Eight Critical Leadership Skills to Unlock Hidden Voices
The most effective business leaders identify and develop the talent around them. For too long, leadership culture has failed to acknowledge, promote, encourage and include the voices of non-dominant workplace groups. Your team is likely missing out on important ideas from unnoticed leaders who can help you compete in a changing world.
Unconscious Biases Hide in Plain Sight
This isn’t to say that business leaders are purposefully excluding minority groups. More often, well-meaning leaders don’t understand how their workplace culture affects their decision-making — hindering full diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). At its core, inclusion is about more than just checking boxes. It’s about maximizing the talent hiding in plain sight. That’s where WMFDP comes in.
Developing Courageous Leaders
We work with business leaders to reveal the unconscious biases that weigh heavily on women, people of color, LGBTQ+ and other frequently marginalized groups. When these biases are brought to the surface and understood for what they are, leaders can begin to disrupt status quo thinking that assumes everyone is just like them.
Through this process, we create courageous leaders. Courageous leaders aren’t afraid of someone else’s good idea, realizing they aren’t all-knowing and all-seeing. Instead, courageous leaders come to work every day and say, “I don’t know, but let’s go find out.”
When business leaders begin to employ these skills in the workplace, they can do amazing things.
Our training seeks to instill these eight critical leadership skills:
- Courage
- Integrating Head and Heart
- Listening
- Balancing Key Paradoxes
- Leveraging Ambiguity and Turbulence
- Managing Difficult Conversations
- Seeing and Thinking Systemically
- Being an Agent of Change
Courageous Leadership in Action
Accomplishing change on this level isn’t always easy, but armed with a new set of skills, leaders can begin taking courageous action toward greater inclusion. By shifting assumptions, mindsets and practices, leaders challenge their organizations to think and act in ways that include everyone. Above all, courageous leaders are facilitators who nurture relationships that bring out the best in every person, regardless of their identity.
By investing in this type of leadership development, organizations are investing in leaders who will be better equipped to uncover the new talent that’s been there all along.
