Welcome to Lead With Inclusion! This weekly newsletter is a resource for EVERY professional. Whether you’re a manager ready to be a more inclusive leader, or an employee ready to be a DEI champion in your workplace, inclusive actions lead to inclusive outcomes. Leading with inclusion simply means starting with inclusive actions in everything you do. It means identifying the areas where bias is at work, and shifting mindsets to make change.
If you’re not sure where to begin, start here.
Looking for Simply Diversity? . . . Welcome to Lead With Inclusion!
If you’re a longtime reader of my newsletter, I want to thank you for allowing Simply Diversity to be a resource in your DEI learning journey. If you’re new to this newsletter, welcome! You’ve joined us at the perfect time. We’ve been thinking long and hard about how to make sure that this newsletter is the best tool it could possibly be for our readers. Every two weeks for the past two and half years, we’ve been bringing you a breakdown of key diversity concepts, and explaining how you can apply them… simply. We’ve focused on explaining what these concepts are, why they’re important, and how you can practice them.
Collectively, we’ve been talking about diversity for many years now. This ‘diversity conversation’ has been incredibly helpful in moving us forward toward more inclusive workplaces for all. However, this conversation has clearly been missing something. How do I know? Let’s look at the evidence:
- BIPOC workers are 3 times more likely to face financial hardship because of their race, with Black women, in particular, being twice as likely to be underpaid for their work as compared to their white male counterparts.
- Women with disabilities are still significantly more likely than other groups of women to have their judgment questioned in their area of expertise, and to have colleagues get credit for their ideas.
- According to a 2022 survey, half of LGBTQI+ adults reported experiencing some form of workplace discrimination or harassment in the past year because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or intersex status.
It’s clear that it’s time to push this conversation forward in a new way. By this point, many of you are familiar with these key terms. You’ve heard them, you understand them. And if not, I’ve got plenty of resources right here on LinkedIn that can help you jumpstart your learning (check out LinkedIn’s DEI learning paths for all stages of the DEI journey). But simply understanding these concepts is not enough. If we want to make measurable change in our organizations, being aware of these concepts and why they’re important is insufficient.
So, what’s next? That’s how this newsletter supports you.
What does it mean to “lead with inclusion”? For us, it means putting inclusion at the forefront of everything you do. It means taking ACTION toward inclusion at your workplace. It means finding ways to prioritize inclusion, even when it’s difficult. If you’re a senior manager or organizational leader at your company, it also means learning how to lead inclusively. It means understanding the work it takes to be an inclusive leader, and how to lead by example. It means moving beyond defining terms, and shifting our focus to making actual change.
And that’s exactly what the working world needs right now. We need tools. We need implementation. We need ACTIVE inclusion. And most of all, we need to acknowledge that anyone can be a leader in this work.
We hope that Lead With Inclusion will be a resource that you can come back to every week to find concrete, clear actions that you can implement in your workplace (that’s right, my newsletter will now be WEEKLY instead of biweekly, so you’ll be hearing from me more often). We hope these insights will be digestible, actionable and shareable – so you can share your learnings with your peers, managers, coworkers, team members or anyone who could benefit from these learnings.
At the end of the day, this work is for all of us. We are all leaders in creating a more inclusive workplace. Anyone can be a leader when it comes to DEI. Anyone can take the lead in making a change. No matter who you are, you can lead with inclusion. Inclusion starts with all of us.
What do you struggle with most when it comes to taking inclusive action at work? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll use your feedback to inform topics for future newsletters.
We’ll see you here next week!
About Stacey Gordon:
Stacey Gordon is Executive Advisor and Founder of Rework Work where she and her team coach and counsel executive leaders on DEI strategies for the business, while offering a no-nonsense approach to unconscious bias education for the broader employee population. As a global keynote speaker, Stacey is a Top Voice on LinkedIn and a popular LinkedIn Learning [IN]structor with nearly two million unique learners enjoying her courses.
