Speaker 1: Wherever you are in the world, whatever kind of project you're doing, one of the main sources of a sustainable advantage for you as a project manager and for your team delivering a project is the diversity of the team with which you're working. So in this video, I want to talk about how to support diversity and inclusion in your team. Firstly, let's clarify some terms. What do we mean by the words diversity and inclusion? By diversity, I mean welcoming people of the widest possible range of types and origins available within your society. We can think in terms of gender, or gender identity, or sexual orientation. We can think of race, of culture, of genetic heritage, and of religious preference. There's age, there's physical ability, and there's neural diversity. And if there are any I've forgotten, I apologise and you should include those too. A truly diverse team means recognising and celebrating the differences among the people within that team. And by inclusion, I mean making it equally easy for everyone in your team to both contribute to the team and benefit from being a part of it. You need to value the differences between people and make everybody feel equally welcome and equally valued. In short, everyone needs to feel an equal part of your team and this starts with respect. Creating a diverse team means respecting the differences and creating an inclusive team means applying that respect to giving everybody equal opportunities to do their best work and to benefit from being part of the team. Creating a diverse team in the first place means being intentional about it. It means go looking for people who are different, who can contribute, and it means recruiting people for what they can contribute rather than rejecting them for what they cannot. But once you've got a diverse team, creating an inclusive environment takes real effort. It may mean going out of your way to make allowances for one person, allowances that allow them to thrive and to give all of their focus and attention on doing their work rather than being worried about their ability to fit in. Before I look at the steps you can take to create an inclusive environment though, I want to start with the one thing that is more important than anything else. We need to acknowledge and understand the fundamental role of bias in human interactions. Bias can come about through conscious discrimination, but also through unconscious bias. The fact that our brains make decisions, make choices, make interpretations that are guided nothing more than by a set of social conventions that we have soaked up over our lifetime. And sometimes they can lead us to make choices that are unfair, unjust, and wrong. As a result, we need to acknowledge the role of unconscious and conscious bias, and we need to take steps to overcome it. Almost certainly, this means setting up processes to mean that bias is circumvented. We also need to get ourselves and our colleagues trained to recognise it and defend against bias. And we can never relax our vigilance. We need to constantly monitor our processes and our behaviours so that we can spot bias as soon as it arises and deal with it. Now, a lot of work that needs to happen to create diversity within an organisation and to allow for inclusive environments needs to be done at the organisational level. But there are some essential steps that you as a project leader can take to encourage diversity and to build an inclusive environment within your project. First, get yourself some training and get training for your team members. Make sure everybody understands what this is all about and why it is valuable and how to deal with the unconscious bias that we have. There are experts in this. I'm not one of them, but those experts will teach you stuff that will allow you to get the best out of a diverse group. And if you get the best out of a diverse group, you will get so much more than you could ever get from a homogeneous group. Secondly, involve your team in setting standards, in establishing good practices and on calling out bad behaviours. Yes, apply the principle of inclusion to how you're going to create an inclusive environment. Third, secure senior level commitment to support your commitment for diversity and inclusion. Seek out that commitment from your sponsors, from your clients, from your colleagues, from your peers. In particular, look for your project board or steering group to endorse its importance in a successful project. Fourth, adopt and adapt the very best policies, processes, procedures, systems and behaviours from all of the organisations that have come together to form your project team. And fifth, act as a role model, set and expect the very highest standards of respectful behaviour and encouragement of inclusion and diversity. You can support these five steps with a large number of practical everyday activities and choices. Firstly, you can mix up your teams and your sub teams to deliberately create diverse work groups. You can encourage people to share their experience and to tell their stories, to encourage empathy and, more important perhaps, to make it easier for everyone in the team to support one another. You can call out and tackle disrespectful language and disrespectful behaviour quickly and effectively. And you can welcome and encourage diverse thinking and experimentation. Celebrate all that is best of your diversity. And that means celebrating everyone's contributions. If you ever do surveys of either your team or your stakeholders, then gather information that will allow you to examine and understand any systematic biases that may be going on within your project that are creating patterns that you can fix. And my final example is to make sure that you avoid generalisations and stereotyping, no matter how well-intentioned they are. Remember, the key to diversity is recognising everyone as an individual. We are all different, even though we are all the same. There are also a large number of logistical and environmental conditions that can support diversity and an inclusive environment. Often the control of these is at the organisational level and you may have very little control over them. But what you can do is use what authority and power you have to advocate appropriately. You can advocate for equal pay and for equality of opportunity, particularly in cases where there are new projects people could be allocated to or where there are chances of promotion. You can make sure that you respect cultural and religious holidays and the need for amended working hours amongst your team. And you can advocate for that at an organisational level too. And likewise, you can advocate for facilities like prayer rooms, nursing rooms and physical adaptations to the building and to the equipment that you and your colleagues use. You can ensure that you use gender, age and culturally neutral language in your project documentation and advocate for that in organisational level documentation. And where appropriate, you can look to make translations of project documentation available to ensure that all of your stakeholders can properly understand it in a language that they are completely fluent in. Always think about the food and the drink that is available either within working hours or in work-based celebrations and social activities. And finally, advocate to strengthen diversity in organisational policies, processes and procedures. And as a project manager, you may want to think about having some form of diversity policy for your project. All the research shows that a diverse team working in an inclusive environment is better able to resolve problems and can create more robust decisions than any other mechanism. To me, the case for diversity and inclusion is obvious. And as a project manager, you need to know how to support diversity and inclusion on your projects. Please do give a thumbs up if you like this video. There's loads more great project management videos to come, so please subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any of them. And I'll look forward to seeing you in the next one.