What we cover
It’s one of those phrases you’ll hear constantly in leadership circles. Bring people along on the journey. Take your team with you. But spend five minutes trying to work out what that looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when your meeting has gone sideways and you’ve got three agenda items left – and it starts to feel a lot less helpful.
Inclusive leadership isn’t a vibe or a personality type. It’s a set of small, repeatable moments where you either make people feel like a valued part of the process, or you don’t. And the gap between those two outcomes is often just a sentence or two.
The meeting is the easiest place to see it
Take one of the most common scenarios new leaders face: the meeting that’s gone off track. Someone’s raised something important – to them, anyway – and the conversation has drifted. You need to redirect it. What do you do?
The instinct for a lot of leaders is to assert control. Cut it off, bring it back, keep things moving. It works, technically. But it tends to leave people feeling dismissed – and that lands differently when it comes from a manager than when it comes from a peer.
There’s a better approach, and it doesn’t take much longer. Watch the video below for a word-for-word example of what inclusive leadership sounds like in that exact moment – and why each part of it works.
The principle behind it
Here’s what that technique is actually doing beneath the surface. It’s separating two things that leaders often accidentally collapse: including people in decisions versus including them in the experience of being led.
You won’t always open every call to a group vote. You don’t need to. But people can tell the difference between a leader who sees them and one who’s just managing a room. Saying someone’s name, acknowledging what they’ve raised, committing to follow up – none of that changes the outcome of the meeting. It changes how people feel about the leader running it.
That distinction shows up in other moments too. How you respond when someone pushes back on a decision. How you deliver direction – whether it lands as instruction or collaboration. How you handle it when someone raises a problem at the worst possible time. Inclusive leadership is less about the big gestures and more about whether you’re present and considered in these smaller exchanges.
What it costs when you skip it
The risk isn’t usually one dramatic incident. It’s subtler than that – a gradual erosion of the psychological safety that makes teams actually function. When people don’t feel seen or heard by their leader, they stop taking risks. They stop raising problems early. They start self-protecting instead of contributing. If you want to understand what that environment does to a team, this post on psychological safety goes deeper.
And when it goes on long enough, you start to see the other thing – the quiet withdrawal that’s become so common it has its own name. If you’ve read the quiet quitting post, you’ll recognise the pattern: people who are technically still there but have already left in every way that matters.
Both of those outcomes start somewhere. Often in moments that felt too small to bother with.
Start small
Inclusive leadership doesn’t require a personality overhaul or a new management framework. It requires noticing the small moments where someone needs to feel seen – and choosing to do that, even when it would be quicker not to.
The meeting scenario in the video is a good place to start. One situation, one technique, ten extra seconds. That’s what bringing people along on the journey actually looks like.
Leader Growth Lab can help you get an accurate idea of how you’re showing up as a leader. How inclusive your team feels, and which of your behaviours are supporting that. Explore our 360 Leadership Diagnostic to get the full picture.
