• News
• : June 27, 2024

CCL Research Reveals That DEI Agenda May Be Diluting the Women Leadership Agenda

Most recently a broader equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) agenda has in some ways diluted focus on women leadership and a growing EDI backlash seems to be getting in the way.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)®, a global provider of executive education, has released a new report, “Elevate the System” with its research partners, Institute for Human Resource Professionals, Prasetiya Mulya Executive Learning Institute (prasmul-eli), Society for Human Resource Management, Slingshot Group, and XEd Space. The report was developed through data drawn from 894 survey respondents and 71 interviewees across the Asia-Pacific (APAC).

The report unpacks challenges that have stifled women from attaining senior roles and examines whether gaps in perception between men and women have improved or gotten worse since CCL’s 2020 Overcoming Barriers to Women’s Leadership Research.

“While increased focus on women’s leadership is encouraging, our latest report reveals a critical disconnect. The persistent underrepresentation of women at the highest levels suggests hidden obstacles are impeding their advancement. These obstacles often stem from biases – deeply ingrained societal expectations and systemic barriers that we are not aware of and don’t see on the surface. Addressing the gender gap in leadership requires men, women and organizations to come together as champions for equity, with the courage to make changes to the systems that are holding women back. The gender equity agenda isn’t just about fairness, it’s about unleashing the power and potential of our full talent pool to create a stronger and more prosperous future for all,” said Elisa Mallis, Managing Director and Vice President, APAC at CCL.

Organizations are encouraged to move beyond quotas and targets by measuring female participation more holistically, engaging male allies, and celebrating champions of gender equality.  This combined effort from organizations and individuals will pave the way for a more inclusive leadership landscape, supporting women’s leadership development ultimately enabling their success in leadership positions.

Thoughts from Our Research Partners

“As a research partner in this study, we echo the findings that highlight the need for systemic change to advance women’s leadership and contributions to the workplace. The data underscores a persistent gap between perception and reality in workplace equity, revealing unconscious biases and societal expectations as major barriers. HR professionals play a pivotal role in addressing these issues by taking a strategic and business-aligned approach in implementing progressive HR policies such as flexible work arrangements to elevate a ‘skills-first’ and ‘change-ready’ culture. By doing so, we not only unlock the full potential of women leaders but also drive organizational success and innovation. This report is a call to action for all stakeholders to commit to meaningful change and create workplaces where everyone can thrive.”

Aslam Sandar

Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Human Resource Professionals

“Diversity is not just an inevitable aspect of life but also a fertile ground for innovation. Promoting and managing diversity has already become and will continue to be a vital factor for future business success. Therefore, discussions and studies about women in leadership, as a part of gender diversity, are both interesting and essential. In Indonesia, while there has been considerable progress in women’s leadership, ongoing discussions and studies are necessary to achieve even greater benefits.”

Deddi Tedjakumara

Chief Executive Officer, Prasetiya Mulya Executive Learning Institute 

“Initially, we didn’t think there was an issue with women leaders, as we believed their journey to leadership was based on their skill set and competency. For too long, we have lived without a sense of urgency regarding this matter. However, the survey results have been a powerful wake-up call, revealing the urgent need to confront unconscious biases, cultural norms, and familial obligations that hinder women’s leadership progression. Despite their remarkable capabilities, women face many challenges. It’s time to transform the entire system to ensure true equity, enabling women leaders to rise without undue barriers. Let’s break down these obstacles and create a future where the next generation of women leaders can lead with confidence and strength. It is time to make equity a reality.”

Dr. Sutisophan Chuaywongyart

Partner, Slingshot Group

“Australia is currently ranked 26th globally for gender equality, so clearly we still have some way to go. Only 9% of the top ASX companies are led by a woman, our gender pay gap is calculated at 12%, Australian women do more than nine hours additional unpaid work each week compared with men, and one in five women have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15. XED Space is an Executive Education firm that aims to make a real difference in everything we do.  We want to accelerate the development of others so that they too can make a difference in their worlds, and we can be part of something that is bigger than us. We are tremendously proud of the work that we and our colleagues do to help shift the part of the ’system’ that better equips all leaders to lead more effectively and more equitably.”

Ric Leahy

Co-Founder, XED Space

Learn More

About the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)®

At the Center for Creative Leadership, our drive to create a ripple effect of positive change underpins everything we do. For 50+ years, we’ve pioneered leadership development solutions for everyone from frontline workers to global CEOs. Consistently ranked among the world’s top providers of executive education, our research-based programs and solutions inspire individuals in organizations across the world — including 2/3 of the Fortune 1000 — to ignite remarkable transformations. Learn more about CCL.

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The post CCL Research Reveals That DEI Agenda May Be Diluting the Women Leadership Agenda appeared first on CCL.

In the early days of the pandemic, many organizations scrambled to help individual leaders optimize their personal effectiveness with an increased focus on self-care. And for good reason: The pandemic left a wake of stress and burnout.

Yet while self-care is important, and resilience is foundational to leading others, they’re not enough alone.

A broader focus on community, connection, and a sense of belonging is required for leaders to help achieve true employee wellbeing. Our research has found this to be particularly true with regard to leaders making meaningful connections when leading virtual teams.

Employee Wellbeing Requires Leadership

First, why does wellbeing matter, particularly in the workplace?

When employees have a sense of wellbeing, they’re more engaged and creative. They also have higher job satisfaction and productivity levels, studies show.

And the importance of wellbeing and leadership is clear: “As a leader, it’s your duty to take care of others and to create an environment where others can be well,” says Dr. Paige Graham, who’s been an executive coach and facilitator for more than 20 years and is leading our work to create client solutions for leadership and wellbeing.

“I like to think about wellbeing as feeling good and functioning well, both individually and within a community,” Graham notes.

What the “quiet quitting” trend has taught organizations is that employee wellbeing really matters. Workers today aren’t as willing to sacrifice everything for their jobs. Instead, they desire fulfilling careers where they do meaningful work on a team where everyone is encouraged to thrive.

Wellbeing Leadership: 6 Components

The 6 Keys of Wellbeing

At CCL, we focus on 6 components of leading with wellbeing, so that organizations can enact deliberate practices that help their people enhance their own leadership and wellbeing — as well as that of their colleagues and direct reports. Here are the 6 keys to wellbeing:

1. Purpose
2. Growth
3. Health
4. Agency
5. Connection
6. Resilience

When leaders focus on these 6 things, they’re prioritizing wellbeing for both themselves and others, and the results are contagious — impacting not only their teams, but the culture of the wider organization, as well. As employee wellbeing is supported, enhanced, and rewarded, new mindsets and practices take root and become sustainable across the enterprise.

1. Purpose.

When employees feel that their work has intrinsic value and meaning — and when they can connect their day-to-day tasks to the organization’s mission — they’re more likely to feel a sense of purpose.

Achieving a sense of purpose starts with recognition. “It’s helpful to recognize the parts of our jobs that bring us energy and are aligned to what we believe is meaningful,” says Graham. Though helpful for everyone, value alignment is especially key for younger generations in the workforce.

• TIP: Leaders can support employee wellbeing and facilitate this connection with a focus on purpose in leadership. Encourage your people to think about what makes work meaningful for them. During meetings, check in on individuals, and not just on their work tasks. You can simply ask, How are things going? What brought you energy last week? What’s creating frustration for you? And then actively listen to their experiences, and respond with empathy and compassionate leadership. Resist the urge to judge or become defensive. Remember that the goal is not to “fix” every issue, but to hear what’s going on, and provide support.
  

2. Growth.

Humans crave challenges, so employee wellbeing is enhanced when people feel they’re growing and learning. When a learning culture is prioritized and a growth mindset is valued across an organization, leaders accept mistakes as opportunities to reflect on what was learned. As a result, people feel free to be more innovative and creative, because they’re not afraid to take risks.

