Podcast: How to cultivate, accelerate and scale inclusive leadership

[0:09] Moderation: Hi and welcome! You’re listening to the herCareer Voice Podcast. This podcast is the one to listen to for diverse perspectives about the social, political and scientific aspects that define our workplaces and especially the female career planning. Whether it’s professional growth and self development ,entrepreneurship, finances or the balance between our professional and private lives : We want to know more about female careers, learnings, experiences and challenges and learn how these women have grown from them.
Today’s speaker is Christina Bösenberg. She brings three questions to this stage into our ears:
1) How can we build momentum to inclusive leadership?
2) Why are we not getting there faster?
3) How can leaders form inclusive leadership styles?
Join the science and industry board member of leading digital coaching provider Coach Hub and discover how to foster a culture of inclusivity from leadership and beyond and how you can scale this throughout organizations.

[1:33]Christina Bösenberg: I don’t want to throw numbers at you, but what I did bring is the latest Mackenzie research that was a global study on why transformations fail. These are numbers from 2020, and they found out in a global study that 84 percent of transformation approaches fail. Not only diversity and inclusion approaches but also agile or digital transformation, and then they found out why. And guess what: It’s all about behavior and resistance. 33 percent is management behavior. So not buying into the approach or just having it as a marketing brand. And 39 percent is even employee resistance which is also behaviors, so it’s all about behaving and behaviors.
So, I brought 3 1/2 questions: How can we build momentum to inclusive leadership? How can we really implement it? How can you foster an inclusive and diverse culture? And how can you scale that through the organization? So scaling is the big question, and also really implementing it. And then 1/2 question is: Why are we not getting there faster? I mean, we have been with that question all over the past 10, 20 years. It’s nothing new. So this is not you, it’s just not working. It’s not implemented yet.
1 minute for the definition so I brought you a quote which I really like, because it puts it into a nice picture. It says: „Diversity is where everybody is invited to the party. Equity means that everyone gets to contribute to the playlist. But inclusion – and we are going to talk about inclusive leadership today – including means that everybody has also the opportunity to dance.“ So I really like this differentiation between playlist, contributing to the agenda setting. That’s one thing, but then also dancing on the party, that’s a different thing. So we need a lot of psychological safety and we need a lot of really implemented behaviors to be able to dance at the party. Playlist and agenda setting is one thing, but dancing at the party is the other thing. And this is why inclusive leadership is so highly important.

[3:50] How can we transform a corporate culture, the leadership culture towards inclusive leadership? I know we all know the standard tools probably: DNI trainings, inclusive leadership principals – so everybody gets together and we are developing new principles for leaders that are more inclusive than before probably, executive coaching of course is one leverage, AI based recruiting and assessment, which is an interesting thing because it is proven to be very very effective.
So do deep dive into the topic of AI based recruiting! It makes a huge difference in the recruiting process. DNI events with experts, and one recommendation from my side is really: measure, measure, measure. So unless you measure things they are not really proven and implemented.Bonus relevant KPIs are a really powerful tool, very impactful. But today we want to talk about how to really implement and scale and accelerate inclusive leadership into a corporate culture.
KPI based bonus relevant measurements are great. But they don’t really change behaviors and remember: 84% of transformation approaches offdiversity and inclusion fail. Because: behaviors are not implemented. New behaviors aren’t implemented and new behaviors and mindsets. So, „innere Haltung“, mindsets don’t really change. It’s all about behavioral change and this is why I scaled coaching and scaled behavioral training is so powerful and so important.

[5:23] So scaled coaching, democratized coaching really changes the system from within and this is also why I personally think coaching is such a powerful tool and that’s why I also accept that this role at the advisory board of Coach Hub. It’s not about because it’s a great brand or it promotes my profile, not at all. It’s because I have been a coach also for 25 years now. I’m more a consultant ,but I’m also a coach – and coaching is the only thing that really changes behaviors. You might know that trainings don’t change behaviors. This is where the most money gets in. This is what gets the budget: trainings. I mean financed DNI measure and the finest HR measure, actually the HR instrument where the most money gets in, but it’s not changing behavior, and that’s the dilemma.
So realizing inclusive leadership works with personal behavioral change, on a personal level.The forgetting curve – everybody knows this sort of reference to the training thing I already mentioned – each training has a forgetting curve, and remember I’m a business psychologist so I do deal a lot with data, and in each training the input you get lasts for less than 30 days.
And then we have 10% of the training content in place. We all know that. I mean those of you whoever went to a training where you were bombarded with input, absolutely great input and highly researched input – and I mean I do like trainings – the thing is, that knowledge doesn’t stick. You probably know after 30 days there’s nothing left and it doesn’t change behavior. So if you want to talk about inclusive leadership it’s all about behavioral change. And behavioral change doesn’t work through trainings. Also not through great DNI trainings because it’s all cognitive. And cognitive is not enough.

