This month Craig Howells from Let’s Talk Talent interviews Stefano Battaglia, HR Consultant and Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour about the importance of inclusive leadership in the modern workforce.
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Transcript of The importance of being an inclusive leader with Stefano Battaglia
Craig Howells
Hello, and welcome to Let’s Talk Talent’s podcast. Within this series, we talk to inspirational leaders from around the world of HR, bringing you top tips, tricks, experiences, and techniques. All with the intention of making your organisation irresistible and hopefully sharing insights that will help you unlock the potential in your people.
Craig Howells
Welcome to Episode 14, where we’re going to be discussing inclusive leadership and its importance in the modern day workplace. I’m your host today, Craig Howells. I am the Client Partner here at Let’s Talk Talent. And I’ve been really, really looking forward to today’s podcast. The topic of inclusive leadership is on the minds and agendas at the moment of many, many people. And it’s really relevant not only for the HR community, but also to all the leaders current and aspiring. So I’m really excited to discuss this topic today. So I’d like to welcome today’s guest, and I’m really excited to be joined by Professor Stefano Battaglia. Hello, Stefano, how you doing today?
Stefano Battaglia
Hi, Craig. I’m good, thanks. Thanks for having me.
Craig Howells
Thanks very much. And Stefano, do you want to talk a little bit about your background and what you currently are doing?
Stefano Battaglia
Yes, absolutely. So I am an HR consultant and Business School professor, specialising in organisational behaviour. As for a lot of people, my work life has been put a bit upside down by the pandemic. And I have been in a sort of privileged position, I think, to observe how people’s attitude and expectations have changed as a consequence of a pandemic we’ve all been experiencing in the past couple of years. And I think the pandemic magnified management and leadership problems that were already existing before the pandemic, but now have become so evident that a leader will not be able to simply revert to the old way of managing teams. There is a need, I think, to be more focused on the wellbeing of their employees, also helping them to feel more heard, to feel more included. And if not, people I think will leave, as we have been seeing with this great resignation happening in the past year or so. So I think in this new post-pandemic workplace, it will become more and more important to practice inclusive leadership. And so that’s why I got so interested in it.
Craig Howells
Fantastic. Thank you so much. And I’m totally in agreement with you, the great resignation, the great attraction is such a key piece at the moment. And I’m really interested to understand from your perspective, what the impact of inclusive leadership has on there, but I think we should start from ground zero just so that anyone who’s listening…that inclusive leadership is brand new to them. So if we start from the foundations and what we believe inclusive leadership is, but also to that, what it is not. So if you want to describe to us what that foundation level is, that’d be great.
Stefano Battaglia
Yeah. So I think inclusive leadership reflects a new way of leading teams. What we learn when we have a pandemic is when people feel that their uniqueness is appreciated, and they have this sense of belonging, they really feel included, and this unleashes their potential. So they perform at their best for themselves first, but also for the organisation. It’s not so much about celebrating diversity as the name might suggest, but of course that is really important as well. But it’s more about fostering a sense of belonging. I think that’s really the core message of inclusive leadership. So of course, some of the core aspects of leadership, such as setting direction or influencing others aren’t changing. But a new capability is emerging, I think, as vital, and it must change the way we live. So I think more than ever it’s required now to be more human-centric. So bringing a stronger focus on empathy, for example, on care, and on wellbeing at work.
Craig Howells
And one thing that I definitely want to touch on, I’d love to know the relationship between empathetic leadership and inclusive leadership because I hear them being thrown almost the same, the same topic. So it’d be good to understand what that difference is. But from your perspective, at this moment in time, the people that you’re dealing with in your world, and you’re discussing with, what are we seeing as the role of inclusive leadership in the modern day workplace and workforce?
Stefano Battaglia
I think there’s a very important role for that, because I think this has an important implication for how organisations currently assess, coach, and develop leaders. As I mentioned before, I think we are experiencing a crisis of leadership, that was already there before the pandemic, and a crisis of trust as well. And the pandemic has put like a magnifying lens of all our limits as a leader. So I think it’s very important that we need to help leaders to think about the quality of an inclusive leader, and how to help their organisation to cultivate what I call inclusive capability across their leadership population. And the challenge is that each organisation is unique. So it will require a very varied sort of tailored approach to be able to cultivate a culture of inclusion.
Craig Howells
And I think building on from that, I’ve seen or particularly read over the last couple of weeks that actually a lot of research has been undertaken around inclusive leadership and also empathetic leaders across the pandemic and crises. Because, again, we’ve faced a lot of periods of time that people probably haven’t, well, people haven’t experienced before. And it was found that actually more inclusive and empathetic leaders together, they gained improvements within areas such as employee loyalty, engagement, collaboration, employee satisfaction, and creativity, which in turn are all factors that improve productivity and business growth, especially during turbulent situations, which understands why it’s probably come to the forefront of lots of people’s minds at the moment. It’d be really interesting also to break down what we feel, from our perspective, what the qualities of an inclusive leader is, so that people can start to think about actually, how do they apply that in their modern day world?