• TIP: Leaders should reflect on how they respond to new ideas and use meetings as an opportunity to celebrate both wins and losses, creating space for people to share what they’re learning from what went wrong. This works best when managers and supervisors make an intentional effort to build a psychologically safe workplace so that team members feel comfortable revealing mistakes and discussing lessons learned.
  

3. Health.

Health is an essential component of wellness, as healthy minds and bodies are shown to enhance reasoning, problem solving, learning, and creativity.

“There’s only so much the human brain can handle,” says Graham. “If you work constantly without resting or incorporating movement into your day, you won’t be able to handle the bigger cognitive challenges. Your memory will suffer and you won’t be as creative.”

There’s a connection between good health and leadership: Optimal health and leadership effectiveness both start with foundational practices, such as movement, nutritious foods that fuel your brain, and a good night’s sleep — all of which help us regulate our emotions and process the events of the previous day.

• TIP: Leaders’ actions cement the culture. If you make time for wellness and model a focus on your own health as one of the keys to wellbeing — unplugging and taking real vacations from work (and encouraging others to do so too); creating boundaries around how late you send emails; and taking intentional steps like scheduling “walk-and-talk” meetings to increase your movement throughout the day — these all send a strong message of support for employee wellbeing to your direct reports, who are watching and learning from your behavior.
  

4. Agency.

When employees perceive a sense of control, as opposed to feeling externally controlled, they tend to be more well. When they meet roadblocks, people with a sense of agency are also more persistent in achieving their goals and in living with intention at work and at home.

“Sometimes when we feel like we don’t have a say and things are happening to us — that we are just picking up the pieces — we feel very little control over our own actions and the consequences of those actions,” says Graham.

How can leaders give people a sense of agency? Start by understanding the connection between purpose, agency, and employee wellbeing.

• TIP: If you know what gives each of your team members a sense of purpose, you can provide options for incorporating more of those responsibilities into people’s jobs. Organizational leaders can also support employee wellbeing by giving their employees as much choice as possible in where and how they work. Flexibility in the workplace benefits organizations because it improves employee engagement, loyalty, and retention. People perform at higher levels when they have the agency to schedule their workdays and prioritize what’s important across their work and personal lives.
  

5. Connection.

Employee wellbeing also requires leaders intentionally helping people to connect with one another. That’s important because strong and healthy relationships lead to acceptance of others and a culture of respect.

Helping people connect can be easier said than done. “Leaders have to understand that people have different preferences for connecting with others,” says Graham. “Some people like to be really social, but that’s not right for everyone.”

At CCL and many other organizations, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) give people an opportunity to connect with others across certain commonalities. Often these are unique groups of people who typically haven’t worked together but share common experiences and social identities.

“Whether we’re being supported, or we are supporting others, we come away with a great feeling of connection and belonging at work, which is an essential human need,” says Graham.

• TIP: For leaders and organizations as a whole, the goal is to foster employee wellbeing by creating a trusting environment where people feel comfortable to be themselves, share how they’re feeling, and know they will find support. Leaders can start with inclusive leadership practices.
  

6. Resilience.

Organizations benefit from having resilient employees because, in challenging organizational settings or during times of change, resilient people operate more effectively and productively.

Resilience and wellbeing aren’t the same thing. While resilience is needed during stress, uncertainty, and setbacks, wellbeing impacts us all the time.

When times are tough, resilience is the ability to bounce back. Not only are resilient people able to adapt in the face of adversity, but they also grow and feel prepared for their next hurdle.

• TIP: Graham recommends seizing the good times to develop resilience. “I like the idea of upping my game, even when things are going well,” she says. It’s worth the effort: Resilient people tend to have greater wellbeing, and greater wellbeing leads to higher resilience. Not sure where to start? Learn 8 practices of resilient leadership.

Better Leaders Focus on Their Own & Their Employees’ Wellbeing

It’s important to note that employee wellbeing isn’t one size fits all. The keys to wellbeing may be slightly different from one person to the next. Team members may prefer to move or rest a bit differently or grow, share, connect, and be challenged in different ways.

That said, leaders being intentional about any of these things will result in increased employee wellbeing — for both individual managers and their teams.

Since the pandemic, there have been calls to stop framing wellness programs around self-care and instead focus on wellbeing for all, and it makes sense: If an organization’s leadership doesn’t promote wellbeing for the collective, the enterprise will never be as strong or productive as it could be.

At CCL, we believe in cultivating organizational cultures that truly support leadership on employee wellbeing — ensuring that people are better than just okay. We’ve created a downloadable collection of leadership resources on compassion, wellbeing, and belonging with actionable tips gleaned from our research.

When leaders focus on wellbeing and create space to care for themselves and others, they become more effective — as individuals, on their teams, within their organizations, and even impacting their entire communities.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Take a meaningful step toward increasing employee wellbeing in your workplace by starting a conversation with colleagues on your team or at your organization. Download our Conversation Guide for leaders on wellbeing.

The post The Keys to Wellbeing and Leadership appeared first on CCL.

Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Psychological safety at work is a shared expectation held by members of a team that teammates will not embarrass, reject, or punish them for sharing ideas, taking risks, or soliciting feedback.

Psychological safety in the workplace doesn’t mean that everybody is nice to each other all the time. Rather, it means that people feel free to “brainstorm out loud,” voice half-finished thoughts, openly challenge the status quo, share feedback, and work through disagreements together — knowing that leaders value honesty, candor, and truth-telling, and that team members will have one another’s backs.

When workplace psychological safety is present, people feel comfortable bringing their full, authentic selves to work and are okay with “laying themselves on the line” in front of others. And organizations with psychologically safe work environments — where employees feel free to ask bold questions, share concerns, ask for help, and take calculated risks — are all the better for it.

In fact, in a research study we conducted of nearly 300 leaders over 2.5 years, we found that teams with high degrees of psychological safety reported higher levels of performance and lower levels of interpersonal conflict.

It’s important to note that not all team members hold the same perceptions, though. The stakes are particularly high for senior leadership teams, where our research found members reported the greatest differences in their perceived levels of psychological safety at work — 62% of senior teams in our sample demonstrated significant variability around their team’s psychological safety. This has real business repercussions; when innovative ideas go unsaid, creative problem solving is squashed, and teams fail to collaborate and innovate together to their full potential.

The Importance of Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Psychological safety at work is not just a “nice to have;” it impacts the organization’s bottom line. Having a higher level of consistent psychological safety helps to unlock the contributions of all talent in the enterprise and ensures the organization is better equipped to prevent failure.

Research has repeatedly found that organizations benefit from diversity of thought, and groups of people with different life experiences are better able to recognize problems and offer up creative solutions than groups with similar life experiences.

But what if some team members don’t feel comfortable speaking up? What if they’re afraid to share their perspective, raise concerns, or asking challenging questions? What if they avoid suggesting new and innovative ideas because they’re worried about the repercussions?

Unfortunately, many people feel this way about their workplace. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, just 3 out of 10 employees strongly agreed that their opinions count at work.

It can be especially challenging for members of social identity groups that are often marginalized by society to feel high levels of psychological safety in the workplace. For example, a recent survey from Catalyst found that nearly half of female business leaders face difficulties speaking up in virtual meetings, and 1 in 5 reported feeling overlooked or ignored during video calls. Those who are members of historically underrepresented groups may feel this reality even more keenly.

Colleagues who feel their work environment is psychologically safe are more willing to engage in interpersonal risk-taking behaviors that contribute to greater organizational innovation — like speaking up, asking questions, sharing unspoken reservations, and respectfully disagreeing. This ultimately yields a more robust, dynamic, innovative, and inclusive organizational culture.

In contrast, when psychological safety at work is low and people are uncomfortable raising concerns, initiatives that aren’t working move forward anyway, the organization isn’t equipped to prevent failure, and talent begins to disengage. When employees aren’t fully committed to shared organizational success, ideas aren’t stress-tested, processes aren’t optimized, solutions aren’t vetted, and the enterprise has lost an opportunity to leverage the contributions of all its talent.

