Insight Inclusive leadership and management practices
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.
THE PATTERN
A responsibility changes status when it stops being a file.
There is a pattern that repeats in the life of organizations. A concern first appears at the margins: it is carried by the convinced, entrusted to a specialist, handled in a committee. It occupies an agenda item, it has its budget, it has its owner. And as long as it stays there, it remains somebody else's business.
Then something tips. The concern leaves the committee and settles into ordinary work: into how a task is planned, how a new employee is welcomed, how a gap is corrected, how a team meeting is run. It stops being a specialty. It becomes a management skill, required of everyone, including those who never asked for it.
It is not the concern that changed. It is where it is managed from.
MARTIN'S ACCOUNT
In the 2000s, health and safety followed exactly that path.
I began my career in settings where health and safety was first and foremost the file of a prevention officer. There was an owner, inspections, posters, a committee. A manager could produce, hold their costs and meet their deadlines without safety really being their business: it belonged to someone whose job it was.
That division did not hold. Gradually, safety stopped being a file and became a management criterion like any other. People began expecting a foreman to stop unsafe work — not report it, stop it. To build risk into their planning rather than deal with it afterwards. To hold the same line in front of a production delay as in front of an unhappy client. Not to let it pass, not even once, not even when letting it pass was simpler.
That period remains one of the defining fights of my career. I watched competent managers struggle with it, not out of bad faith, but because they were being asked to fit a new requirement into habits already in place. Those who succeeded did not change their values: they changed their practices.
Martin Lépine President and co-founder, Mosaïca Conseils
WHAT HE SEES TODAY
Diversity management is following the same path.
Today, in many organizations, diversity occupies the place safety occupied at the outset: a file, a committee, a policy, sometimes a dedicated person. And the same sentence keeps coming back: “it's important, but it isn't really my role.”
Yet teams have already changed. Backgrounds, languages, working reference points and ways of contributing are more varied than they have ever been. This is no longer an exceptional situation a manager runs into twice a year: it is the normal context in which they give an instruction, correct a gap, assign a task and assess a contribution. What used to be a matter of personal sensitivity is now a matter of professional competence.
WHAT THE ANALOGY SAYS, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
Two different issues, the same way of taking hold.
We have to be precise, because the comparison can be misread. Diversity and health and safety are not issues of the same nature. The risk is not the same, the obligations are not the same, and it would be absurd to treat the presence of people who are different as a hazard to be controlled. The analogy is not about the subject matter.
It is about how a responsibility takes hold in a manager's daily work, and about the standard that implies. In the same way that hazardous work must not be treated casually, the management practices tied to diversity should not tolerate improvisation, sloppiness, disrespect, vague expectations or inconsistent treatment from one person to the next.
That is precisely what the word rigour means here. Not more good intentions: more consistency. The same expectations expressed the same way, a welcome that does not depend on how busy the day is, feedback given as clearly to the person whose accent is hard to follow as to everyone else.
WHAT THIS CHANGES FOR AN ORGANIZATION
You do not cross this threshold with a policy.
Safety did not become a management responsibility because a policy was published. It became one because expectations of managers changed, because they were equipped, because it was discussed in ordinary meetings and because what used to be tolerated eventually came to be seen as unacceptable.
The path is the same here. So the question put to a leadership team is not whether it values diversity — the answer is known in advance — but what it concretely expects of a manager on Monday morning, and what it has put in place so that they can deliver it.
What, in our organization, is no longer acceptable, and do we all know it?
The managers who lived through the first of these shifts know both its difficulty and its value. The second has already begun. The only question still open is how long each organization gives itself to recognize it.
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 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.
- 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.