My daughters are growing up in a home with altars. They watch me meditating, journaling, and doing other practices near little tables with intentional groups of objects. They know I’m calmer after I practice. They ask me questions about what I’m doing and have started to experiment with their own spaces.

“Every part of you is welcome and needed in your leadership.”  

If you have seen this declaration in my email footer, you know that I’m passionate about enabling people to show up as themselves at work.  In teams where individual differences are valued and each person feels invited to contribute authentically, engagement increases and big problems get solved.  There are many ways to foster inclusion at work and we often focus on shifting cultures at the group level.  That's why so many leaders are surprised when I ask them whether they are including and welcoming themselves in the same way.  Quite often, they realize that they tell their team they value authenticity but send a different message through their behavior toward themselves. ... It is by modeling the authenticity and vulnerability that they hope to support in their teams that leaders can create the psychological safety necessary for true inclusion.  Here are some thoughts on how to do that.

Most of us are familiar with the competitive advantage experienced by companies that focus on diversity and inclusion.  Valuing differences in identity, experience, beliefs, culture, and working style increases employee engagement, decreases turnover, and creates novel approaches to problems, all of which increase profits.  The challenge I most often see leaders grappling with is how to harness the diversity in their team.  How can they foster a more inclusive culture?  How does their own leadership style create biases about the value of contributions from others?  What can they do when a colleague’s voice is not being heard?  The tool that I have found to be incredibly valuable in this discussion is the Enneagram.