Why Psychological Safety in the Workplace Matters Now More Than Ever

The rise of the hybrid workplace and virtual work arrangements since the pandemic have made psychological safety at work more complex for leaders today. It can be harder to build a psychologically safe “workplace” when employees are not all co-located, and many are working remotely.

After all, how do you establish trust when interpersonal conversations have to be scheduled in advance, and many are conducted through a screen? Yet leading remote teams may give leaders a unique opportunity to forge connections and increase psychological safety — if they’re paying attention.

In an on-camera virtual meeting, you can look intently at people, perhaps more so than you could in person. (In many cultures, it can be awkward to stare at someone for 30 seconds or minutes at a time.) But on videoconferences, no one knows who you’re looking at, so you can watch the speaker closely — absorbing not just their words, but also their emotions and values. Leaders can seize this opportunity to explore authentic communication in virtual settings through the power of listening.

Plus, many people feel more comfortable typing vulnerable statements through a screen (for example, into a meeting chat) than they would speaking in person. In those settings, they may appreciate a chance to spend a little more time thinking through how they want to convey information to maximize impact. Leaders can show respect for those courageous enough to share their honest thoughts — again, recognizing the vulnerability required to do so, and responding with appreciation.

8 Steps Toward Creating More Psychological Safety at Work

Our Tips for Leaders

Here’s how leaders can help create a more psychologically safe workplace.

1. Make psychological safety an explicit priority.

Talk with your team about the importance of creating psychological safety at work. Connect it to a higher purpose of greater organizational innovation, team engagement, and inclusion. Ask for help when you need it, and freely give help when asked. Model the behaviors you want to see, and set the stage by using inclusive leadership practices.

2. Facilitate everyone speaking up.

Show genuine curiosity, and honor frankness and truth-telling. Be an open-minded, compassionate leader, and willing to listen when someone is brave enough to say something challenging the status quo. Organizations with a coaching culture will more likely have team members with the courage to speak the truth.

3. Establish norms for how failure is handled.

Don’t punish experimentation and (reasonable) risk-taking. Show recognition that mistakes are an opportunity for growth. Encourage learning from failure and disappointment, and openly share your hard-won lessons learned from mistakes. This will help encourage innovation, instead of sabotaging it. Use candor when expressing disappointment (and appreciation).

4. Create space for new ideas (even wild ones).

Provide any challenge within the larger context of support. Consider whether you only want ideas that have been thoroughly tested, or whether you’re willing to accept highly creative, out-of-the-box ideas that are not yet well-formulated. It’s fine to ask the tough questions; but do so while always being supportive at the same time. Learn more about how to foster more innovative mindsets on your team.

5. Embrace productive conflict.

Promote sincere dialogue and constructive debate, and work to resolve conflicts productively. Set the stage for incremental change by establishing team expectations for factors that contribute to psychological safety. With your team, discuss the following questions:

• How will team members communicate their concerns about a process that isn’t working?
• How can reservations be shared with colleagues in a respectful manner?
• What are our norms for managing conflicting perspectives?

6. Pay close attention and look for patterns.

Focus on team members’ perceived patterns of psychological safety, not just the overall level. Do some members experience significantly more or less psychological safety than others, or is the level fairly even across the team?

• Advocate for consistent psychological safety for everyone, and not just as a “nice to have” — it matters for the bottom line.
• Consider the team’s current beliefs when developing strategies to enhance team psychological safety, because one size does not fit all.

7. Make an intentional effort to promote dialogue.

Promote skill at giving and receiving feedback, and create space for people to raise concerns. Ask colleagues powerful, open-ended questions, and then listen actively and intently to understand their feelings and values, as well as facts. Provide opportunities to learn how to share constructive feedback to one another and what respectful responses look like.

You may want to consider investments in strengthening the quality of conversations across the organization, because quite literally, better conversations will lead to a better culture. Improved skill at feedback conversations, combined with a psychologically safe work environment, will yield colleagues who are more willing to share unspoken reservations with one another and propose solutions that are more rigorously stress-tested before implementation.

8. Celebrate wins.

Notice and acknowledge what’s going well. Positive interactions and conversations between individuals are built on trust and mutual respect. So share credit and embrace expertise among many, and the success of the collective, versus a single “hero” mentality.

Celebrate what’s going well, however small, and appreciate people’s efforts. Encouraging and expressing gratitude reinforces your team members’ sense of self. Give your team members the benefit of the doubt when they take a risk, ask for help, or admit a mistake. In turn, trust that they will do the same for you.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Has Your Organization Moved Through Each Phase?

As organizations build greater psychological safety, 4 recognizable stages emerge.

A psychologically safe workplace begins with a feeling of belonging. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs, employees must feel accepted before they’re able to contribute fully in ways that improve their organizations.

According to Dr. Timothy Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, employees have to progress through the following 4 stages before they feel free to make valuable contributions and challenge the status quo.

Stage 1 — Inclusion Safety

Inclusion safety satisfies the basic human need to connect and belong. In this stage, you feel safe to be yourself and are accepted for who you are, including your unique attributes and defining characteristics.

Stage 2 — Learner Safety

Learner safety satisfies the need to learn and grow. In this stage, you feel safe to exchange in the learning process by asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and making mistakes.

Stage 3 — Contributor Safety

Contributor safety satisfies the need to make a difference. You feel safe to use your skills and abilities to make a meaningful contribution.

Stage 4 — Challenger Safety

Challenger safety satisfies the need to make things better. You feel safe to speak up and challenge the status quo when you think there’s an opportunity to change or improve.

To help employees move through the 4 stages and ultimately land in a place where they feel comfortable with interpersonal risk-taking and speaking up, leaders should nurture and promote their team’s sense of psychological safety in the workplace.

When a team or organizational climate is characterized by interpersonal trust, respect, and a sense of belonging at work, members feel free to collaborate and they feel safe taking risks, which ultimately enables them to drive innovation more effectively.

Psychological Safety Reveals Your Work Culture

The levels of psychological safety in your workplace represent your organization’s climate and culture. A culture is simplistically defined by “the way we do things around here,” and everyone has a role to play in how work gets done. Leaders are especially key in shaping organizational culture — both on our teams and in our organizations.

Changing a culture is never fast or easy, but transforming your organization to build psychological safety for everyone is definitely worthwhile.

If it feels like a tall order, remember that transformation comes in the form of small steps, so think about changing your culture in terms of making incremental changes that yield incremental wins. Ask colleagues if they’re willing to sign up for improving 1% each day. By the end of a year, your organization will be exponentially stronger.

Remember, the goal is to create psychological safety at work where team members aren’t worried about feeling rejected for speaking up. When that’s the case, not only does interpersonal risk-taking become the norm, but teams are also more adaptable in the face of change.

In other words, they understand the challenges and opportunities that exist throughout the organization — and they see their role in making it a better place.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Start building a psychologically safe workplace today: Take our Psychological Safety Challenge to discover 7 specific practices to try in your conversations next week.

The post How Leaders Can Build Psychological Safety at Work appeared first on CCL.

What happens at work when you’re presented with a new idea?

Do you play devil’s advocate, punching holes in the idea or pointing out roadblocks? Do you shut it down with a quick retort or dismissive gesture? Or do you ignore it, hoping the idea (and the person who had it) will just go away?

What a leader says and does when someone comes to them with an idea can either spur innovation or stifle it. In fact, studies show that up to 67% of the climate for creativity in organizations is directly attributed to the behavior of the leader.

Caution, skepticism, judging, and dismissal are understandable — and typical — responses to new ideas, especially when resources are strapped. Yet they’re also signs of subconsciously sabotaging innovation and the development of innovative mindsets. In order to foster trust, creativity, collaboration, and innovation within and across teams, you must work to create a psychologically safe culture where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas. These unfiltered ideas are what lead to innovation.