[7:24] So what’s working? How can you and your organizations really implement inclusive leadership and scale it and accelerate female empowerment? And this is one approach that has been proven to be very successful, and I’ve been dealing with that approach for the past 10 years. And those who know me know that I’m always deep diving into corporate cultures. And I’ve seen like, I don’t know, 10 DAX companies in the past years that really went well and were very successful with the approach of creating excitement. Of course it’s important to create a level of excitement, so everybody has a buy in to the topic.
And those of your employees, of your teams, who are excited like the influencers, the internal influencers, the corporate influencers, your ambassadors to enable and really scale everything. They need behavioral change, they sometimes need probably support more than behavioral change, but they need to spread the news actually, to find a sweet spot where they can really influence then the decision makers and the executive management, which in many cases is not in the new state but rather in the older states of behaviors.

[8:44] So then embed coaching into the landscape. And the new thing on the block is digital coaching of course. Why is digital coaching so powerful? Because it’s highly scalable. It’s a democratized way. It’s not only executives. So I know you all remember in former days there were a lot of executive coachings in place. But only for a very very small group of people in the company. So it was kind of an incentive, and those who were most important they received coaching.
Executive coaching meant high daily fees for the coaches, very very expensive for the companies. And digital coaching is different: you can scale it throughout the companies. It’s easy, accessible, it’s highly scalable, and there is a lot of room for exploring and experimenting and also focusing on things. So you can focus digital coaching, democratized coaching on diversity and inclusion. You can focus and measure it in terms of inclusive leadership.
You can also focus on HR transformations or on digitization. So enablement in terms of digital transformations. So it’s a large variety of opportunities where you can implement it, focus it, measure it and then scale it through the organization. And there are, of course, there are a lot of dashboards and measurements in place that you can use.
So measurable scalable democratized coaching: great! I’m a fan you might see. I’m a fan girl. And it’s easy to do the global rollout with it as well. I mean, I didn’t deep dive into the global rollout thing, but a global rollout is for many international, multinational organizations highly important. To have the ability to really roll it out globally. So, in terms of Coach Hub, which is the sponsor for the session today, they have 2.500 coaches coaching in 50 different languages on 6 continents. So you might imagine: through digitization, and it’s all working through an app, people and executives on all levels of the organization stay together and they can use it on the desktop and they have digital coaching all over the world. And Coach Hub has customers like Amazon, like Siemens, like other big players in the market and they scaled it immediately. Schneider Electric is one of the new customers who’s especially dealing with diversity and inclusion and scalable diversity and inclusion. So they can spread it immediately internationally. So it’s not only about the highly elaborated executive coaches are only in Germany and travelling back and forth and so on, no. They have it in a day throughout the organization, on a global level. So this is a really new and democratized approach. And I’m really happy that we have the opportunity through digitization to do it that way.

[11:50] So, use case: How are we approaching the inclusive leadership topic with digitized coaching? You see coaching over a desktop, a coachie and a coach – and what are they doing? They are obviously working on personal biases, e.g. mindset, and also on personal assumptions that are normally highly subconscious. I know we all know about unconscious biases and they are unconscious. So how can you through training change and conscious biases? You can’t.
If you get one message of today then it is: You cannot change unconscious biases through training, through reading, through listening to experts – you can’t. This is why you need a personal and a relational approach to it and a lot of practice. Working with a coach, unconscious biases one of the use cases: The coaches question attitudes and behaviors on a weekly basis. So it’s really a daily practice. Weekly basis coaching, small slots and developing communication skills and behaviors – to scale it then through the organization.
This is, from my perspective, a very very successful approach to inclusive leadership. Of course I have a lot of things in place here. Another use case: So all of you know the common HR instruments: leadership development seminars, talent development seminars. 360 feedback processes, quarterly measurements, quarterly wrap ups, psychometrics – to integrate all that withdigital coaching is no problem. So what you’re seeing here is a use case that I’m at the moment using in this way with a global player from France. This is the leadership development program that they had in place anyway on a global scale, and the psychometrics that are running with the leadership development program. So it’s nothing new, it’s not a hugely cost intense thing. But there is a leadership development program in place, and they are only integrating digital coaching into the leadership development program to really anchor the DNI topics that the leaders learn through the seminars.
So like always you have this module, one module, two modules, three. But before, in between, afterwards. They have the leaders and also the talents and whoever is in place there. They can really deep dive into their personal topics and into their personal unconscious biases. So it’s not only frontal teaching and talk and group learning – which is highly valuable –, but it’s the leadership development seminar they have anyway in terms of DNI probably or in terms of becoming more agile or whatever. And then just implement this digital coaching thing.
That makes it so much more powerful and so much more valuable, also for the individual as you might imagine. Because the individual feels that there are successes. That you really change on a personal level, but then also on a team level and on an organizational level. And that makes it so valuable. I’m a fan.
Thank you so much.

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