Inclusive Research Leadership: how a culture of inclusion becomes part of a team

By Dr Panagiota Axelithioti – aka Joulie, Leadership Developer, InFrame Project.

‘EDI’ is a mandatory part of our training in our academic, research, professional, and support roles in Higher Education so we can often feel that in doing the training, we have taken all the actions we could take to ensure an inclusive research environment. For me, as the InFrame project’s Leadership Developer based at Glasgow and an EDIA (Equity/Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) advocate, the story keeps going beyond the mandatory training course, into further opportunities to discuss these topics through training, workshops, and focus groups, as well as frequent team discussions on what it means to ‘be inclusive’.

The InFrame team poses a good forum for ongoing EDIA and inclusive culture discussions. In our 20 months of existence as a team, we have gone from complete strangers to close colleagues, sometimes even friends. And we have also grown in numbers, had our fair share of people leaving for new roles and new people joining. Every time a new person has joined the team, the EDIA and inclusive culture conversations have been ignited again. Why? Has this not been time-consuming?

An ongoing approach to evolving our inclusive culture does take up some of our time, but it’s also needed as every new person that joins any team, immediately has an impact on the existing dynamic. New people imbalance the existing equilibrium, and we have to make space and time for re-calibrating. This is in part the reason we hire new staff, to share the workload, complete the team, and for them to bring in their expertise, and fresh perspective. New staff shake things up and that’s part of the appeal.

So, we ask ourselves: how do we let new joiners know they have agency in helping to shape the team culture? Are we prepared for them to bring their diverse identities to the mix? What boundaries may we need to rethink collectively and individually? 

To offer you a more nuanced perspective, ‘inclusive leadership’ can be interpreted as ‘shared leadership which welcomes all voices and transcends hierarchies’. In this interpretation, to include everyone within a collective leadership community is to support them to feel they lead within the role that they hold, and within the responsibilities they are asked to deliver on. And to be visible about it.

Taking on the challenge of a culture of inclusion

To do this well, we need to disrupt leadership ‘norms’. To surface some of the norms we may be familiar with, see below:

1. In research, it is the norm to have teams that embody many diverse identities, backgrounds, and preferences, and accessibility needs.  Getting the best from everyone warrants the work of introducing and cultivating an inclusive culture
2. Leadership is often thought to be the work of the PI or the people who are hierarchically higher in role and pay grade
3. The lower we stand in the hierarchy, the more invisible our work and contribution may be
4. Each person may be expected to conform to the majority culture and forego the expression of some parts of their diverse identities
5. Upholding an inclusive research culture is often reduced to doing the prescribed EDI training, rather than figuring things out as a team
6. Everyone is welcome but sometimes it’s hard to manifest that

How did you react to the list above? Did you find it familiar? What is missing from the list? What can you do about it? Inclusive leadership is intentional. It takes effort to set up and create the culture but once in place, it activates diverse skills and perspectives and creates more robust and innovative outcomes, with the potential for impact to be far-reaching.

Tools to support you

Some tools to use for creating an inclusive leadership culture, that, if you are willing to hold a space for curiosity rather than judgement, you could try out with your teams are:

• Holding a discussion using the Academic Wheel of Privilege, which mostly presents the systemic enhancement characteristics and systemic biases that we would ideally like to sway to be more inclusive
• Trialling some of the Harvard Implicit Associations tests, specifically focusing on topics most relevant to the UK reality, for example religion, race, ethnicity, gender, gender and science, gender and career.
• Considering language biases. There are many examples to be found online such as these from Catalogue of Bias But also have a think on the biase that plays out through the story below for your own benefit:

A man and his son are driving in a car one day when they get into a fatal accident. The man is killed instantly. The boy is knocked unconscious. He is still alive and is rushed to the hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says, “I can’t operate on this boy, he is my son” (story from Playmeo).

• Introducing the topic of aggressions and microaggressions, explaining what these may look like, comparing experiences, and being open to feedback especially when it comes from roles lower in the hierarchy. A couple of sources to read more about this here from the Royal College of Nursing and here from The Kings Fund.
• Making sure the team has up to date information on neurodiversities and how they manifest in the workplace (check out the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development guide for neuroinclusion). Making space to help team members understand how to communicate well so that they are working together smoothly, professionally, and safely.

When uncertain where to (re)start with creating an inclusive leadership space, as is often the case, start small, for example you could start by examining conscious biases, for example the position that ‘scientific research methodologies are more robust than other methodologies’ and examine how you might have come to hold that assumption, and how it feels when that idea is challenged. Noting emotional management is key for a productive team conversation about inclusion, how are you affected? What emotion arises? Are you able to listen to other perspectives without arguing back? Are you curious to learn new things? How do you feel about the people who think differently to you?

When you feel ready for next steps, completing the any of the above tools or readings, as a solo activity can give you ideas to reflect on and process, before carefully initiating group conversations about privileges, biases, and inclusive environments. Counter to common belief, the work of creating a culture of inclusion does not fall to only the team leader; they may set the tone, but the team takes on the shared responsibility and effort for making it a reality.