Want an Innovative Mindset? 4 Requirements for Leaders

To counter this natural tendency and to foster innovation in their teams and among their direct reports, leaders can develop an innovative mindset — along with learning innovation processes, tools, and skills. What’s an innovative mindset exactly?

Leaders who have an innovative mindset:

1. Have curiosity;
2. Are able to tolerate ambiguity;
3. Practice affirmative judgment; and
4. Show persistence.

4 Facets of an Innovative Mindset

1. Stay curious.

People who are good at making things happen are curious. Curiosity fuels the acquisition of new information and is the source of creativity and innovation.

Innovation leaders are curious about why things are set up the way they are, open to doing things differently, and willing to try things that don’t neatly fit into their own assumptions. Curious leaders ask, What if? or How might we do something different? They shift their focus from, There’s no way we can do that! to I wonder how we could make that happen.

When you feel you already know the answer, there’s no curiosity.

2. Be tolerant of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is uncomfortable and challenging. But the ability to slow down and be okay with ambiguity is necessary to innovate in the face of complexity.

Innovation leaders balance the need to move forward with the need to hold themselves open to options. Creative thinking and innovative solutions increase when leaders are willing to stay open to possibilities longer.

3. Practice affirmative judgment.

Instead of telling people what they don’t like or what won’t work, innovation leaders let people know what they do like. They point out the strengths and value of a new solution or idea. This lets the team know they’re on to something new and useful, and it ensures they retain the most valuable attributes as the idea evolves.

Affirmative judgment also provides recognition and promotes a sense of accomplishment and progress, which employees need to keep them motivated.

4. Remain persistent.

By definition, new ideas are strange, unusual, weird, and different. So selling new ideas to others to get buy-in takes a lot of work and time.

A senior leader once told his people that if they propose an idea and he says “no,” don’t give up. If they still believe in the idea, he told them he wanted them to try another way to pitch it until he sees its value. For him, that was the definition of “empowerment.”

Innovation leaders empower themselves to do what it takes, which typically requires great persistence.

Innovation and innovative mindsets don’t happen without leadership. Regardless of the brilliance of your strategy, remember that the culture will support it or kill it. Since leaders have such a significant impact on the culture, it’s up to you as the leader to develop it.

The next time you hear a new idea or are asked to weigh in on a new solution, make a choice to lead with an innovative mindset, and foster innovation.

How to Encourage an Innovative Mindset on Your Team

Learn how to encourage innovative mindsets at your organization with our guidebook How to Treat New Ideas. The book identifies 5 tips that can help leaders nurture new ideas and foster innovative mindsets in the workplace, based on personal experience, data, and lessons from scores of organizations around the world.

5 Tips to Foster Innovative Mindsets

1. Resist the instinct to kill a new idea.

Leaders need to understand that their first reaction to a new idea is typically “fight or flight.” When an idea that is new, foreign, or maybe even odd emerges, we’re programmed to fight it or resist it, perhaps maybe even ignore it in hopes that it will go away.

But leaders who want to encourage innovation should take a deep breath and allow themselves and their teams to think through the idea before rejecting it.

2. Practice innovation thinking.

There’s nothing wrong with traditional business thinking — it’s required to manage a modern organization. But when a new idea comes along, it’s time to switch into innovation thinking mode. Innovation thinking gives new ideas the oxygen they need to continue developing.

3. Frame and clarify the idea’s purpose.

Successful innovators often ask themselves what problem a new idea can help solve or what opportunity it might address. Sometimes this takes a little patience.

When 3M scientist Spencer Silver created a “low-tack,” pressure-sensitive adhesive instead of the super-strong glue he’d been trying for, he couldn’t imagine what it would be good for. When a colleague mentioned a problem with the slips of paper he used to mark songs falling out of his Sunday hymnal, Silver had a solution. The result was 3M’s Post-it® notes, now a staple item in every office supply closet.

4. Use the POINt technique.

At this juncture, the promise of at least some new ideas might be starting to clarify. But to sharpen that promise and test it a bit more rigorously, you can use the POINt technique developed by Pfizer executive Bob Moore.

POINt stands for:

• Pluses: Praise the idea and consider what’s good about it as presented.
• Opportunities: Picture the opportunities and benefits that might be realized if you implemented the idea.
• Issues: While you don’t want to kill new ideas, it’s OK to consider some of their challenges and limitations.
• New thinking: Use new thinking to develop solutions for the issues you’ve raised about the new idea.

Nurturing new ideas doesn’t mean being naive about them. Rather, it means considering, with clear eyes, both the opportunities and challenges a new idea presents, and thinking through potential solutions to those challenges.

5. Connect ideas to ideas.

Not every new idea will become a fully realized product or business solution on its own. But that doesn’t mean those ideas don’t have value.

One useful exercise to get more value out of new ideas is to combine previously unconnected ideas. Brainstorming, mind-mapping, and forced connections are techniques that can be used to connect one idea to another.

Follow these tips to develop innovative mindsets on your team, and be watchful for signs you’re subconsciously sabotaging innovation.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Help your teams develop more innovative mindsets with a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-based modules. Available leadership topics include Innovation Leadership, Leading Through Change, Learning Agility, Psychological Safety, and more.

The post How to Foster an Innovative Mindset at Your Organization appeared first on CCL.

When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, we count on good leaders to take actions that pave a way forward for us all.

But better leaders know that success is about more than just their own personal competencies. Leadership is a social process, and to create shared direction, alignment, and commitment — the outcomes of leadership — they need a team of people who are able to function at their best.

At the core of leading others well? Compassionate leadership.

Compassion is at the heart of relationship-building, says Karissa McKenna, who is responsible for 3 of our core leadership programs, including our flagship Leadership Development Program (LDP)®.

At its broadest, compassion is an awareness of a person’s condition, coupled with genuine concern for that person and a willingness to take action to help. It’s about having the courage to walk alongside someone as they navigate a difficult time, a complex situation, or a persistent problem.

Truly compassionate leaders don’t merely lend a sympathetic ear or show empathy for everyone, and their goal isn’t just to solve the problems of their direct reports or take pain away from them.

Instead, compassionate leaders move beyond empathetic concern to take productive actions — supporting team members as they work through challenges and looking for systemic ways to reduce friction, making it easier for good people to do great work.

In short, compassionate leadership is about being willing to apply your influence and power to help create a more even playing field for others.

Why Is Compassionate Leadership Important?

Compassionate leaders are more effective leaders, because they’re able to strengthen trust on their teams and increase organizational collaboration, while decreasing turnover rates, research shows.

The ever-changing context of today’s workplace is challenging. Both internal and external forces are constantly shifting — on our teams, in our industries, and even in our personal lives. All of these forces can come into play, which is why you have to have compassion — both for yourself and for your team. As leaders demonstrate compassion toward themselves and others, they expand their entire team’s capacity to handle future challenges.

Compassion is one of the most powerful acts of leadership available to us, and it often shows up in the smallest of ways. “We see it in those moment-by-moment acknowledgements of what’s hard, what hurts, what is joyous, exciting, or disappointing,” McKenna says.

Most importantly, compassionate leaders acknowledge that their colleagues are more than any specific trauma they’ve endured or challenge they may be facing. In other words, they recognize that someone may be dealing with a particular hardship, but also that they have unique strengths. Compassionate leaders are able to see and acknowledge the whole person in context and seek to grow that person (not just solve their problems). In doing so, they uncover hidden talents and find new ways to leverage the skills and contributions of others.

Ultimately, compassionate leadership changes an entire organization’s culture, yielding greater cooperation and grace for all. Employees trust their leaders and each other, giving others the benefit of the doubt. As a result, senior leaders feel more comfortable taking bold, courageous actions. And when their people feel heard and sense that their perspectives and experiences are valued, they’re better able to support those bold actions, which benefits the entire enterprise.

