Insight Inclusive leadership and management practices
Inclusive leadership plays out where the work actually happens
A policy can be common to the whole organization. Yet a team's experience of it is built in very local decisions.
THE TENSION
The organization decides once. The team learns it a hundred times.
A leadership team adopts a direction, writes it down, communicates it, sometimes celebrates it. From the organization's point of view, the decision has been made: it dates from a given month, it appears in a given document, it was presented at a given meeting.
From the point of view of someone on a team, none of that happened once. What they learn, they learn in small touches: how their question was received on Tuesday, the tone used when they made a mistake, whether they were told the why of an instruction or only the how, who was consulted before a decision was made.
A direction is decided at the top. It is learned in contact with a manager.
WHAT GETS TRANSLATED
Five places where an intention becomes concrete, or disappears.
Expectations: what gets asked, and with what precision. Two managers can pass on the same instruction, one giving the intended outcome, the other only the task. The room for judgment left is not the same.
Feedback: what gets corrected, what gets let go, and how it is said. A gap flagged early and simply does not teach the same thing as a gap that accumulates and is then held against someone.
Recognition: who a success is credited to, and in front of whom. That is often where a team learns which contributions really count.
Decisions: who is consulted beforehand, and who hears about it afterwards. The make-up of that informal circle says more than any org chart.
Room to act: what a person can decide without asking. It is almost never written down; it is inferred from what happened the last time someone tried.
WHY THE GAP IS HARD TO SEE
No one acted badly, and yet the experience is not the same.
The gap between two teams in the same organization is almost never explained by bad faith. It is explained by different management habits, adopted in good faith, often inherited from how those managers were themselves managed.
That is what makes the gap so stable. Every manager believes they are doing what is needed, and they are right within their own logic. What is missing is not goodwill: it is a shared reference point about what has to be done the same way everywhere, and what can legitimately vary from one team to the next.
THE USEFUL DISTINCTION
A policy is a promise. A practice is proof.
An organization that wants to check where it stands does well to stop asking whether its intention is clear — it almost always is — and to ask instead what an employee who arrived three months ago could tell you about their last three weeks. That account cannot be inferred from any document.
What does a person learn, in one week, about what they are allowed to do here?
The answer is found neither in the policy nor in leadership's intention. It is found where the work actually happens, and it is built one decision at a time.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full argument, the evidence and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Inclusive leadership and management practicesCONTINUE
Other insights on inclusive leadership.
- Insight Training managers is not enough A training room can open up awareness. On its own, it does not transform how a team is managed on Monday morning.
- Insight Leadership should not disappear when the leader leaves the room The test of transferable leadership often begins the moment the person who usually decides is no longer in the room.
- Insight A title gives you a responsibility. Not necessarily the right to act. The org chart says who is accountable. Daily life reveals who can actually decide without asking permission.
- Insight The next big challenge for managers is already here Some responsibilities end up changing the very way people manage. Martin Lépine saw one take hold twenty years ago. He sees another one today.