Inclusive Leadership in Practice For Senior Teams
In-House Training, Available As:
- Full or half-day workshop or 1 hour interactive webinar
- In-person or live virtual
- Fully customisable
- Option to enhance with actors
- Embed learning with Toolkit Takeaways
Inclusive Leadership in Practice for Senior Teams Training Solution
In this flexible, hands-on workshop, participants explore inclusive leadership, workplace power dynamics, privilege, psychological safety, and your existing organisational culture. The option to include a complementary pre-workshop culture diagnostic provides the chance to generate meaningful data insights to ground the conversation.
Through experiential activities, facilitated discussion, and interactive scenarios (optionally enacted by professional actors), leaders leave this workshop with a deep understanding of how to move beyond unconscious bias to become consciously inclusive. The workshop concludes with the development of personalised action plans, ensuring each leader is equipped to promote genuine, collective progress.
Learning outcomes:
- Be able to approach diversity and inclusion strategically, with a sound understanding of the difference between equality and equity.
- Gain awareness of their own unconscious biases and how they could be affecting behaviour, interactions and decision-making.
- Explore power dynamics, privilege, and psychological safety, learning how to utilise power ethically to build trust.
- Develop a collective vision for an inclusive culture, aligned with organisational goals and values.
- Analyse team dynamics and organisational culture to determine effective practices and obstacles to equality, diversity, and inclusion in the context of your organisation.
- Leave with a personalised action plan aimed at encouraging consciously inclusive and psychologically safe work environments.
Workshop Outline...
(1) The Big Picture: An activity titled “Six Letters” reveals how getting caught up in the little things can mean we lose sight of the big picture – we see the trees, but not the forest. We discuss how our personal experiences can create blinkers to the experiences of others. Reflecting on barriers in the world around us, we show how there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to inclusion.
(2) Equality and Equity: Using visuals to bring these concepts to life, participants deepen their understanding of the distinctions between equality and equity. We’ll consider practical examples of equity in practice, with a tool for leaders to introspect on equity in their organisation. Using these insights, participants reflect on goals to include in their personalised action plans.
(3) Understanding Unconscious Bias: The group explores bias through an activity called “Candle and Matches”, examining two systems of thinking and how bias influences decision-making at a senior level. We’ll unpack group think, affinity, benevolence, and confirmation bias, and the impact of each on leadership. We bring this to life with a short scenario, demonstrating “Micro-Aggressions in Action”.
How this looks with actors:
A scenario, based on lived experience collected from people within your organisation or real events from our own research, highlights how small expressions of bias are often overlooked in everyday interactions. Participants will be immersed in a conversation charged with subtle microaggressions. They’ll be invited to ask questions to delve into the intentions and experiences of both characters. Through this discussion, participants will deepen their understanding of the lines between intent and impact.
(4) Power Dynamics and Psychological Safety: An exploration of power dynamics, privilege, and promoting trust brings attention to the essential role leaders play in shaping the environments they lead in. The “Power Up/Power Down” activity highlights manifestations of power, introducing insights into conscientious and empathetic leadership practices. We’ll link this with psychological safety and examine its impact on trust, innovation, and collaboration. Participants will be invited to build on their action plan, reflecting on how they can ethically leverage their power for good.
How this looks with actors:
A scenario vividly portrays how psychological safety can be quickly eroded when power dynamics come into play. After the initial conversation, the audience is invited to ask each character questions to uncover their motivations and the emotions provoked through the conversation. The group work together to steer the conversation in a better direction.
(6) Our Vision for Inclusion: The group are invited to reflect on their collective vision for an inclusive culture, in alignment with organisational goals and values. A thoughtful breakout discussion, ideally focussed around qualitative or quantitative data insights from within your organisation, sets the stage for an honest and reflective facilitated action-planning session that empowers leaders to plan for meaningful change.
(7) Empowering Conscious Inclusion: Finally, in the Inclusive Leadership Self-Audit, leaders reflect on their own leadership skills, values and biases, and scope an actionable plan to drive continuous growth and embed inclusive leadership capabilities.
Let's Talk!
We’re advocates of crafting tailormade solutions that ensure you meet objectives and maximise budgets. Contact us to book a meeting to scope the right solution for your organisation, together.
What About Actors?
Through clever script writing, goosebump-inducing delivery and professional facilitation, we love to bring learning to life with actors…
We can select scripts from our library or write them specially for you, based on typical scenarios you see within in your organisation. For larger projects where budgets don’t allow for live acting, we can professionally film bespoke scenarios to create video content which can be used in the training as well as induction, toolkits, and beyond.
Using actors in workshop give delegates the opportunity to:
- Test out alternative ways of approaching what can sometimes be difficult situations, without the pressure of role playing themselves!
- Explore what is acceptable and what isn’t; intent versus impact; and both the subtle, and not so subtle, behaviours we see play out in the workplace
- Be immersed in an interactive learning experience that engages hearts and minds, and sticks in the long-term memory
Don't Just Take Our Word For It
Nina Darling
UoP SHCP Teaching Fellow, University of Portsmouth“The course which Paula provided was really engaging and nicely presented. The use of the actors was particularly good and actually bought the whole thing to life and made it really valuable learning. Thank you very much – it was fantastic!”
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