Compassion Is Different From Empathy

Compassion Vs. Empathy, Explained

It’s important to note that compassionate leadership is more than just feeling empathy for everyone.

What’s the difference between compassion vs. empathy? Compassion is a lot like empathy, in that both attempt to understand how another person feels. And empathy in the workplace is certainly good to have. But simply feeling what someone else is feeling can be painful, and not very productive.

That’s because research has found that when we witness the pain and suffering of someone else, networks in our brains are activated which trigger and amplify similar negative emotions, making us more likely to experience emotional burnout.

For example, imagine an emergency room physician who feels overwhelming empathy toward their ER trauma patients. The doctor is then both less able to fulfill a unique and important role — providing expert help in a moment of need — and more likely to experience personal burnout. “What the physician needs isn’t empathy, but compassion — the ability to recognize the suffering and care for the person, quite literally in this case!” McKenna says.

In contrast to empathy, compassion has been found to involve a different set of neural networks and increases positive feelings, resilience, and the ability to overcome distress in challenging situations. In other words, compassion increases our likelihood of behaviors that take action to help others, whereas empathy alone does not.

“If you sit with another person’s emotions and ‘get stuck in their suffering’ without doing something about it, it can lead to burnout and broader organizational problems — both for you and your direct reports,” McKenna says. That’s why in chaotic times, when managers feel they can barely handle their own emotions, much less those of their direct reports, leaders should focus on compassion vs. empathy.

Behaviors of Compassionate Leaders

How to Show Compassionate Leadership: 4 Steps

During everyday interactions, leaders have many opportunities to incorporate compassionate leadership behaviors. Read on to learn how to recognize these opportunities and use them to make a difference on your team and in your organization’s culture.

1. Start with self-compassion.

Don’t overlook the power of showing compassion to yourself. Before you can extend compassion to others, make sure you’ve done the same for yourself. Research has found that leaders perform better when they show self-compassion, and it’s actually more predictive of goal attainment than self-confidence, according to one study.

“At least a third of the leaders we’ve seen in our leadership programs profoundly need more compassion for themselves,” McKenna says. “They’ve gone through a lot and they’re beating themselves up about their missteps. But imperfections are something to notice and care for.“

The key, McKenna says, is the ability to tease apart the small truths in what you’re telling yourself from “the big lie.” Perhaps you’re upset that your presentation didn’t go as planned; That didn’t go as well as I hoped is true. But I’ve lost all credibility with senior management likely isn’t.

“The small truth is almost always something you can deal with, learn from, and grow through. But the big lie can be paralyzing and costs a tremendous amount of energy.” Leaders who focus on the big lies instead of the small truths are too hard on themselves. By not showing themselves compassion for their mistakes, they miss a chance to learn from their experiences and try again.

• TIP: The way you talk to yourself really matters. Whether you’re speaking out loud, thinking in your head, or just jotting things down in a journal, harness the power of positive self-talk to improve your mental health and your leadership effectiveness. One trick is to talk to yourself in the second person (use “you,” not “I”). When you make that shift, you’ll probably automatically speak to yourself the way you might speak to a valued friend. (You’ll be honest, but kinder).

Another thing we see with our participants are struggles with work/life balance and resilience in handling stress, uncertainty, and setbacks. We remind them that taking time out for self-care and rest isn’t weakness. Recharging is important, because when we create space to notice and care for our imperfect selves, we also increase our ability to do that for others. Becoming a more holistic leader will enable you to be a more resilient, effective, and compassionate leader too.

• TIP: You must make time for wellness to reach your full potential. And it’s good to model taking time for yourself for others on your team, as it underscores that you and your organization understand the importance of wellbeing and leadership.

2. Prioritize psychological safety.

You can lay the groundwork for compassionate leadership by helping to create a culture that invites people to bring their full, authentic selves to work. “Anytime you have a group or team trying to accomplish something together, each person brings a whole life’s worth of experiences and perspectives, strengths and weaknesses, which can be tapped,” says McKenna.

When there’s psychological safety at work, employees feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, sharing concerns, and respectfully disagreeing. When individuals feel able to share missteps without fear of retribution and energized instead of stifled by their differences, increased openness to diversity of thought leads to more risk-taking and greater innovation and collaboration. You get a multiplier effect, and the entire team benefits.

• TIP: As you learn from your own failures or disappointments, freely share those lessons with your team. This demonstrates self-compassion, shows that you value learning from mistakes, and challenges your direct reports to see mistakes as an opportunity for growth. You also create an environment where people know that honesty and candor are appreciated. And don’t forget to acknowledge successes and celebrate wins.

Leader attitudes and behaviors have a major impact on how psychologically safe their teams feel. Politeness and kindness really matter, not only to the person directly involved, but to the whole climate of the team and their direct reports too. Research shows that supervisor incivility has a negative impact on psychological safety 2 levels down in the organization. And more than half of first-time leaders (52%) in a large global CCL study said that it was not safe to make mistakes or take risks, suggesting that a lack of psychological safety is a barrier holding these emerging leaders back from making bigger contributions at their organizations by stepping up to larger leadership roles.

• TIP: Hopefully it goes without saying, but show kindness in the workplace!

3. Expand your understanding of others.

A curious mindset is fundamental to compassionate leadership. First, leaders must notice the challenges colleagues and direct reports are facing, and then they can ask questions to learn more and expand their scope of understanding.

“We cannot show compassion to another person unless we have truly listened to that person,” McKenna notes. Leaders don’t need to have all the answers, but when they use the practice of active listening, it conveys that they care. It’s important to listen for understanding, of both the facts and the feelings and values behind the facts, to learn more about where your people are coming from and what matters to them.

When you listen with curiosity, within an environment that is psychologically safe, it opens the door to another powerful tool — asking open-ended questions that convey caring and connection. Asking the right questions shows that leaders value others’ perspectives and can provide insight into why everyone on the team may not be aligned and committed — and what’s holding them back from moving together in a shared direction.

• TIP: Something as simple as noticing how someone is doing, asking them about it, and then listening for facts, feelings, and values in their answer can be a powerful leadership practice. Even saying something like, I see you’re overwhelmed and I wonder how I can help can really demonstrate compassionate leadership. Show kindness when colleagues disclose worries, hardships, or setbacks, but don’t immediately try to fix things or solve their problems. Ask good questions that help people view dilemmas from a different angle. Use the information you gain to help influence what you do next.

4. Take meaningful action.

Compassionate leadership isn’t merely providing a sympathetic ear. Simply having empathy for everyone without taking any meaningful action can actually be detrimental, both to individuals and the organization as a whole. Even if managers are great listeners when their employees speak up about something, they won’t feel truly listened to if their leaders don’t then act on what they heard, our researchers have found. This is because when employees share a concern, they’re doing so with the hope it will lead to positive organizational change; and if that doesn’t happen, they don’t feel heard and are then less likely to speak up in the future.

Compassionate leaders aren’t passive and do not accept excuses. When leaders hold their people accountable, they demonstrate that they trust them to follow through on their commitments. “We also don’t want the rest of the team to absorb all the problems when one team member isn’t accountable,” says McKenna.

Instead of stepping in to solve another person’s problems, leaders can use their power and influence to provide direction and structure. As a result, empowered employees have the tools they need to work through challenges and emerge as stronger problem-solvers.

• TIP: After you’ve listened, ask how you can support in resolving the issue. Work toward a mutual understanding of what the other person needs, how they might be able to address their needs themselves, and any additional resources that could be helpful. Also, listen closely for what you as a leader could do to support the other person as they work through the problem, or whether there are ways you could help to remove obstacles in their way that might be creating needless friction. Are there ways you could use the power of your leadership role to make your team or organization more inclusive or equitable by helping to remove the roadblocks others face?

Compassionate Leaders Are Better Leaders

Compassionate leaders move beyond empathetic concern to take productive actions. If they don’t, organizations will never be as strong or productive as they could be.

