Companies are discovering that diversity and inclusion, as an ethical imperative, are also increasingly becoming a strategic imperative that spurs innovation, organizational performance, and better decision-making in the increasingly complex global economy.
But in spite of all the hoopla everywhere, there are too many organizations bogged down in trying to create the fully inclusive leadership cultures. Executive coaching here is a force for genuine change.
The Challenge of Diversity and Leadership
The leadership is defined by the decisions made and consistently performed at the top. This is actually very rare in normal leadership and that’s one of the reasons people at the top of our organizations have so little self-awareness, nor taste or passion to create a means for all their team members to thrive.
There have been numerous studies that have consistently proved that multicultural leadership teams perform better than such teams, but it is more than the effort of hiring additional individuals from different backgrounds in order to achieve that kind of diversity and make it a success. It needs leaders to manage complex interpersonal relationships, identify and break unconscious bias and be able to build psychological safety for all members of the team.
The Role of the Executive Coach in Inclusive Leader Development
Executive coaching is a private one-to-one environment in which the leader is able to probe his/her own blind spots, behavior, and cognition. It has the same level of personal attention given in group workshop or training and can be tailored exactly to individual development issues and needs to each leader.
More self-awareness will be the largest diversity and inclusion impact that coaching is having. Unconscious bias drives the decisions of most leaders, i.e., hire and promotion and attitudes of team members for most of the time. Good executive coaches can sensitize leaders to these biases and help decide how to get beyond them prior to affecting others.
For example, a CEO will learn through coaching that he or she tends to interrupt some members of his or her team when communicating during meetings or provide additional feedback information to some employees but not others. Those are the kind of habits which seem trivial but make a great contribution toward inclusion and access to opportunity for career growth. By coaching, leaders notice these habits and shift to more even habits of communication.
Developing Cultural Competence and Emotional Intelligence
Cultural Competence is a part of executive coaching. It means the ability to have a conversation with others who are from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. There in no need of shallow diversity training for liking towards different perspectives.
Leaders develop inclusive leadership through skills such as empathy, listening and addressing through race, gender and other diversity issues. These skills allow leaders in solving tough problems which cannot be avoided.
Eliminating Systemic Barriers Through Leadership Development
Executive coaching can also be used in the identification and demolition of systemic barriers within the firms by the executives. Most inclusion problems are organizational, including policies, practices, and uncodified systems that, unwittingly, construct walls to certain groups.
Coaching allows leaders to be good critics of their organizations by asking them the following questions: Do our promotion standards in any way prefer one background or experience over another? Do all our employees have access to our networking? What does our meeting arrangements do to the engagement of other personality types or culture?
It is on this analysis that leaders are requested to create action plans for how to deal with problems within the system. It can include redesigning job descriptions in terms of reducing not-for-the-job requirements filtering out right candidates, systematic interviewing procedures as a way of reducing bias, or designing multiple career paths.
Successful diversity and inclusion in executive coaching is not a change in attitudes but, more importantly but more importantly by changing behavior and outcomes. Executives are encouraged to set measurable objectives and track their progress with support of their coaches. This can be as such percentage of employee engagement by various demographic groups, turnover rates, patterns of promotion, or team psychological safety.
The coaching relationship also offers ongoing guidance and accountability as the leaders continuously strive to develop the change process. Organizations’ involvement is not a one-time simple exercise or repeated activity but one that involves learning and commitment. Having a coach gives the leaders sets of beliefs that are strong enough to get them through the setbacks, celebrate the little wins, and rebuild plans from successes.
The Organizational Impact
As a diversity and inclusion initiative its value reaches way beyond a single development benefit. Therefore, in an organization it is suggested that more to the senior level executives. Since these leaders emerge as champions in their organizations and make more balanced choices which tend to develop cultures where diverse voices are heard in the room and utilized.
Inclusive coaching holds the standard of mobilizing employee involvement, levels of innovation and performance in case of executives. Executive coaching emerges as a domino effect whose final outcome is juiced up with greater organization which becomes more attractive to any form of talent and well positioned for serving more than one customer segment.
Executive coaching is an evidence-based practice with a long history of proven results in developing inclusive leadership required in today’s organizations. By systems thinking, skill development, and reflection, coaching produces leaders who talk diversity and inclusion but also act to build it.