Stefano Battaglia
Yeah. So there are fundamentally four very important qualities that describe an inclusive leader. And I’ll start with probably the most important one, I think, which is purpose and being purposeful. It’s really about being guided by a clear purpose. And even more important probably, being able to communicate that to all your employees. So it does need to be done in a way that resonates with people. But it’s also about helping them to find their own purpose, and helping them to look at themselves, looking at their strengths. And then really figuring out what they are driven, what is the main things that sort of drive them. So the first characteristic is purposeful. The second characteristic very linked to that is being connected. Basically being in touch with your team reality. So being able to remain connected, despite the from-home working, remote working, that we’ve all been experiencing, and really be able to hear truth from people, in that sense of being able to develop what we always refer to as psychological safety. So people tell us what they really think, rather than what we want them to…what we want to hear. So that’s the second characteristic of being being connected. The third one is being balanced. And you could probably also use other words for…to refer to balance, that would be, for example, being agile or being flexible. And it’s about having that social sensitivity to really understand the person that we have in front, and also the situation that we are dealing with, and be able to make a more sensible approach. So it’s about developing, also what I like to call Intelligent Disobedience. So be able to balance relationships and results, and appreciate that for every good characteristic that we have, as a leader, there is an opposite, which is equally important. So I want to give you a couple of examples of that. So think about today, a very complex world of work. And we could say that it’s very important, for example, to be courageous, to have courage. But it’s equally important to be humble, we can all know that very well. So it’s important to be strong and confident. But a lot of the research has shown that it’s equally if not even more important to show vulnerability. It’s important to be decisive yet to be flexible. And it’s important to be strategic and yet creative, maybe outgoing yet introspective, and the list can go on and on, I think you are getting the message here. And even if we want to think about the old business, we could say that it’s important to be global, yet local. So the main point here is to understand that as a leader, we need to develop this wider range, as I like to call it, which allows us to tap into these important characteristics in different circumstances. And that’s what basically I mean, it being balanced. And finally, the last characteristic is being resilient. Being resilient is about being able to bounce back. That growth mindset to defeat challenge, but primarily to defeat burnout as well for ourselves, but then being able to become a role model for our team. So how do we do that? I think we need to become more aware of our energy, sort of a different type of energy that exists within us. And how do we take charge and care of that energy? So how do we recharge ourselves both physically and mentally. These are the four main characteristics of an inclusive leader. So again: be purposeful, be connected, being able to be balanced, and being resilient.
Craig Howells
I think one of the key messages from what you said there that’s really resonated with me is the human-centric approach, that even though you are a leader, to be more human, and actually be vulnerable, and be that type of leader and show vulnerability is a key takeaway from me from what you said in those areas. And I think one piece that I’d like to almost bolt onto that as a bit of a side question, which is around burnout. Burnout seems to be another key topic at the moment. In my role, I’m talking to many different clients and understanding what’s happening in their world. And more and more times come up that actually burnout is occurring not only within their leadership teams from the last couple of years and the challenges that have occurred, but this is now starting to almost sink down through the organisations and people are seeing that within their teams as well. Touching on what you said about energy and using those energy pieces to actually take time to figure out how to come out of that burnout stage, reflecting back to, say, the energy quadrant that I know that we’ve spoken about before, what were the recommendations you’d make for somebody who knows of somebody who is in the burnout stage? Or somebody who’s going through that personally, to recommend to them to get them out into, say, a more recovery type position to lead to high performance?
Stefano Battaglia
Yeah, I think it’s a great question. And so I think it’s, as I mentioned before, first of all, to know the energy quadrant and understanding energy, I think is key. And it’s something that probably we don’t do much of it. So understanding the different type of energy that we have, and how that influences each other. So our own physical energy, how that influences our emotional energy, and so the quality of energy that we currently have in that moment, how that influences then the focus that we have on what we are doing, and also how we generate energy by social environments of our people around us and by the purpose. So I think it’s very important to first to put energy at the front of what we’re doing, and start discussing that much more. And I think in order to do that, of course, we first need to work on our own awareness. So become more and more and more aware of our daily energy flow, to anticipate a cyclical rough period that we might have. So really taking care of us physically and psychologically. And then this becomes, I think, a rule: become like a role model for everybody else in our team. So in that sense then, it’s about taking an active role in promoting that resilience. And show how we are doing, you know? I am a strong believer that we kind of lead by example. And we need to show with all the difficulty how we are trying to take care of our own energy. And so helping people to build their own resilience plan that can help them really to take care of themselves. I think the fear we have of a wellbeing programme, which we have been seeing increasingly offered in the past few years, is that they end up being very much individually focused and it’s up for people to pick up on that. And what we see is that for a number of different reasons, people not necessarily responding to that. So the programme out there, the companies are investing the money in this programme. But then there is not an adequate response from people. And I think this is very much about tackling the problem as a team, rather than individually. And that needs to come from from the leader, needs to come from the manager. So to model the way, I think, in terms of energy, and therefore its internal resilience.