At CCL, we believe in helping leaders and organizations cultivate cultures that truly support everyone — ensuring people are better than just okay. We’ve created a downloadable collection of leadership resources on compassion, wellbeing, and belonging with actionable tips gleaned from our research.

The ever-changing context of today’s workplace is challenging. Both internal and external forces are constantly shifting — on our teams, in our industries, and even in our personal lives. All of these forces can come into play, which is why you have to have compassion — both for yourself and for your team. Compassionate leadership is also a key element of fostering belonging at work, which influences job satisfaction and performance.

When managers are compassionate leaders towards both themselves and others, they become more effective — as individuals, on their teams, within their organizations, and even impacting their entire communities. Compassionate leaders come to work as whole people, and work alongside others, enabling them to be whole people too, to create shared value for the collective.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Take a meaningful step toward increasing compassionate leadership in your workplace by starting a conversation with colleagues on your team or at your organization. Download Our Compassionate Leadership Conversation Starter Guide now.

The post Better Culture Starts With Compassionate Leadership appeared first on CCL.

Innovate or die — everyone says it, but few organizations really know how to make innovation happen.

We’ve heard the cautionary tales. Blockbuster missed the opportunity to innovate around streaming video rentals and lost their once-cornered market to Netflix. Kodak, the former leader in the film industry, filed for bankruptcy in 2012 because it struggled to adapt to the world of digital photography — a technology that it invented.

And more recently, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, swaths of industries were crippled as they found existing business models disrupted — some temporarily, and others permanently obsolete. Hanging on required companies to reinvent their offerings. Those who were already struggling, especially if because of a failure to adapt to changing customer preferences, found it was too late to begin focusing on organizational innovation.

Experts note the following organizational innovation trends: 

• Organizational innovation is regularly cited as one of the top 10 trends affecting business and leadership.
• Executives cite creativity as the #1 leadership skill needed for dealing with an increasingly complex future.
• Creativity and innovation are generally seen as essential requirements for organizational success.
• Willingness to rapidly prototype early versions of innovations is one of the top 10 leadership skills needed for future success.

Despite the consensus around the importance of organizational innovation, it continues to be an area in which leaders and organizations struggle. Given that leaders and organizations seem to care a great deal about being innovative, what’s holding them back? Why aren’t companies as innovative as they want to be? We believe it’s because of a lack of understanding both sides of the innovation equation, a both / and proposition.

The Innovation Equation for Organizational Innovation

Some leaders believe that all they have to do is hire creative people and innovation will just happen. And organizations do need leaders with the ability — and willingness — to think beyond short-term needs and to resist the temptation to cut back on the resources that feed innovation.

Other leaders believe that innovation is all about organizational processes — that all employees will prove to be equally innovative, under the right circumstances and with the right organizational structures (and compensation) encouraging them.

But the most creative person in the world is unlikely to innovate effectively in a company that does not support organizational innovation, and even the most innovation-supportive companies in the world will not reach their innovation potential without creative people in place to do the work.

The bottom line is that organizational innovation follows a simple innovation equation. And the innovation equation isn’t about either having creative people or creating a workplace that fosters innovation — because, for organizational innovation, both must be present.

That’s why the organizational innovation equation is: People + Context = Innovation. For even more on this, including specifics for leaders on what does and doesn’t motivate people to support more organizational innovation, explore our white paper on the innovation equation.

How Companies Can Foster Organizational Innovation

To better understand how organizational innovation works, and how companies can operationalize innovation to support both sides of the innovation equation, we asked 485 leaders from organizations around the globe to share their experiences with innovation in the workplace.

Their responses offered insights into how organizations encourage innovation — as well as common roadblocks they face when trying to implement organizational innovation.

Our research paper on organizational innovation roadblocks summarizes findings from our survey, which revealed the following 5 key differences separating organizations that are effective at innovation from those that are not.

5 Ways to Build Innovation in Your Organization

1. Leaders encourage innovation.

Nearly a third of people surveyed from ineffective organizations selected “leaders don’t encourage innovation” as one of their 3 main roadblocks, compared to only 9% from effective organizations. By definition, innovation is strange and different, and without the risk tolerance and psychological safety at work to experiment, prototype, and pilot new concepts, leaders’ actions speak louder than any hollow words of encouragement.

• Questions to consider: Do leaders in your organization allow people to take a chance on innovation? How could your organization work to ensure alignment between what it said about innovation being important, and actual leadership behaviors?
• Organizational innovation leadership tip: Rather than using innovation as merely a buzzword, demonstrate behaviors that actively encourage innovation. (Be sure leaders know how to encourage innovation, not unintentionally sabotage it, and understand how to foster innovative mindsets.)

2. The culture fosters innovation.

More than half (56%) of respondents from ineffective organizations selected “culture that does not support innovation” as an innovation roadblock. In contrast, only 11% of respondents from effective organizations thought that organizational culture was a roadblock to innovation in their organizations.

• Questions to consider: What could your organizational culture leverage to encourage innovation? What cultural obstacles need to be broken down?
• Organizational innovation leadership tip: Think of organizational culture as “the ways that things really get done around here” (versus official processes). Culture change takes years, yet by looking at what’s working in the culture that can be leveraged — as well as what overtly blocks innovation — organizations can begin to create a culture of innovation.

3. There’s a formal innovation strategy.

When asked whether their organizations had a formal approach to innovation, 66% of respondents from effective organizations said yes, compared with 20% of respondents from ineffective organizations. Many of these ineffective organizations are relying only on informal efforts.

After all, it is the task of leaders to understand both how to run the day-to-day business and invest in the innovation process to support the future of the organization. Managing this tension or polarity is not a bad thing; it’s about finding balance. Managing limited resources and establishing the right level of risk-taking are 2 important aspects of finding this balance.

• Questions to consider: How might you develop a formal innovation strategy? How might your organization align people, processes, and output with your organizational culture and environment?
• Organizational innovation leadership tip: Develop a formal strategy for innovation — unique to your organization — taking into account the 3 practices that will help drive innovation in your organization. Then, outline the best ways to communicate that strategy to your employees.

4. There’s money in the budget.

Innovative organizations have funds dedicated to innovation. Of the people surveyed, 90% of respondents from effective organizations said their organization has an innovation budget, while only 58% of respondents from ineffective organizations said the same.

Simply put, organizational innovation requires resources. Many organizations that are effective at innovation put in place innovation venture capital funds to build and run experiments that determine the viability of concepts.

• Questions to consider: How does your organization currently budget for innovation? How might you free up venture capital funds for experiments and prototypes?
• Organizational innovation leadership tip: Remember that creating and implementing something new and valuable is not cheap, and should be viewed as a critical, long-term investment.

5. Leaders set the direction for innovation.

Innovative organizations have a clear direction for innovation. While only 17% of respondents from effective organizations selected this issue, 39% of respondents from ineffective organizations selected “no clear direction” as a major roadblock.

So whether you’re an executive who leads the entire organization through innovation, a functional leader who is responsible for directing and promoting that innovation, or a manager who is simply advocating for and/or implementing innovative ideas, remember that organizational innovation is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. It requires constant facilitation and support, and your role in innovation depends on where you sit in the organization But while the responsibilities for innovation vary by leader level, don’t lose sight of why organizational innovation is important. Start with a clear statement of purpose for innovation, with very few objective measures of success, to build aligned efforts within the organization and ensure that the work being done is focused on the desired outcome.

• Questions to consider: How might your organization create clear direction, alignment, and commitment for innovation?
• Organizational innovation leadership tip: Start with a clear statement of purpose for innovation, with objective measures of success. This helps to align efforts within the organization and ensure that work toward that goal is focused on the desired outcome.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build a culture of organizational innovation and help your people understand the innovation equation with a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-backed modules. Available leadership topics include Change & Disruption, Innovation Leadership, Learning Agility, Psychological Safety, and more.

