190 Christine Barnes: The Inclusion Trap - Why Leaders Are Getting It Wrong Without Knowing It

I love it because it's such a beautiful articulation of what an unlock moment's all about.

So the reason why I asked that question, aside from just being a generally curious person about where you need to start in your story, is because the stories people choose to tell, they could tell any story, and they choose certain stories.

There's often a connection of this thread.

There's not necessarily a thread that they have even figured out themselves.

Sometimes it is.

Um, I, I hear in your story about your childhood this, this...

I mean, the word I wrote down was belonging.

Belonging in your community at school, belonging in family and, and, and acceptance and all of that.

Um, and then an unlock moment, um, that rem- moment of remarkable clarity is like a lens on your, what I call your deepest underlying sense of purpose.

So it's not, it's not something big and broad necessarily.

It can be something very specific, which for you is something about going beyond passive into something much more active.

And I hear you going, "I want to do something with this.

I want to make something happen." Which is a shift on from maybe where you were younger to a place of...

I mean, one of, one of the other people I had on the, the podcast, Jenny Fernandez, she talked about, "I wanted to play a bigger game," was the way she articulated it.

And she was like, "So I think about how I actively engage with people and make things happen in, in, in, in the work that I do." Um, and I think it's so interesting in this space because there's a huge number of people who talk about inclusion, and there are lots of kind of, I would say today, accepted principles of what people should do.

And yet, there's, as you describe, there's lots and lots of workplaces that are not actually very inclusive.

For all that they might be ticking the boxes of doing the right kinds of things.

When you're in this mindset now of saying, "I've got some things that I want people to really understand," what, what's the difference between the general narrative of inclusion and what you want people to really know?

What I have found to be successful in these conversations that I have had, and I just had one last night at an open house event that some people I know were putting on, is to make the connection with people for what's the problem they're trying to solve and how inclusion can be a strategy for that.

So putting it in business terms, one of the people I took-- If I can back up a step.

When I was writing my book, I interviewed about 15, uh, experts, leaders, and other folks in the world that I said to them, "I want to write the kind of book that people like you would buy." And so [laughs] I asked the question, "What would make you pick up a book on inclusion?" And a very senior executive at a tech company, uh, that I know and, and like and have worked with said, "You know, Christine, I probably wouldn't pick up a book about inclusion." He said, "However, I want to be a more effective leader.

And so if your book had some practical advice and tips that was relevant to me, I would pick it up." So, so by putting it in terms of it's a strategy, it's not a nice thing to do, it's not a flavor of the month kind of leadership technique.

It's, it's grounded in the knowledge that the primary relationship between people at work is the leader or manager and the employee.And I, if I ask any leader, and I've done this, how satisfied with-- are you with the effort and the, and the output and outcomes that you're getting from your team when you think about it? Well, they could do better.

Okay.

How clear are you about what each member of your team has as their strengths, as their deepest abilities, as their mo- what motivates them? And then they go quiet 'cause chances are pretty good they don't really know.