How Inclusive a Leader are You?

Mark Powell
2 min readApr 20, 2021

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There is a lot written about the organizational benefits of inclusion. And as we enter a phase of even more accelerated change, these benefits, including innovation, agility, and robust decision making, take on even greater importance. We also know that there are deep seated systemic reasons why inclusion can be hard to achieve. Currently a lot of focus is placed at addressing these systemic issues through organizational initiatives such as unconscious bias training, or amending external recruitment practices.

Inclusion is now very important for all organizational leaders, and yet there many individuals who don’t know how to evaluate their own level of inclusion, and how to modify their behavior to become both more inclusive and a better boundary spanning leader.

  1. However, what is happening at the individual leader level?
  2. Do we know if one leader is more inclusive in their leadership than another?
  3. Does inclusion get scored when evaluating leaders, and if so on what basis?
  4. Do you know if your personal leadership approach is truly inclusive, even if that is your intention?

We want to address this gap through some research on what makes for effective inclusive leaders. An effective inclusive leader is someone that is both effective at leading boundary spanning businesses, and incorporating inclusive practices to achieve performance outcomes.

Our research will look to establish:

  • What behaviors make for an inclusive leader?
  • And how do these inclusive leadership behaviors match up to high performance behaviors?
  • What are the costs of ignoring inclusion? Personally, and at team level.
  • What hurdles exist for leaders who are trying to become more inclusive?
  • And how can they get around these?
  • When is a leader likely to be facing tough moments on inclusion?
  • And how do they make the right decision in these critical moments?

We will be using an established highly regarded, global, well researched leadership diagnostic to ensure our research is both robust and practical. We are looking to partner with organizations and senior leaders interested in these critical inclusive leadership questions and issues. So, if this area of inclusive leadership is of interest to you, and or your organization, then please reach out to learn more about the research process and your potential participation.

Originally published at https://xdirections.com on April 20, 2021.

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Mark Powell

Mark founded XD to help senior executives and their teams to rise to the challenge and become the best they can be by through coaching experience.