The post Support More Organizational Innovation With the Innovation Equation appeared first on CCL.

The idea that there’s a quick fix for culture can cause lots of problems. Cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place, and it evolves slowly, along with the organization.

It’s challenging to get employees to embrace change — they may feel they’re constantly told they need to change processes and practices, only for the leadership team to keep on doing what they always do, and for managers to maintain the same old routines. Despite an initial surge of enthusiasm, nothing ever changes.

The irony is that “change fatigue” can set in, despite “the way we do things around here” remaining very much the same.

Change fatigue is one of the top 2 challenges leaders face when building organizational cultures, we found in a survey with corporate leaders. Other research has found that change initiatives flounder because companies lack the skills to sustain and embrace change over time.

When the reasons and need for change are poorly communicated, everyone feels frustrated and deflated.

Combine with that the fact that all changes, even positive ones, come at a cumulative cost for your workforce.

Build Change Resilience & Overcome Change Fatigue in the Workplace

How to Get Employees to Embrace Change & Avoid Change Fatigue

Change is constant now. What leaders must do is to help employees and managers recalibrate their expectations. This is the world we live in now — change is constant. There’s no ‘getting back to normal.’

The message from leaders needs to be: ‘Let’s get ourselves in shape as individuals and as an organizational culture to embrace the opportunities and to manage the challenges of constant change in the dynamic world that we live in. Let’s equip ourselves together to become more resilient to accommodate that.’”

Leaders can help employees — and themselves — embrace change and overcome change fatigue by taking the following steps:

1. Help the organization continually prioritize change efforts, and focus on the change initiatives that are the highest priority.
2. Recognize and talk about how change is both the beginning of something new and the ending of something that previously was embraced as a best practice.
3. Teach employees evidence-based techniques for managing stress, building resilience, and deploying coping skills in the face of high demands. Build organizational resilience, too.
4. Focus on building a psychologically safe culture in which people can take interpersonal risks by speaking their truths. Psychological safety is critical for candid conversations.

The last step will help leaders understand the challenges and opportunities that exist throughout the organization, which in turn will help leaders be more effective in leading their teams through change.

To Ditch Change Fatigue, Help People View Change as Continual Evolution

Consider the experience of a large company in the energy sector attempting to reinvent itself in the face of volatile market conditions.

In the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world of energy — with shifting oil and gas prices, competition, government policies, and so on — what worked in the past doesn’t work anymore, which was just generating energy and selling it at a good price. It’s also not just about hiring more good engineers, as they’re typically trained to identify problems and come up with a solution and are steeped in LEAN and Six Sigma. But they’re not set up to take risks, to have innovative mindsets, and try new things out.

Across all industries, many traditional, hierarchical global companies struggle to innovate and adapt with sufficient speed and, as a result, must change their mindsets about what’s needed to survive and thrive in the new world order.

Legacy organizations with ingrained cultures have to understand that there is no endpoint — there’s just continual evolution. The ability to be innovative and flexible is directly linked to the ability to seek new opportunities and embrace change.

The reality is, change is complex and continuous. Organizations must help their workers to embrace the opportunities of change and to manage the challenges of constant disruption. That may be a tough message for leaders to deliver, but it need not be a harsh reality.

Rather than focusing on help team members in overcoming “change fatigue,” focus on helping them develop change energy and learning agility. Most successful change initiatives start with baby steps, even large, transformational ones.

With the right leadership, it’s an exciting and galvanizing message for your workforce. Generating excitement around new initiatives and creating a learning culture helps organizations and their employees ditch the change fatigue and truly embrace continual disruption and innovation.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Do your leaders react to change, rather than proactively lead it? Enable them to go beyond change management and become change leaders who can overcome change fatigue and build greater organizational change resilience. Partner with us to create a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-based modules. Available leadership topics include Emotional Intelligence, Innovation Leadership, Leading Through Change, Psychological Safety, Resilience-Building and more.

The post Overcome Change Fatigue & Embrace Continual Evolution appeared first on CCL.

It’s become nearly impossible to consume any news related to diversity & inclusion in the workplace and not also hear that the role of the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO), once the “It-Job,” is now in peril.

Many factors — from political and social backlash and the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, to economic pressures, layoffs, shrinking budgets, and even AI — have contributed to a pullback at organizations across the country.

While it’s tempting to jump straight into challenges and solutions, we believe it’s important to understand why we must address the dilemma of diversity & inclusion officers now.

Regardless of personal or corporate political leanings or progress in diversity efforts, the reality is that the Millennial generation is increasingly filling leadership roles in companies and organizations. They comprise the largest part of the American workforce, studies show, and as consumers, they expect brands to take moral stands on issues. As employees, Millennials want their organizations to be intentional and strategic about creating inclusive company cultures and equitable access to opportunities for growth and development.

To build our understanding of this complex role and organizational efforts to support DEI or EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion — learn why we lead with equity first), we spent time with senior diversity & inclusion officers from organizations in the Fortune 1000. We engaged over 60 diversity officers and other enterprise DEI leaders from various industries, including telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance, and energy.

We listened as these leaders opened up about their perspectives, challenges, and aspirations for the future. They shared their organizations’ levels of investment in DEI and their personal experiences as enterprise diversity officers and shared these insights in our report, The ABCs of Chief Diversity Officers: Alignment, Burnout, and Culture.

Their input confirmed what we’ve all been hearing: Chief Diversity Officers often don’t have the support they need to fully realize sustainable change for EDI.

The Top Challenges of Chief Diversity Officers

While some U.S.-based companies had diversity & inclusion officers prior to 2020, many did not — and the ones that did often granted their DEI leaders limited resources, power, and influence, hampering their ability to build consensus and make lasting advancements in company culture.

Many more organizations created new positions for senior diversity officers for the first time in 2020–2021, and in fact “Chief Diversity Officer” became the C-suite title with the fastest hiring growth in those years, according to LinkedIn. In some cases, they were onboarded into environments that were ill-prepared to receive them.

From the experiences and aspirations of the senior DEI officers we interviewed, we can learn how to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces. Factoring in what these leaders ranked as their highest concerns in both importance and urgency, their top 5 challenges are primarily issues of alignment and culture, but in combination, all point squarely at burnout:

1. Conveying the importance of EDI to middle managers
2. Integrating EDI into the organization’s DNA
3. Changing EDI-related behaviors and actions
4. Translating strategic goals into practices, policies, etc.
5. Achieving alignment and commitment to EDI outcomes

Our resulting insights pointed to a 3-tiered way forward — sort of an A, B, C approach — for DEI officers and their organizations to support and sustain diversity & inclusion efforts:

• Get organizational Alignment
• Prevent personal Burnout, and
• Build a committed Culture.

Alignment: Diversity Officers’ Challenge of Getting Everyone On Board

Most of the Chief Diversity Officers that we talked with reported that they found less organizational alignment around EDI than it originally seemed when they were first hired. Stakeholders didn’t necessarily agree on tactics, goals, objectives, or ways of measuring progress. Outcomes weren’t clear, and decision-making authority and mandates were often vague. And when there isn’t agreement on what everyone should be trying to achieve, success can be difficult to define.

Alignment can be represented by a supportive organizational structure and outcome clarity — one without the other leads to further frustration. By now, most diversity officers and the HR teams who hire them understand that CDOs and executive diversity and inclusion officers must report to the CEO to ensure actual authority and perceived priority. What seems more difficult to achieve is an agreed-upon suite of KPIs to monitor and measure success.

“[As a CDO], your work — and even your job — is never secure or settled,” adds Stephanie Wormington, our Director of Global Strategic Research and member of our EDI practice. Being a diversity officer therefore “requires constant monitoring and adaptation. You have to constantly check — and recheck — and then check again that everything and everyone is aligned to meet your goals.” Being aligned on what outcomes are most desired and expected can make progress easier.

