison, personal communication, July 25, 2022).

To inclusive leaders, employees are valuable experts in their fields for the organization instead of expendable assets that can easily be replaced (Bagley et al., 2020). Inclusive leaders must build genuine collaborative relationships with their teams through open discussions to engage with their employees. It is essential to seek out different perspectives, opinions, and concerns from others to make effective ethical decisions. Weekly meetings with employees must be a priority for inclusive leaders as it creates an open forum for timely feedback and a safe space for even the shyest individuals to share their ideas. All stakeholders of an organization need their leaders to individually invest time in their employees by providing guided support, educational training, and respectful, collaborative inclusion within their workplace environment (Bagley et al., 2020).


Essential Tip # 3: Use Inclusive Language

An aspiring leader can establish strong understanding relationships with employees by using inclusive language. According to a recent study by Perales et al., inclusive language creates feelings of belonging, increases employees’ well-being, and cohesively integrates all employees with trans workers of various cultural and linguistic backgrounds (2022). Inclusive language practices, such as recognizing others with their preferred pronouns, embrace all individuals within the workplace and inspires every employee to stand up against non-inclusive ideologies. Utilizing inclusive language to maintain an inclusive work environment is a process, as Amelia recalls:

“I guess the first step is just like putting that thought out there to all the employees. It’s like letting them know, ‘Hey, this is an important topic to us.’ Try to feel out employees’ opinions and then start thinking about what kind of mission; if you were to create a committee of their own, what kind of mission are you trying to achieve within your organization? Because we want people to feel empowered. We want people to feel respected. We want them to not feel like either their gender or ethnicity or any other factors can hinder their performance or their interactions within the company.” (A. Harrison, personal communication, July 25, 2022).

Language is a powerful medium for expressing ideas, empowering employees to form highly functional, collaborative, and openly communicative teams. Inclusive leaders promote using appropriate language within their teams to establish positive engagement and solidify positive contributions from all diverse employees (Perales et al., 2022). Creating a welcoming environment for each employee through inclusive language is vital for the overall success of the individual, team, and organization.


Essential Tip #4: Educate Others

Educating others to promote inclusive practices is imperative to establishing a solid foundation for genuine collaboration and innovative creativity. Many organizations like Amelia Harrison’s company, AccuData, provide training sessions to promote inclusivity within the work environment.

“We provide a lot of learning opportunities, and a few of those include the diversity and inclusion training, unconscious bias, anti-harassment training. So, it is a company policy that once a year we go through all those trainings. They’re online, instructor-led videos, usually take anywhere from one and a half to two hours in total to go over various topics, including the diversity and inclusion. Once completed, there’s a certificate that’s put in the employee’s electronic file showing that they completed that training. As rules and regulations change, and as years go on, that training will be updated to reflect the latest information” (A. Harrison, personal communication, July 25, 2022).

However, the impersonal, virtual training sessions Amelia described are not enough to gain an authentic, ethically moral understanding of daily decisions’ impact on various organizational stakeholders.

Instead, educational training should involve experiences that require intuitive higher-level thinking, interdependent interactions with organizational members, and reflective self-awareness (Berti et al., 2021). For inclusive diversity training sessions to make a meaningful change in how leaders and employees view the complexities of diversity all organizational members must engage in hands-on exercises (Bagley et al., 2020) and self-reflection throughout their sessions (Berti et al., 2021). Employees and leaders engaging in role-playing simulations fundamentally shift their paradigms as they experience situations from different perspectives, creating paradoxical situations (Berti et al., 2021). Leaders and employees will recognize that certain situations require difficult decisions that may negatively impact some stakeholders more than others. Recognizing the intricate complexities of real-wor

ld situations and their impact on the environment and surrounding communities they serve is critical for all employees to make ethically sustainable decisions. The overall goal of educating organizational members is to create more ethically inclusive, responsible leaders (Berti et al., 2021) who proactively promote ecologically sustainable and innovative solutions in an unpredictable world market (Bagley et al., 2020).


Essential Tip # 5: Advocate Inclusivity

In inclusive environments, employees must feel open with their leaders to make their unique voices heard. Employees in psychologically safe environments feel more inclined to express their ideas because their voices are valued by their leaders and contain “hidden knowledge” from their diverse staff’s cultural experiences (Saqib & Arif, 2017, p. 88). Inclusive leaders value their worker’s unique perspectives and raise awareness of these concerns to their superiors. When describing the reasoning for taking these issues up the corporate ladder, Amelia explains:

“There are companies that make you feel like you're just a number, and then there are people who genuinely care. And I think that one of those things is you've just gotta make your voice heard. Too many times, people let things slide. No matter what the case is in this, I'm going on a tangent a little bit beyond diversity and inclusion, but just overall, the most important thing is just get that conversation out there because I think some companies don't realize its importance or how much it means to certain people until there’s a negative situation that may occur in their companies” (A. Harrison, personal communication, July 25, 2022).

Remaining silent or allowing for the concerns of others to go unnoticed makes corporations lose a vast wealth of knowledge from their diverse employees which can hinder collaboratively innovative business management practices (Saqib & Arif, 2017). Inclusive leaders utilize their position to aid other diverse members in getting their voices heard and promote open inclusive conversations with their employees. Genuinely inclusive leaders become advocates for change, recognizing that it is not enough to pursue the opinions and perspectives of others for intuitively insightful ideas in order for diverse voices to be heard. These advocates promote inclusive actions over empty rhetoric. Inclusive leaders mandate that diverse voices are utilized and base their decisive ethical actions on what should occur in order to create a solid foundation for inclusive practices to flourish (Bagley et al., 2020).


Summary & Final Thoughts

Incoming inclusive business leaders must implement innovative strategies to compete globally in a world with changing technologies and demographics, increasing income inequalities, corruptive environmental practices, and unpredictable adverse effects of climate change (Bagley et al., 2020). Inclusive leaders can overcome these challenges by recognizing their biases when inclusively collaborating with their teams to promote ethically sustainable decisions within their organization. Self-reflection and awareness of a leader’s actions are critical components in building strong relationships and cooperative understanding between themselves and their team members. Providing educational opportunities for individuals to experience situations from another point of view is imperative for solidifying strong moral and ethical values within their employees. These experiences empower all employees to become upstanders who speak out against non-inclusive practices instead of remaining passive bystanders. Without the determination of inclusive leaders advocating for inclusive practices within all levels of an organization, non-inclusive practices may flourish and hinder the overall health and productivity of the employees and the organization. It is up to aspiring business leaders to establish a cooperatively collaborative environment with diverse employees through mindful self-reflecting conversations that educate and advocate for inclusivity. To conclude, when it comes to incorporating diversity and inclusive practices, “It’s not only helping individuals adapt to existing cultures; it’s making us as an organization adapt to changes going on in the world” (A. Harrison, personal communication, July 25, 2022).


Outro

We would like to give a very special thanks to our insightful guest Amelia Harrison for adding her twenty-plus years of experiential insight to the show and our favorite music creator, Diego Franco for giving us permission to use his song called, “Voice.”

Thank you for joining us today on Breakdown, the show that helps our listeners to break topics down through easy-to-understand conversations. Remember to tune in every Sunday for new episodes on various topics you request us to break down.


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