Inclusify: The power of uniqueness and belonging to build innovative teams · Aperio book club
Organizations across the country are diving deep into ensuring diversity in their workplaces, across teams, and within interactions with others.
In Inclusify: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams, Stefanie K. Johnson breaks down how leaders in the workplace can create diverse teams by creating cultures that celebrate their employees' unique identities, and through doing so, ensuring cohesion and belonging for all team members.
This is not an easy task. All of us have biases, conscious and unconscious, that limit our understandings of each other. These biases also inform how we operate within a team, placing us into one of six archetypes, Johnson writes. Each of these archetypes has limitations that must be overcome to ‘inclusify’ the workplace.
As fundraisers working in the non-profit space, we must not only think about diversity in our teams but how that translates to our work. In the most recent Aperio book club, we came together to walk through this question: How can we ‘inclusify’ philanthropy?
What does it mean to ‘inclusify’?
The thing about leaders is that they have the power to ensure that people are not left out—the power to create space for everyone to be welcomed and be a part of the team even if they are different. That’s how leaders create belonging, by welcoming people to fit in while supporting them in their desire to stand out.
Stefanie K. Johnson defines ‘inclusify’ like this: “to and lead in a way that recognizes and celebrates unique and dissenting perspectives while creating a collaborative and open-minded environment where everyone feels they truly belong.”
‘Inclusifying’ is not a one-and-done process. It necessitates “continuous, sustained effort toward helping diverse teams feel engaged, empowered, accepted, and valued.”
‘Inclusifying’ also requires leaders to balance embracing their employee’s uniqueness while understanding that they want to feel like they belong. For those who face systemic marginalization, belonging in the workplace can feel impossible. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (both conscious and unconscious) create hostile environments that affect job performance and mental health, leading to high turnover.
To create a safe environment, leaders must break down their own biases.
How to break down bias
“We all hold biases of one kind or another. But only self-examination can help us make this breakthrough. Yes, it might feel a little uncomfortable, and that’s okay. We’ve all heard that being willing to break out of our comfort zones is a good leadership skill. This is the perfect time to start doing it,” Johnson says.
Johnson has a background in breaking down unconscious bias and lays out the ABCs of Breaking Bias: admit it, block it, and count it.
Admit It
As Johnson describes it, breaking bias requires acknowledging that it exists, and we all have it. This can be a challenge because, for many of us, we like to think of ourselves as good people, and good people don’t hold biases. But, by refusing to admit to our own biases, we let them grow and make them worse.
Block it
After we’ve admitted to our biases, we must actively work at blocking them. We cannot break them down through willpower alone, as Johnson states. To block bias, we must build systems that eliminate the potential for bias in our decision-making.
Count it
To ensure that we are breaking down our biases in the workplace, we need to set goals for ourselves and our organizations.
“Setting goals is the most effective action organizations can take to successfully increase their diversity,” Johnson says. These goals must be for every level of the organization, and all individuals must be aware of them and be held accountable to them.
Understanding bias in this way is crucial as we think about our leadership style and into which of the archetypes we fall.
Leadership archetypes (and how they miss out on uniqueness and belonging)
Johnson lays 6 archetypes that limit leaders opportunities to ‘inclusify’ the workplace. They are:
Meritocracy Manager
Wants to hire the ‘best people for the job’ but does little to appreciate the unique qualities of his employees or help them feel that they belong to the same team.
Culture Crusader
Focuses on creating a team of like-minded people and ends up forgoing the benefits of incorporating different thoughts, perspectives, and backgrounds.
Team Player
A subset of Culture Crusaders (mostly women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ) who work so hard to assimilate with the group that they lose touch with the value their own and others’ diverse perspectives add to the team dynamic.
White Knight
Takes a paternalistic approach to women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ and tries to ‘save’ them. The resulting lack of emphasis on shared goals diminishes team cohesion because people cannot see how they fit together.
Shepherd
A subset of White Knights, Shepherds are women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ who offer in-group support but in doing so cause people to question their motives, resulting in a less cohesive team.
Optimist
Sees value in uniqueness and belonging but is not committed to actively creating change and so maintains the status quo through inertia.
Every single archetype is limited in its ability to bring diversity into the workplace.
Breaking bias and unpacking archetypes to ‘inclusify’ philanthropy
In discussing what Johnson has laid out in Inclusify, many of our book club attendees noted how thinking about these dynamics can make us better teammates, and better fundraisers.
Many of our attendees saw themselves as the Team Player or the Optimist. This makes sense, as many fundraisers are women, POC, WOC, and LGBTQ. To create better models for our teams, we all recognized that we have to be willing to disrupt our assumed culture and bring different perspectives into our workspaces.
Another area we touched on frequently during our discussion was how we can ensure diversity among our donors. As fundraisers, our work with donors is informed by our biases.
Our biases dictate how we work with our donors, what our donors are willing to fund, and what a philanthropist looks like. By breaking down those biases, we can open doors for new relationships.
One attendee shared a story about working with a potential donor. They had a donor who called and wanted to donate. He was 32 years old, from a poor part of the state, and had none of the ‘traditional’ indicators of wealth. This donor wanted to give $5,000. Even though the fundraiser’s superiors questioned their decision-making, they stuck with it. In the end, this donor gave $100,000 to their program.
Working to ‘inclusify’ is not easy. It requires a lot of self-reflection, and the ability to break down our preconceived notions about each other. We often are paralyzed by fear, not wanting to admit our biases out loud in fear of sounding like a bad person. If we want to make better workplaces and better experiences for our donors, we need to be willing to get uncomfortable and be honest about where we are falling short. Creating more diverse and equitable organizations is all of our responsibility.
Bekah Eichelberger
Bekah has been involved with nonprofit organizations since she was 10 years old. After working in regional theatre in Washington, DC, she joined Planned Parenthood Keystone as a grant writer. She serves on the board of trustees for Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, PA.