Taking Action: Creating Alignment

The reality is that leadership isn’t just about individual leaders and their capabilities — it’s a social process that happens in the interactions and exchanges among people with shared work, as outlined in our Direction-Alignment-Commitment (DAC) framework.

DAC can provide leaders with guidance on recognizing and addressing alignment issues. DAC considers what it takes for individuals to willingly and effectively combine their efforts to produce collective results, together. This framework directly translates to the work of diversity officers, as it promotes the idea that leadership is a social process that revolves around mutual influence.

Burnout: DEI Officers Struggle to “Secure Their Own Masks First”

It’s important to acknowledge that burnout is not unique to diversity work. It’s a condition the entire workforce has collectively experienced at increased rates since the pandemic. In fact, burnout was named an occupational phenomenon worldwide by the World Health Organization.

However, among the C-suite roles in an organization, the Chief Diversity Officer job is often more socially, emotionally, and mentally taxing than others because of the very personal nature of diversity work. Individuals are sometimes asked to communicate vulnerability, insecurity, bias, anxiety, concern, and even resentment, plus a host of other emotions that impact workplace behavior. The work of diversity officers can literally be exhausting.

The culprits of burnout are a lack of resourcing and a need for community. Both can be areas of trouble for DEI leaders. We gleaned these insights from CDOs around the causes of the burnout they face:

1. Staffing is inconsistent and not proportional to organizational size — which may make driving diversity & inclusion for the enterprise feel like a very big task for a very small few. For example, we found some $20B organizations had just one single full-time headcount dedicated to EDI work.
2. Organizational funding for diversity & inclusion budgets is all over the board. Although the median investment for enterprise EDI work was $350,000, or about $32 for every FTE, the amount spent again varied greatly across companies. Alarmingly, the average EDI budget was just $57 for every $1M in organizational revenue. Some organizations allocated as little as $4 per employee for EDI, while others budgeted as much as $300.
3. Diversity officers are typically juggling more than 10 responsibilities. They reported being tasked with addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion in everything from talent recruitment, retention, and promotion to supply chain diversification to internal education and capacity development.

And as the Vice President of our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion practice, Michael DePass, notes, “To actually move the culture toward EDI, people have to want to … The CDO feels the burden of getting people to want to do it. Even if they have the money, even if they have the staff, they still struggle.”

This leads us to community; fostering a supportive and engaged community is another burnout-related challenge diversity & inclusion officers consistently face. Sensing a lack of respect and urgency on the part of other leaders, the C-suite, or the board can be discouraging. Likewise, it can be draining to feel you must constantly be pulling others along, while at the same time trying to keep up your own motivation. 

Taking Action: Preventing Burnout

But the news isn’t all bad. We also found that diversity officers didn’t name their own burnout as the primary cause of slow progress on EDI. Rather — and perhaps unfortunately — they see it as part of the nature of their very purpose-driven work. They are passionate advocates who recognize they have signed up for a challenge.

Prioritizing their own wellbeing can serve the greater EDI cause in the organization, and leaders can reflect on this by asking themselves questions like:

• Which of my responsibilities feel most aligned to my sense of purpose?
• Do I focus enough on my own wellbeing? Does our team and organizational culture encourage employees to focus on their own health?
• How can we support one another in prioritizing what’s most important?

Culture: Diversity & Inclusion Officers’ Challenge of Weaving DEI Into the Fabric of the Organization

Company culture is a set of shared values, attitudes, and behaviors established by leadership to achieve internal and external success. When a person becomes a part of a company or organization, they are agreeing to be a part of a culture in addition to belonging to their personal culture or cultures. Further, all cultures must evolve. Social, political, technological, and other forces are constantly at play, which means change is guaranteed.

Culture change isn’t easy, but it may be bolstered by determining strategic priorities, re-evaluating policies, establishing a common language around EDI, and normalizing how employees talk to one another and collaborate. The work is not a one-size-fits-all, and a close alliance between the C-suite and the CDO is critical.

Our research shows that to build or bolster culture, senior leadership must empower diversity officers to:

1. Establish strategic partnerships, internal and external.
2. Establish meaningful metrics.
3. See the bigger picture.

Participants who have had success in shifting culture cited things like breaking down silos and sharing EDI responsibility by function, peer-to-peer groups within the organization, and ongoing ties with external EDI consultants and civil rights leaders as part of their success in creating a diversity roadmap and implementing it.

When diversity efforts go beyond box-checking and become serious enterprise-wide initiatives, they transcend simple statistics and bring tangible benefits to organizations. We advise avoiding merely cosmetic activities or trying to appear as a good corporate citizen. Tying EDI goals to the larger organizational purpose and vision can help employees understand why they should be invested.

CDOs must be able to connect the dots, build understanding across the organization, and see the bigger picture to craft an actionable roadmap for EDI change. Having a view of the entire system and where the organization wants to go allows them to suggest solutions that will meet all stakeholders where they are and create a collective shift toward a more committed EDI culture.

Taking Action: Leveraging Polarities to Foster Culture Change

For lasting culture change, it’s important that leaders leverage polarities and establish new initiatives within existing ecosystems. In other words, executives may feel pulled between two seemingly conflicting things that appear at odds with one another and feel tempted to focus on just one or the other — but doing so risks underwhelming results and even backlash from stakeholders.

A polarity — also described as a paradox, conundrum, or contradiction — is a dilemma that is ongoing, unsolvable, and contains seemingly opposing ideas.

For leaders to work with polarities, they need to be able to see both perspectives clearly and at the same time. The trick isn’t to solve a polarity or to make a choice and move on. Instead, effective leaders handle a polarity by recognizing and acknowledging it, and then by moving mentally and practically through the ebbs and flows that it presents.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Download our full research report on The ABCs of Chief Diversity Officers: Alignment, Burnout, and Culture to learn more, or partner with us to support the critical work of your organization’s diversity & inclusion officers. We can help you move your organization forward so that mindsets, behaviors, and practices are more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. Learn more about our EDI practice and solutions.

The post Why Chief Diversity Officers Are Critical — Yet Endangered — in the Workplace appeared first on CCL.

The role of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) executive is at a critical crossroads. In an ever-changing professional and political environment, these leaders face intense pressure as their mandates and goals — and even the terms used to discuss those things — are shifting.

In the past few years, significant strides have been made at many organizations in terms of building and executing meaningful strategies that advance DEI. Continued progress will require substantive, sustained investments that support the work of DEI executives in order to overcome organizational DEI challenges.

Find out what we learned from our research with Chief Diversity Officers and other DEI executives from across the U.S. In this report, we offer insights from senior leaders, grouping the most common DEI challenges into themes of where they told us they struggle most: getting organizational alignment, preventing personal burnout, and building committed cultures.

From their stories, experiences, and aspirations, we can learn how to overcome DEI challenges to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces.

Download Research Report

The post Executives Share Their DEI Challenges & Aspirations for the Future appeared first on CCL.

According to research, leadership coaching continues to grow in popularity at a rapid pace across the globe. Due to the positive impact of coaching, it has long been the gold standard for individual development, but it’s increasingly understood that it also has the potential to ignite culture change. When done right, leadership coaching has a ripple effect that positively impacts the entire organization.

Our recent impact survey data from more than 200 leaders shows the positive impact of coaching, confirming that coaching leads to improved leader effectiveness, better job performance, more contribution to business success, and an increased ability to lead under pressure. But the impact of this positive transformation doesn’t stop there — it extends beyond the individual and improves organizational leadership capacity.

Join us for a webinar to discuss the positive impact of coaching, and learn practical tips about how to leverage leadership coaching for individuals, teams, and organizations.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll discover:

• Research and experience-based insights about the positive impact of coaching leaders
• Coaching tools for individual, team, and organizational development
• Recommendations for ways to integrate coaching into development initiatives

The post The Positive Impact of Coaching appeared first on CCL.