Craig Howells
I think it becomes more self-sustaining then as well, when you build up a team, those peer-to-peer networks that, actually, you know that as a group of individuals, you’re getting together to push through those difficult times, you’ve got people that have your back, that know and can see actually when your energy falls. And actually they can see that and actually give you help and advice and guidance, rather than if you’re individualistic and focusing just on yourself, there’s less of that chance. It’s better to have that objectivity of somebody looking into you to see the changes because they can see those more frequently than you can yourself. So that’s really great. Thank you so much for talking about those energy quadrants. We have discussed a little bit around inclusive leadership and empathetic leadership. So it’d be really great to know, from your perspective and your understanding, what is the relationship and/or the difference between the two?
Stefano Battaglia
Well, I think empathic leadership is equally very important and is a part of this discussion we’re having today, if you think about it as having the ability to understand the needs of others and be aware of their own feelings and thoughts. So that’s what empathetic leadership is. So if you think about what I said before about being connected, and then being resilient for yourself but then helping others to become resilient, it’s very much about having that emotional connection with the people that we are managing. I think the main difference I see is that, almost by definition, empathic leaders tend to focus on how we do connect with others. So how do we develop that emotional intelligence to create that connection? And I think that’s not the whole picture. So inclusive leadership as sort of the same goal, but encouraging us, I think, first in looking at ourselves, and in a more holistic way. So looking at our own purpose, looking at our own energy, as I mentioned before, looking at what I call sweet range. So, having this balanced approach where we can appreciate that opposite characteristics are equally important, as I said before. So I think that very often with all these different types of leadership model, we have the aim for a similar type of outcome, but with slightly different focus. But definitely, empathic leadership is part of that. So you cannot be a good inclusive leader I think without developing a strong, strong empathy.
Craig Howells
And it’s really great to hear the similarities between them. Because I’m sure many people listening today know that these two terms get thrown around. So it’s really great to actually understand how they come together. And it’s really interesting to hear that. Now building on further, there’s one thing I have to talk to you about. Some people may know about this, some people may not, but you’ve been a fundamental part in building a programme that’s really building out what we mean by inclusive leadership, and almost throwing the rulebook out the window in regards to learning and development for leaders. So I’d love to talk to you about the new Leader Of The Pack workshop. And if people know about it or don’t know about it, I know there’s details about it on the Let’s Talk Talent website. But you’ve been fundamental in creating this workshop. Can you tell us a little bit more about this workshop?
Stefano Battaglia
As I mentioned before, I think we are, and companies around the world are facing a leadership crisis. There’s a lot of evidence of that. So there was interesting research published on people management and [inaudible] that found that nearly two thirds, roughly 73% of the interviewees, felt the condition of leadership has been lacking during during the pandemic. And then there was another interesting study in Forbes in 2021. So like roughly six months ago, showed that only 11% of a surveyed organisation, which were over 15,000, reported they had a very strong or strong leadership bench. And this was the lowest which they ever rated it over 10 years, and the company who did the survey really talked about a risk of a lost generation of leaders. And what we have been seeing because of a pandemic, those leaders which are transitioning into a new role during the pandemic reported a significant drop in terms of support, in terms of receiving feedback or development opportunity, or assessment. I think we have to recognise that there is this gap and it kind of needs to be, needs to somehow be tackled, despite in the past we have seen an increased spend in terms of leadership development. And the programme. The leader impact programme was born out of a reputation that what we are teaching in doctrine is not really just helping the dog, but actually it’s helping the dog owner to become a better leader. And this could actually be very beneficial for everyone who wants to learn about becoming a better manager and leader. And this is because a dog can sense leadership in a person by observation. So there is a lot to do with the nonverbal communication and our presence and our posture and our energy, which determine the effectiveness of a good dog owner and becoming a leader for your dog. So thanks to the programme and interaction with a dog, we are able to boil some of the principles of leadership down to the very basic, and there is a great quote, which I think shows this, which says that animals don’t follow an unstable leader, only humans have leaders who lie and can get away with that. And so the programme really gives life to very important concepts in leadership, such as social sensitivity, and energy awareness. And people are able to experience that through their interaction with a dog. So in order to do that, we have set up a half day workshop. And it’s been looking really, really promising so far. So we’re really looking forward to seeing how the community will respond to this.
