How to make inclusion a leadership priority: Stop making it another priority
In today’s climate of rising costs, sales pressures, tech disruption, and political uncertainty, inclusion can get side-lined because it’s being positioned as another priority competing for the attention of leaders. Our Head of Research, Edward Haigh, suggests the real opportunity is to reframe inclusion, not as an extra item on the agenda, but as the answer to leaders’ biggest challenges: driving sales, reducing costs, and staying competitive.
How to make inclusion a leadership priority: Stop making it another priority
You probably don’t need us to tell you this but it’s tough out there. Many business leaders are facing a perfect storm of challenges that includes pressure on sales, increasing costs, new competition, tech-driven threats, workforce disengagement, and political uncertainty.
That’s the backdrop against which D&I and HR leaders are attempting, and often failing, to draw leadership attention towards the topic of inclusion.
The story often follows a familiar pattern: After months of awareness-raising, D&I secure a slot at the next leadership meeting. They spend time honing their message, which is important because, despite assurances that this topic matters a great deal to the leadership, they’ve only been given a three minute slot at the end of the meeting. Then the big day comes and, to everybody’s surprise, the agenda starts to run behind schedule. Three minutes becomes two. Then one. Then the CEO’s EA comes out of the meeting room looking apologetic. And that’s that.
The problem, of course, isn’t that D&I are being given the last slot, or that leadership meetings run over. The problem is that inclusion is being positioned as another priority competing for the attention of leaders. And when it goes up against falling sales, increasing costs, or the threat that AI might destroy the business next week, it’s losing badly. It always will.
The response, then, shouldn’t be to compete with other priorities. Inclusion shouldn’t be positioned as yet another thing vying for the attention of leaders. It should be positioned as the answer to the things that are already top of their list.
As D&I leaders turn dejectedly on their heels to head back to their desks, the question they should be asking themselves is: How can inclusion drive up sales? How can it reduce costs or counter the threat of new competition? What perspectives do we have on those topics that nobody’s talking about? The answers might not always come easily but they’re worth pursuing because they might just get you three hours at the top of the agenda, instead of three minutes at the end.
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