How a Leadership Course Increases Workplace Inclusion

May 23, 2022 | Maureen Frank

Are your leaders well-equipped to handle the challenges that come with having a diverse workforce, or do you need to invest in a leadership course?

Despite our best wishes, not all leaders are instinctively or naturally inclusive. Being able to leverage diversity and produce tangible, profitable outcomes for an organisation requires know-how and experience.

A recent survey by Research.com found that after completing a leadership course, participants reported a:

28% increase in leadership behaviours, and
20% increase in overall job performance.

If inclusion is a big part of your leaders’ jobs, you must consider investing in a program designed to embed inclusive behaviours.

There’s something important to note about leadership courses

Worldwide, organisations spend about $8 billion per year on diversity and inclusion training with little to show for their efforts.

It is important to enrol in a course that offers a real return on your investment. Avoid a generic program!

In this article, I want to shine a light on 4 ways an ROI-focused leadership course can increase workplace inclusion.

1. Increased employee engagement and reduced employee turnover

According to Gallup’s chief scientist, James K. Harper, at least 75% of employees quit their jobs due to poor management.

Additionally, according to Officevibe’s 2020 report on employee feedback, 4 out of 10 workers felt disengaged they received no feedback.

Clearly, there’s a need for leaders to appreciate their employees, and provide them with specific feedback on their performance.

A well thought out critique is very important to help employees feel valued. It also lets them know how they can improve and make progress.

Trained leaders who’ve been through a rigorous leadership course will pay close attention to how they’re managing their staff, and provide them with specific feedback.

They understand the importance of regular check-ins, and devote time to both understanding concerns and providing valuable insights. Doing this can help increase staff engagement, and reduce turnover.

2. Refined management styles

Without formal training, leaders would just be following their gut on how they should manage their employees. Without a framework to make decisions, leaders resort to doing things the way they’ve always been done.

In the realm of diversity and inclusion, this can be counter intuitive. Consider the leader who may not know about, or be aware of, their own unconscious biases. When this occurs, they continue making decisions and interacting with employees without self-reflection, which could lead to suboptimal outcomes.

Relevant leadership courses bring these unconscious biases to the foreground. They make your leaders more mindful and conscious about their own leadership and management style.

Ideally, your leadership course will actively mentor your leaders through management challenges and offer feedback on refining their style.

They provide information and insights to your leaders about their strengths and weaknesses. Leaders will become more self-aware, and therefore, more emotionally intelligent in the way they conduct themselves.

In this way your leaders will also feel empowered to challenge the status quo, exposing them to fresh perspectives, and giving them the opportunity to apply newly acquired knowledge to the workplace.

3. Improved organisation culture

When you invest in an inclusive leadership course, it demonstrates the importance of leveraging diversity to create tangible business outcomes.

Training your leaders has a ripple effect on your corporate culture.

Influencing your culture with a top-down approach means you’re directly shaping your organisation’s values, mission, and purpose. In embedding inclusive behaviours, your leaders will champion the change to manage diversity effectively.

A good leadership trainer will create a bespoke program based upon your unique D&I goals.

4. Increased knowledge from experienced leaders

Choose a leadership program run by leaders who have experience in the field of building workplace inclusion.

If the leadership program has a proven track record of success, it’s likely that your organisation will experience similar results.

Screen all leadership courses wisely

At Emberin, we have worked with hundreds of global organisations help grow more inclusive cultures. Our obsession has been to support organisations to get results.

The approach which we take focuses on 2 simple elements:

Push: supporting individuals who feel they don’t ‘fit’ the norm, supporting them with intentional development, and consistent structured mentoring to develop their own toolkit, because they don’t need to be ‘fixed’.
Pull: supporting leaders to understand that managing differences is difficult and requires new skills. We help leaders build the habits of inclusion and measure this via their action and experiments, rather than just ticking a ‘training box’.

Both approaches focus on demonstrating an increased inclusive culture in a team within a short timeframe.

We have had the privilege of conversations with over 15,000 leaders from every industry all over the globe, and we have mentored more than 35,000 people, many of whom have been members of ERGs.

Our current diversity and inclusion offering is the culmination of all of those experiences, with our north star being evidence of real impact in creating an inclusive culture.

So your leaders benefit from our wealth of experience, and the experience of other leaders with a proven track record.