Craig Howells
And am I right in saying that you actually have dogs there in the actual workshop with you?
Stefano Battaglia
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So people will be able to observe interactions between our active dog trainer and the dog, but also interact themselves, and this is really part of the training. So that interaction with the dog is what creates that interactivity, which creates the lightbulb moment. Which allows people to learn I think on a different level.
Craig Howells
Amazing. That is, well, from my perspective, absolutely groundbreaking. Something really new and fun. And I think also having a point of difference. We’ve all sat in these L&D type workshops, almost been a part of a lecture for half a day, which normally people say there’s one or two things that stick with you through the whole programme, but I can imagine that having dogs in there, there’s different cues that almost stick in their minds. So I think it’s a really great and groundbreaking programme, so well done for creating it. I don’t envy you, trying to work out how dog training aligns with the leadership world, but you managed to get there. It sounds fantastic. So I’m really looking forward to seeing that in person. And just to summarise, Stefano, it’s been a really, really interesting conversation. And it’s quite clear that we can talk about the topic of inclusive leadership pretty much all day. There’s so much there that we could be discussing and talking about and how it all impacts the world of work moving forward. But I’d like to just pull together some key takeaways, as how a leader who’s in a position at the moment or an aspiring leader can start to make their first steps to become a more inclusive leader. What are the key steps you would advise them to take?
Stefano Battaglia
The main takeaway, Craig, is that there is an urgent need for inclusive leaders. So that’s what really I tried to communicate so far, and I think all managers can start becoming more inclusive, try to do a few things in the different domains I mentioned before. So for example, I think in terms of purpose, probably, as I mentioned, the most important is about making the time, a little time each day or each week to think about purpose, think about how that is unique to you, as a leader, so it’s addressing really who you are, and not so much your job role, and really focus on communicating your purpose as frequently as you can, and really get better at it. This, as I mentioned, needs to resonate with people, but also then become a sort of a role model for helping them figure out their own purpose, primarily by focusing on their strengths. So this is what I would say in terms of purpose. In terms of being connected, it’s really about getting to know people personally. So sort of common practice here like checking regularly, asking questions to demonstrate that you really care, but also more wider, create that consistent connection ritual between people. So the creative opportunity to continuously offer praise, offer appreciation on an ongoing basis, so that people can feel that connection, which has been so much harder to maintain with the transition that we’re experiencing from-home working and remote working. And in that I think it’s very powerful to share vulnerability. And we have seen that this really fostered belonging. And I think on that it’s equally important to create, make it easier for people to ask for support. So create what I call this reciprocity array. So I asked you something, and you can ask me something back. And we have that consistent structure for making that happen, for making it easier to ask for help. So that we do feel more connected. In terms of balance, it’s about understanding yourself, as very often in leadership training. So understanding what are your natural tendencies, especially in situations of stress. What are your strengths and what are your weaknesses, but then develop that sweet range, I was referring to before. So try to broaden your range according to what circumstances you are facing. And I think this requires a lot of self-reflection. And I think the process can be strongly enhanced by formal coaching. So having a coach and discussing your preference, but also the opposite of each individual characteristic, I think it can be very, very beneficial. Then finally on energy and on being resilient, as I said before, it’s really about becoming more aware of your energy flow, and invest in your physical and psychological health. I think this is extremely important. And then having a team focus, as I mentioned, so really taking an active role in promoting resilience and boosting energy for the whole team, and show the team how you are doing it yourself. So how you’re trying to build your own resilience. Nobody gets it perfect. But it’s actually showing how we try to do it, show us our vulnerability, become a role model for all our team. So setting this resilience plan, and raising this awareness of energy I think is key. And on that, I think, yes, I tell you the Leader Of The Pack, for example, to be an excellent connection there because we’ll cover energy in much detail.
Craig Howells
Some really, really tangible takeaways there. Stefano, thank you so much. And thank you for your time and joining us on the latest Let’s Talk Talent podcast. It’s been really great to hear your opinions. A real key takeaway from me is, one, as you said at the start, of the takeaways is that urgent need and requirement for leaders to be more inclusive is a real key takeaway. And for everything, summarising, the one thing I’m taking away from that is the human-centric approach. Actually, everything you’ve talked about there is actually being more human as a leader and almost recognising energy in yourself and others. They’re the key takeaways for myself. So thank you so much for joining us.
Stefano Battaglia
Thank you so much, Craig, for having me again.
Craig Howells
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