Speaker 1: Diversity is our strength, right? Wrong, sort of. Diversity without inclusion can lead to anarchy and division. Hey leader, David Berkes here, organizational psychologist and author of four best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. And in this episode, we're gonna talk about how to build inclusive teams. You see, this is really at the core of teamwork because so much of working together on a team is solving problems. Solving the problem of how we're going to deliver on the projects that we've committed to, solving the problem of how we're gonna overcome roadblocks and sometimes coming up with big innovative solutions to the world's problems, right? At the core of collaboration is solving problems. And when you're trying to solve problems, generating as many solutions as possible is usually the best way to go. So if we accept that, then the next logical conclusion is that the more diverse a team we have, the more ideas we're gonna generate. The more different our individual knowledge, skills, abilities, lived experiences, the more different our past, our gender experience, our racial experience, our work experience, all of those levels of diversity are going to lead to lots of different ideas, hopefully. It turns out that diversity alone is often not enough to take a team into that next level of creativity because we need something else. We need people believing that their diverse ideas are actually going to be heard, that the different experiences that they bring to the table are actually going to be respected. In other words, we need inclusion alongside our diversity. So in this episode, we'll cover four ways that you can get started building a more inclusive team to leverage the diversity on your team that you hopefully already have. So the first way to build a more inclusive team is to share information, share information liberally. There is nothing more declusive, if we wanna use that term, there is nothing that makes you feel more like an outsider, more like someone who's not included than getting the feeling that other people on your team have access to information you don't, or that other teams have access to information that you potentially don't. And this is where we sometimes abuse cliches like we're telling people on a need to know basis. Well, why don't I need to know? What about me doesn't need to know? You see how that plays in people's mind? So if you're in a leadership role, this means sharing as much information as you can get away with, and maybe even a little bit more, but don't tell your boss, sharing as much information as you can get away with with your team so that they feel included in all of that information. It also means making sure that your people are regularly sharing information with each other. There are certain people on your team who are going to want to play it close to the chest, who are gonna wanna hide their cards and are gonna wanna only share information when they have to, so make them have to. And as a result, not only will they realize that other people on their team need this information and can benefit from this information, they'll become the recipient of information they were probably being left out of before because they weren't playing nicely with others. So the sharing of information goes both ways, and that should raise the feeling of inclusion on your team. The second way to build a more inclusive team is to build trust. We talk about trust so often in this community. Trust is one of those core elements of a team. Without trust, you're not really a team. You're a bunch of strangers who just kind of have to work alongside each other. But what is trust in the context of being inclusive? It's really about trusting the team that you will not be ridiculed when you bring up those crazy ideas or ideas that might seem crazy but are actually genius. It's trusting that your past experiences, your lived experience, your perspective won't be degraded when you share it with the team. Trust requires some level of vulnerability, and every time you share a unique perspective, every time you share a new crazy idea, even if it's not a crazy idea, every time you share information or state your opinion, you have the potential to either invite judgment or invite more trust. And that's not to say that we should never judge ideas, but it is to say that every time somebody steps out in trust, we should respect that. More on that in number three. And we should seek to create an environment where people feel like they can trust you as a leader and feel like they can trust each other. Otherwise, they're probably self-censoring some of their best ideas, self-censoring some of their best perspectives, and hence censoring the whole team from solving problems at the level they'll need to do their best work. Along with trust also comes the third way to build more inclusive teams, which is train respect. Train your people on how to respond to those trusting moments with respect. Train your people on how to act with civility and respect. Now, some of them, some of them this might come naturally to, some of them might already do it. But one of the things I find interesting, Christine Porath, probably the world's most respected researcher on respect and civility in the workplace, surveys tens of thousands of people about uncivil moments they've experienced, times where they felt disrespected. And the number one reason they often give for why they're a recipient of disrespectful behavior is that either it comes from their boss or someone on their team is modeling their boss's behavior, which means as a leader, you model the way here. You model the way to respect with active listening. You model the way with not cutting people off. You model the way with not being quick to judge ideas, but inviting the whole team into considering ideas. So when I say train respect on a team, if you're a leader, really even if you're an influential teammate, what this really means is that you model the way of respect. People are going to take their cues off of you. And the more you can respect when people are vulnerable, and even when people are just sharing something that doesn't seem vulnerable, but might seem like an opportunity to judge, the more you model respect in those moments, the more inclusion your team is gonna feel as a result. And the last way to build a more inclusive team is to create safety. And if you're familiar with what I like to talk about, I love to cite the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson on psychological safety in that she says that it's a climate of mutual trust and respect. But since we've already covered trust and respect, what else is there to talk about when we're talking about safety? Well, really when you look at psychological safety, there's that climate of mutual trust and respect. And then there's the growth mindset that people feel like they can develop because they can admit failures. That's really the last piece you need to create a more inclusive team is to create safety around admitting when you messed up, when you make an assumption that's wrong. You see, the problem is we have all of these biases and stereotypes and we have what's often referred to as fundamental attribution error. When we mess up, we tend to excuse away the reasons we tend to look for something external. When someone else on our team messes up, we tend to look to something internal. And if you've got a diverse team, that can create a huge problem, right? Because we can also be relying on our stereotypes and biases and what that internal quality that led to the failure is. So this can really lead to a twofold failure when it comes to safety. We find that we don't want to admit our failings because we think they're not our problem, that there's something external. And as a result, we're not learning from those failings. And also we tend to dismiss failings from other people as some internal negative that they have and not the external environment that we could actually learn from. You and your team have a choice in how they can respond to every failure. They can excuse it away or they could choose to learn from it. And which one they choose depends entirely on how much safety is felt on the team. And in the longterm, how inclusive we feel is really determined by how safe we feel when we're discussing failure on a team. And it's important to look at, when we look at all four of these, we're not gonna build the most inclusive team we can right away. As we share information, as we build trust, as we train respect, and as we create safety, it's going to take time for each individual person to model our behavior and to greater exhibit that behavior on a team. But that's okay. Building trust, building inclusion, and benefiting from diversity do take some time. For the fact that they take time isn't an excuse not to start. So get started on one of these. Better yet, get started on all four. And you'll find that your team is getting more inclusive every single day. And that's gonna create a team where eventually people can do their best work ever. Oh, and one more thing. We could go so much deeper on trust. And we did. And if you want to, then you're gonna wanna check out this video here on how to build trusting teams. I trust that you're gonna love the insights in that video.